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[JeffWeber]

Hey All.

My name is Jeff Weber. I currently live in Appleton, Wisconsin (USA)

For the last 6 years, give or take a year, I've considered myself an indie game developer hobbyist.
Recently I got my mind right and started taking the steps to nix the 'hobbyist' part.

Over these last 6 years I've developed a whole crap-load of demos, experiments, prototypes, and unfinished games.
 
I've spent the last year, give or take a year, getting more focused and actually completed development of a free open source 2D physics engine called the Farseer Physics Engine.

The physics engine was just a necassary pre-cursor to my ultimate goal: make some damn fun physics games! Which I'm doing currently.

My games will not be AAA, have jaw-dropping art, or win a pulitzer for story, but they will ooooooze physics out of every orfice!

As far as playing games goes, I'm sure to be in the minority. While I'm obsessed with game technology, development, and the industry as a whole, I don't play a ton of games.

I do play some, though, and here are three that have had the biggest impact on me:

Another World
Ski Stunt Simulator
Elasto Mania

Here's a small screenie of the game I'm currently working on. It's called 'Diver'. I should have a playable Alpha version ready in mid to late March. It's being developed for Microsofts new Silverlight platform.



You can vist my website/blog for more info about me and what I'm up to. (see sig. for link)

Finally, here's what I look like when I'm riding a donkey with my 1 yr old son.



This post concludes my 'ManBaby' status.

See you around!

[James-Kond]

damn console gamers around here
Also: Hello my names is James-Kond im an student and run my own little site: http://archgamer.blogspot.com/
I have been looking at tigsource forever.. (like Indie Blog better but heh..)
You guys seem to be more of an community based site (mods, maps etc)so i like that.


so lets start I think my first game was:

Super Mario Bros. ofc..

But i think the game that had the most influence on me was:

Diablo 2, the best game ever made..well maybe..


and maybe another good contender.. Warcraft 2


And ofcourse, being orignal, my favourite indie game is..

CAVE STORY!

ugh..im out..

[Zaknafein]

Fish just told me that an unwritten (whoops, just read it) rule around here is to introduce ourself here before anything else, so here goes!

I'm Renaud Bédard, I've done all the coding on Fez and before that I've been (still am) running a fairly technical blog called The Instruction Limit about shaders, TV3D samples, little tools I wrote and whatnot.

I honestly found out about the indie gaming scene (and TIGSource) about the same time I started to get involved with Fez, so maybe 6-8 months ago. So I downloaded every indie game I had the time to try, and I've loved all of them. Cave Story, Synaesthete, Flywrench, Knytt, Space Barnacle come to mind.
But I'm mainly an Xbox/Xbox360 and MS fanboy, I love C# and the .NET framework, and I believe that Mass Effect is the greatest thing that's happened to RPGs since Lunar. Or something.

And that's me!

[Corpus]

Welcome, Fifth!

Howdy, PaoloVictor!

A lovely explosion of images you have there, Mailman. EarthBound is awesome. Best RPG ever. Apparently MOTHER is pretty much a poor version of its sequel, so, uh... play EB.

Good day to you, grickmin.

Hello, JeffWeber. Diver looks lovely, at least graphically.

Hi ho, James-Kond. Mods, maps etc.? Are we on the same website?

Renaud, you have a cool name and are about exactly as skinny as I am. Fez looks amazing.

My work here is done.

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

An Introduce Yourself Thread?
You mean, instead of random people trying to show each other their games, we're one big indie-games family?
That is, an amazing idea. My new Indie-games family - I love you all!

Ok, so I am MekanikDestrukiwKommando. (Yes, the same era as Magma). I am a talented game designer, who has just started going Indie. I am 20 years old. I've been designing things no paper for years, random scatter brains. I used to host Star Wars and Paranoia XP RPGS in my hometown, and everyone said I was the best GM they had

I stopped going to college in my first semester, because earlier that year I had secured a job interview to work for Australian game dev company m1cr0f0R TE as a Junior Designer. I met the CEO at a Christian Game Dev conference on Oregon, I asked him for advice and got a job offer a month later in an e-mail. Brought a sample design document to Austin GDC that year, and then had an hour long Skype interview with the ld. designer in Sydney, and we grilled each other about various design philosophies.
The most influential (and only) piece of "formal" training I have is reading Rules of Play four times.

