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[wanderlands]

Hullo! I'm Harry, a game designer in Melbourne, Australia. I make games with my independent studio, Wanderlands. I've been meaning to join the wanton debauchery enjoyable discourse here for a while, and I've finally taken the plunge. Looking forward to making your acquaintance - I'll be attending GDC this year; if you're around, let's meet up!

[angrygeometry]

awooop! its wanderlands!

[mbalestrini]

HI!
I'm Maximo. I'm a co-founder of the small independent studio Videogamo. I'm 33 years old, from Argentina and I'm mainly a programmer. I've worked in desktop systems, databases, flash websites, interactive applications, and some games.
I've been playing with the idea of making games for living in the past, but now I'm trying to achieve it.

My first gaming console was the C64. I spent a lot time in my childhood playing with it. My father also had a Macintosh 512 (which I still have), and I spent many hours with it also… playing DarkCastle and Lode Runner.

I've always enjoyed playing adventure games. The sensation of playing Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island the first time was amazing… MM because I think it was my first adventure and was amazed by the idea of interacting with the environment and that I could do "anything" I wanted (I could put some batteries in a flash light and it'll work! ). With Monkey Island I think I really got in the character and loved the idea of a regular guy that could became a Pirate! Oh… I was forgetting the first Larry… with which I learned english while trying to get him laid.
During the XT/AT time, beside adventures, I stayed awake all night playing games like Civilization o Settlers also.
Lately I've been enjoying more making games than playing them. Maybe I'm getting old…


Game Development

While I was a kid I made one try at "game development" : bought a book that had an amazing skeleton in the cover, and all the code lines of a game that I thought had something to do with that. But after several hours of copying I've never managed to make the game work… probably some mistake in one or two lines that I had no idea how to find. I didn't have any way to save the code, so I that was it.
I searched in google and found the book:

http://www.btinternet.com/~pweighill/music/books/

I've spent my first years as a programmer doing bank systems, until I got bored and started working for more interesting companies, mainly interactive ones, as I've always had an attraction for animation and design. There I learnt Flash and Director and made some games. The biggest one for Duracell (big because there were 600.000 copies made, to give them free with the batteries, but I think not many people really played it).
Another game I've made that was interesting was an online Karaoke made in Flash and the Flash Media Server, where people recorded their version of some song and other people could listen and vote for the best one.

In 2010 I started meeting with a friend regularly to make games as a hobby… and as we were spending more and more time on that, we decided to take this project more seriously, so maybe someday we could make a living out of it.
We've founded Videogamo, and started working on a couple of ideas…
In 2011 we released our first game:

Bicicletas-Hoy:


It's a music-video game… our idea was simply trying out how it would be to play a music video that’s actually a game (my partner worked as a music-video director for many clips).
Maybe it's more an interactive experience than a game, but we really like the results.

We are currently finishing our second music-video game (for the american band Radical Something), and trying to get to a beta state on NAVE, a space shooter/survival game, so we can show it to some of you on the GDC

Some screenshot from Nave:



Our website it's kind of static right now. If you want news on the progress of the games our facebook page is the place to get them: https://www.facebook.com/VIDEOGAMO



Bonus

I've also made some approaches to electronics and art installations: while working at Gazz (an animation production company), I've founded the Lab section with a guy. I think it was really an excuse to play while working.
The most interesting thing we did was a precursor of the PS3 Move that we made for the OneDotZero festival (2007). Here you can see a video of it. Sorry it's in spanish, but I think you can understand the idea and see how it works:
http://youtu.be/z69i83sXeJw


Here's another video of the early stages of research of a stop motion control system, where you can see me controlling two servos with a wii controller:
http://youtu.be/xV3xWblju0c


Okay… I think that's it for now… sorry if it was too long...

[mduffor]

I've lurked as a guest on these forums for a long time, so it is about time I stepped out of the shadows and introduced myself.  My name is Michael Duffy, and I first got into video games many, many moons ago when the Atari 2600 ruled the earth.  After countless games of Adventure, Combat, Kaboom, and rolling the high score on Missile Command three times, my brother and I moved on to the ColecoVision where Demon Attack and the Smurfs game ate up our afternoons.  I used to love hanging out at the arcade at the local pizza parlor playing Gorf and Galaxian, and that is when I first started to really study what went into a game and how they were designed.

