I’m guessing you are reading this because you want to hear a story, eh? Well take a seat, grab a drink, and let’s jump into it.
Why did I want to be a game developer? For as long as I can remember, I’ve been playing video games. The first three games I remember playing were Bugs Bunny Rabbit Rampage (SNES), Tecmo Super Baseball (SNES), and Sonic the Hedgehog (Genesis?). Since my Uncle had the SNES, some of my best memories as a kid were going over there and getting to play the Super Nintendo.
As I got older, I was given a classic Game Boy with Tetris 2. This game kept me for a long time. I would play the same level over and over just to play games, and then I found that you could clear some stages with the first couple pieces. I thought this was so amazing, and tried to figure out the fastest paths to clear the stages. A few years later, my parents found a copy of Super Mario Land while moving, and thus I had my introduction to a handheld platformer.
Within a couple years, my Aunt and Uncle decided to move to Seattle. Before they left, my Uncle gave me his SNES and all the games. I can remember the next Christmas getting two new games, Animaniacs and Earthworm Jim 2. I was also introduced to GameStop, back when they had all the NES, SNES, and N64 cartridges available. That’s when I got games like The Legend of Zelda- A Link to the Past, Super Mario World, Yoshi’s Island, and F-Zero.
Any time I wasn’t doing homework, I ended up playing video games or playing with Legos/K’Nex. It all depended on who out of my siblings got to the TV first. I can even remember getting my dad to stay up with me and play games.
Fast-forward to when I was in 4th grade, and I was introduced to Pokemon Yellow and Gold. At this point I can remember my life changing. I had been collecting trading cards since I was in 1st grade, but playing these games felt as if I was sucked into the world, and experiencing something totally new. From this point on I was determined that video games needed to be in my future. So when people asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, I answered by being a game programmer.
However, after I got my first car in high school and had to do a tune up before I started driving, my thoughts changed from game developer to auto mechanic. Part of this was also due to working on a game development project in one of my high school classes, and not having enough experience with math to make things work right. That part was a bit of a hit to my confidence with computers, and it was using a much older version of Game Maker Studio. I was so determined being a mechanic was the career path I was going to take that I had plans to move to Nevada and work in a car dealership there… Plans fell through and I started at the local community college. I needed to pick a major when it was set in stone that I wasn’t moving, so I decided to give programming a shot.
Thanks to all the programming/database instructors at the community college, I found that programming was something that I loved and wanted to continue with. After graduating, I joined a startup through reddit as a programmer and worked on my first real game. Unfortunately the project was hit with a lawsuit that the startup didn’t have funds to take care of so we had to cancel it.
The experience was invaluable, and the success of that project being greenlit on Steam after stopping development has given me the confidence to begin working on my own projects. I’ve also started a career as a software engineer. By doing this, I have a steady income that allows me to fund some of my projects and eventually launch several games of my own.
So that brings us to today. As soon as my home office is completed, more work is going to be done on both the blog, and the projects I’m working on, but unfortunately it takes time… But if you made it this far, it means a lot to share my story and some of my experiences.