First game was playing Sonic on rented Segas. I dont think I ever got past level 3 or 4 or something, but it was great fun.

Years later I saw a friends sister playing Metroid on an NES, and I instantly fell in love (with Metroid, not her). I found it on ROM 4 years later after tryign hard to remember "that game I played". SMRPG was my first rom, after seeing a friend's brother playing some Mario game on the computer.. it was also the day I saw him MSN a friend on how to beat a section of MGS. I gamefaq'xd MGS and read walkthroughs. My young brain did not understand most of what I read, but I loved it. I have played every single MG game except for the PS1 VR missions. I got online/router working too late for MGO, the servers went down within a few months of me playing. The best game I've ever played was MGO. And tbh, I loved the outdoors, wild jungle of it. I don't know if MGO2 will be able to refill that love of the wild in my heart.. but I'm damn sure going to be saluting and shooting when it comes out.

Earthbound 0, brilliant.
Fallout 2, brilliant.
Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. Then MGO3, then MGO, then MGS2.
Super Smash Bros. Melee. Perfect Dark. All have been powerfully influential on my LIFE.

And then Sydney, I moved to Australia as for that job offer^. Being a Junior Designer is alright, but I decided to become Indie in my spare time, later. But first,

The life altering, soul shattering, eye opening and scary scary "this is real."



Marathon changed my soul.

Well, Indie gaming.
I'll start with Cave Story. A friend of mine imed me months ago and said "hey, try out this 8-bit ish game". And so I did. I liked it.

I stumbled upon Tigsource, I don't remember how. About 2 months ago. Wow. It's brilliant.

I found Cactus' games, and donated a bit with an e-mail saying hi. We talked a bit on gtalk, he introduced me to Mulholland Dr. and Twin Peaks, which have been incredible. His creativity and genius encouraged me that "yes, I can do this too". A month and a half ago, me and a friend began work on our own game. We have a fully playable first level, and I have added a second level that is mostly complete. A lot of time has been spent tweaking the gameplay. It involves.. swords, drugs, walljumping, cops and grenades. Yeah.  . My friend did the pixel art for the game, and now I'm using colored rectangles to draw buildings because I just don't do visual art that well.

Found Nethack last year. I lost.. a certain amount of "work" productivity to that. I got past Medusa and have reached the Castle once. Stopped playing it as much when my friend (mentioned above) stopped as well, to work on our game. He is currently.... well he's gone AFK for important reasons for a while. I'll hear from him again if he survives.

Work at M1 c==r0fo4te is alright. We're making an MMO with the b1g==w==0rld technology (one company owns the other).. it's alright. there's some coolness, but some  as well that's not really anyone's fault so much as it is.. we're making a commercial game and the average commercial gamers are pansies.

HEY I SPELLED IT WRONG ON PURPOSE I DONT WANT TO BE TRACED SO DONT QUOTE WITH THE CORRECT SPELLING

So where do I stand now?

I am flying to the USA on Holiday March 5. I will be in SAN FRANCISCO from March 5-8. I'm staying with a friend, but if anyone wants to chill with me while I'm there, PM me! I'd love to meet you, even if you are an owl. (which after watching Twin Peaks freaks me out).

The platformer I'm working on (since my friend is in hiatus). Progress: 5%, or 10% for a shorter game. Will need: my friend to do more pixel art.