Later in 7th grade, my family bought an Atari 800 and I was hooked.  I spent countless hours on Ultima 3, Snooper Troops, and Empire of the Overmind.  I learned BASIC and wrote all sorts of little games with ASCII graphics, from arcade games to text adventures.  This was also when I was able to go "online" for the first time, and thrilled at connecting to BBSs across a 900 baud modem hooked up through the joystick port.  Whee!!!

I went to college at the University of Southern California and studied Cinema Production, but a good chunk of my free time was spent coding on my 286 and 386 back at my dorm.  I learned the wonders of Pascal and coding to the EGA/VGA card in assembly.  I later moved on to C and have been using C/C++ ever since.  I learned how to code more advanced games through the people and posts of the old rec.games.programmer usenet newsgroup, and later through the #opengl IRC channel.

I fell in love with Zelda on a borrowed SNES, Kid Icarus on my roommate's system, and Wanderers from Ys on the PC.  I played at least a little of dozens of games over the years, and even loved watching over people's shoulders as they played games I hadn't seen before.  In Japan, I came across the tactical RPGs Farland Saga and Farland Story, and those still rank as two of my favorite games.

After college, I went to work for a company called Stardock Systems where I created graphics for Galactic Civilizations II and a couple of their other games, as well as being lead programmer for Entrepreneur.  When I left Stardock, I tried to start my own company called Studio Blue and though we developed a playable demo, no publishers picked it up and we had to close our doors after our initial round of funding ran out.  Here are a couple of screenshots from our game demo, as it was back at the end of 1999:

Game publishers were looking for 3D based games back then, and so I spent a few months learning 3D graphics and putting together a portal-based 3D engine.  In the end, I had to stop working on my own projects and get a real job, which led me to joining the film company DNA Productions back in 2001.  Since then I've worked as a programmer / technical director on films such as Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, The Ant Bully, Open Season 2, The Tale of Despereaux, How to Train Your Dragon, Megamind, and Madagascar 3.  My contract is up in March of this year, and I'm itching to get back to creating something where I'm the primary driver of the project, rather than being a smaller cog of some big engine. 

So, over the next year I hope to get back into game development, ideally of the indie variety.  I've started dusting off my old code libraries and bringing them up to date, so ideally I won't be starting exactly from scratch again.  Plus with the explosion of the smart phone and tablet markets, I hope to dip my toes in those waters and see how I fare.  I'm older now and have a family, so I have to turn things around much quicker than I've ever done before (simplify simplify simplify...) 

Should be a wild ride. (^_^)

Cheers,
Michael Duffy

[metaldemon]

hey hey hey,


i'm metaldemon, i live in holland.
i started playing games ever since my dad brought a copy of doom from apogee on floppy disks to me. i was hooked for life 
from there i started playing games more and more. and as nerdy as i was... i wanted to make games on my own. so i started making mods for lots of games, i found that id softwares games were realy easy to mod. so from there i learned a little programming and scripting. so a few years later i started programming in C#.

i'm a newbie still but i work in a little team called Spectre Games.
we're currently working on a platformer.

see this thread: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=23894.0
for more details on the game

[giewuer]

Hi!
Giewuer from Poland here. Hobby programmer for +5 years. Works include: lots of small games in Turbo Pascal, a DOS platformer (finished to the point that it needed only making more levels), a Windows Worms clone (1+ year of coding but it wasn't properly designed, the code got very messy and then I lost all source code after a hard drive failure). Currently working on Abominatra (Contra-Metroid crossover) which I posted in the Feedback forums. I use Visual Studio, Allegro game programming libraries and GIMP.

[NakaiEntertainment]

Hi, my name is Sarah and I am working with an extremely talented team of individuals that make up Nakai Entertainment. We're a mobile development studio and are working on our second title called Access Point, a 3D puzzle RPG. We've got a vertical slice completed are full steam ahead towards release, which will hopefully happen in the next month or so.

You can check out some of our latest work here: http://www.nakaientertainment.com/

[unseven]

My real name is Glauber Kotaki, 24, Brazilian, but in London for now. An overall 2D artist that does mainly pixel art, animation and UI design.

I've been messing around with gamedev for 8 years, but have been keen of game making since I first finished Mega Man X on SNES.
Most of the games I've worked on were under contract, although I'd say the companies were independent developers. Just 3 of them are what I would call "old fashioned indie", that were made with a fellow coder (:

Now I've been wanting to make my own games by myself, to hone my skills as game designer. With little knowledge of coding, I'm currently working on Construct projects.