Now, something else I'm working on. This is pretty big, so please read. I've created a working fighting game engine in Visual Basic 6. I should probably make a new thread for it,  but I'll give a quick rundown:

--stun prevents you from attacking, not blocking. No automatic combos.
--linking requires momentum and is move specific. MoveB12 always requires at least 5 momentum to link to, and can only be linked to at certain windows in MoveA20 and Move C13 and MoveA18. The better you time your blocks, the more momentum the attacker loses, thus preventing them from continuing a string of attacks. If they reach 0 Momentum they cannot attack for a short time (a second and a half or so). Input accepts quarter circles, half-circles and has three attack buttons. Now, why am I saying all this? I'm not trying to brag. I need ARTISTS. And if the Indie Games Art community wants to pool together, and animate badass looking characters with different moves.. I want to put say, 12 of these into my fighting game engine.. and release the most kickass fighting game ever. Because it's damn FAST and requires TIMING and REFLEXES to play. I'll make a Topic about this somewhere else, but I wanted to put it here for everyone to read since it's the biggest IndieGame thing on my mind right now.

That's it! I love you all, my new family!

[dont think im a softy.i drink taurine to prevent psychopathic events from occurring and promote creativity]

In San-Fran March 5-8!

\MEKANIKDESTRUKIWKOMMANDOH
 

[dave]

I'm David. A wanna-be programmer with a learning disability that makes me wish I would have just stuck with something easy... Like Business.  Or something.  But the voices in my head don't tell me to go into business.  They tell me that being a programmer is achievable with enough determination and will power.  So hell yeah!

Pimps Site: http://www.david-mcgraw.com

I actually got started with gaming back in the NES days.  My mom finally had enough money to put one on the kitchen table, with a nice 12 inch television screen that I could use to play Mario on.  After dinking around with the NES, I got my hands on a personal computer. One of those 386dx types that boasted 4MB of ram, if you were lucky. 

My first computer game was a really bad ass simulation game by Impressions Software called Detroit.  The goal of the game was to build cars, sell them, upgrade to build better cars, buy more land, and completely beat the living tar out of your competition by raking in a ton of cash.  Many mornings spent on that game before school.

After that, I got into Star Wars: Tie Fighter.  Which was awesome, and really presented me with the value of Rewards.

And then... Power Rangers, I think. Which totally sucked. ;|

And then... Many, many more.

And then... EverQuest.  Which blew my mind and really allowed me to see the sort of freedom that you can give players...

Alright. I'm rambling.

Anyway. When AOL was just a baby, I used to write programs to torment chat rooms and the e-mail system. 

I continued to play games, but after high school I decided to join the Marine Corps.  For some ungodly, unknown, and freaking crazy reason. Well. I survived, kicked ass, and didn't die.  So that has to increment some sort of programming stat in my life codebase.

Right before I got out of the Marines, I started to think about what I wanted to focus in on with programming.  I pretty much knew it right away.  Programming and Games just interests me 10000000x more than programming some sort of heart application that keeps old Wilma alive for 2 more days.

I'll spare the details of why I want to program Games.  We'll leave it at, it kicks ass and watching a community grow around your game, while being able to be personal with your community, rocks. Among other things.

So. In 2005, I started to pick up and learn C++ while I was learning Java in school.  I joined a development team that worked on a game called Morning's Wrath (RPG/Action Adventure Hybrid) that was released in late 2005 and sold around 500 copies.  I beta tested the shit out of the game, and provided some design feedback when I could.  After that game the main programmer from Morning's Wrath and I started up his second game, the Lost City of Malathedra, an Adventure game.  I programmed a little, designed a little, tested a little, and then I went off to do some of my own things.

I've created a few small games which you can find on my blog, and I've also helped another team with a software project that wasn't game related (Testing, Design Feedback). 

So that brings me to today.  I'm working on a vertical scrolling shooter game that I just started.

I'll be graduating from KState this coming December, and hopefully I can find an independent team to join up with.  There's something about indies that appeal to me a lot more than the big wigs.  Probably because they focus way too much on perfect, pristine, and eligant 3D graphics while spending millions of dollars.  Where as an indie can come in and work their asses off, with little to no funding, and come out with a spectacular game that caters to the community.

And I like that.  Community.

Here is a mug shot of my bad ass days.

[

img]http://i228.photobucket.com/albums/ee295/AOC_Ethanael/1077618849_l.jpg[/img]

If you are at the GDC this week and recognize me.  Say Hi. Because I can't seem to say Hi first.