There is more about me on my website (:
http://www.glauberkotaki.com/


Games that I'm proud of making are Cold Tension:



And CaveDays:

[Nat]

Hi, I'm Nat,
I just recently got into indie gaming and development after listening to BBC's '99 coins' podcast.
My website is www.natsworld.co.uk
I have made one game to date!

[anefiox]

Hi All,
I'm Huss. I'm a lead web developer in Birmingham, UK. I have recently started my own game dev company www.anefiox.com which I do in my spare time.

I got into gaming when I was about 3 years old. After my uncle gave me his Atari 2600. So after many years of Pac-Man, the unplayable ET and a few Nintendo LCD games, my parents bought me an Amstrad 464. This is where I had my first dabble with games programming.

I used to game loads but for just over 2 years I've dedicated my spare time to game dev. About 18 months ago I released an XBLIG game on the 360. I have 2 games currently in development and one awaiting review with Apple as we speak.

Go check out info on it here http://www.anefiox.com/yarnaby/

[UP_Kevin]

First of all, i just want to say to Glauber (unseven), that it's a little freaky that we joined TIGSource on the same day. I mean, do you stalk me or something? Really man, you gotta get your own life.  

Well I'm Kevin, lead game designer at Underground Pixel. We make retro, NES-styled arcade games for PC, Mac, and iOS. We launched our indie company last year with our first release, Holiday Havoc, for iOS. As you might have guess, Glauber Kotaki did the art for that. And then followed me here...

We made Holiday Havoc as a kick-off game. It was a bit small in scale, but we're making bigger and better games this year and are planning a buttload of new releases across the 2012 (you know, before the apocalypse strikes and all).

If you want to know more about me, and less about my company, I am from New York and enjoy playing and making video games. I am going into health sciences (because that's totally related to game design) and am currently studying to earn my certification as a pharmaceutical technician. I also enjoy cheesy and spicy foods.  

That pretty much sums me, and my company, up. If you were somehow intrigued by my post, we'd love to have you follow us on Twitter @undergroundpixl. We'd also love it if you downloaded Holiday Havoc on the App Store. It's only 99 cents and helps me (and Glauber) keep making more awesome games for you guys! Au revoir! (I'm not actually French)

[hobothehero]

Im trying to learn various types of coding because the idea of making games really appeals to me. I understand basic coding but i have no indepth knowledge with any language. Im currently making small projects in game maker with the help of my friend.

[richardjames13]

Hi my name is Richard and I'm from Queensland Australia.

I've been into gaming and game programming for a long time (since the mid 80's when my parents got a VIC20 computer). I haven't really got anywhere in my programming due to untreated health issues but recently I have had much better treatment and things are improving in that area.

I'm familiar but not really fluent in a lot of programming languages. I started in Microsoft BASIC 2.0 and did some assembly, C, C++, Java. Recently I have been using Python and Pygame.

The biggest "working" game I have ever written was tic-tac-toe in Python and ported to the VIC-20 in 6502 Assembly. I have made a small shooter using ASCII graphics (via ncurses) in C and got most of the way in a Space Invaders clone in C++ (it stutters, it has framerate issues and is probably badly written).

I like retro computing and looking at games that use pixel art.

My current project is a automatic pixel art generator for make quick and dirty pixel art for placeholders. After that I'm hoping to work on a Sudoku game using my pygame GUI which is also WIP. Then who knows?

[chelseamccolmbs]

Hi. My name is Chelsea and I am a programmer from California, US. I've been making games for about 4 years now and would love to meet everyone here! =D

[Flying Roosters]

Hello guys, Flying Roosters here!

We are 3 guys from Paris, starting to code our first game! It's actually our first experience working on a game.

Right now we are working on the Scripting and level engine in Coco2D-X ( to be able to release on iOS & Android ) and it as proven to be a pain in the ass to work with due to the lack of documention, oh well at least its open source

Since we don't have any game footage per say to show you, I'll would like to show you some of our art and a concept video of the game.

The game is an endless running /side scroller kinda of game with QTE, boss fight , multiple levels and a story. You could compare it to something like Windup knight but in 2D and more dynamic due to the QTE.

Here's some links to the arts and videos:

- New Hero animations
- Concept video of the game ( with old / no animations )
- Early Mockups of the game
- 1st colorization of the game
- Watch our artist draw characters


If you want to see more, there's also our brand new blog that we'll update at least 3 times per week.

In any case, we look forward to be part of the big indie game dev family and contribute as much as we can on this forum!