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

This is so awesome.
David, I recommend you try the following drugs: Taurine and Marijuana. Both of those always keep me clear thinking, creative, and even friendly. Plus they keep the nightmares away. Sometimes. Oh, and copious, copious amounts of badass music, videogames and people.
I played X-Wing Vs Tie Fighter ages ago.. incredibly fun. Running it on a modern computer ran worse for some reason

Code:

I can't wait to meet you people!

[carbon]

Hey there. My name is Joel and I'm 19. I'm currently attending college in New Jersey (a small school that specializes in engineering and research), majoring in Computer Science. My life and hobbies are all over the place: programming (C++ and Python), video games (a whole bunch), music (guitar), sports (tennis) but most importantly Christ.

I've played video games as far back as I can remember (earlier than kindergarten). I played Super Mario World on the SNES as my first game ever, I think. I quickly moved onto RPGs after having seen my friend play Earthbound, Final Fantasy 6 and Robotrek. He then started playing a MUD and sucked me into that as well. Around 7th grade we moved on from the MUD to EverQuest, resulting in me being an MMORPG addict until 12th grade.

I've spent the past few years studying various programming languages both on my own and in school. I no longer like MMORPGs as much as I did before. Instead, I prefer games that can be started quickly and played on a whim (without massive loading) and games that are LAN- and party-friendly.

Some of my favorite games:


Counterstrike 1.5


Super Smash Brothers Melee


BaboViolent 2

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

Sweetness, welcome.
What is Destrike?

[carbon]

Destrike is a game inspired by BaboViolent 2 (the only game that I really play lately). It's going to be a top-down multiplayer shooter, similar to the screenshot of BV2 in my previous post, but with a heavier focus on individual tactics and team strategy instead of random spray-and-pray. I'm trying to replicate the competitive aspect of Counterstrike in a separate genre from FPSs.

I haven't really thought about whether the idea is unique or even appealing, but this is also my first real game project after the usual Pong | Tetris | Snake clone so I figured I'd make a game that I would enjoy designing and coding. If it flops, oh well.

[Acid]

Hi, my name is Shaquille and I'm fourteen years old. I have been into video games since I was little, about four years old, and have stuck with them ever since. The first couple of games that made a mark on me before I became an avid gamer were (in chronological order as best I can put them): Most of the Atari games (my dad still has his), Sonic the Hedgehog, Mortal Kombat, and Golden Eye 64.

Then, when I played my first RPG (which wasn't even a particularly good one - Monster Rancher for PS1) I knew I was a gamer. From then on I got hooked on these games: Final Fantasy VII (when I first played it I didn't understand it, so I hated it... but now it's one of my favorite games!), Metal Gear Solid (I played a demo of this and then my cousin let me play the full game on his PS1... now I've beaten ever MGS game created.), Mega Man (I've been a fan of the Blue Bomber for a long time now. I used to watch the show on TV when I was little too. XD), and much more. Mostly RPG's.

Recently, in the last two years, I've spent more and more time playing indie games and  wanting to get into the industry. I've been creating with GameMaker, which most people don't take seriously for creating and developing games, but have decided that I will need to be able to use something more powerful if I am going to continue to strive to become an indie game designer. So, this year, I've decided to teach myself C++ from scratch. Any good tutorials and help would be much appreciated.

[skaldicpoet9]

Any good tutorials and help would be much appreciated.

Well, there is this thread here on TIGS...

Hope that helps,

Oh and btw...welcome to the forums

[Tiego "TJ" Jontiago]

I'm Chris DeLeon, and I've been creating indie videogames for more than 10 years now.  My first game work was in the form of C&C mods, followed by Doom mods, Descent levels, and moving on to learn C/C++ a few games later.

I enjoy every aspect of development, from documentation to project management to system architecture or level design or tool programming, and generally pride myself in hybriding to fit the needs of whatever project(s) I'm involved with.

In 2004 I co-founded the Game Creation Society at Carnegie Mellon University, managing it for the first two years in operation.  Before graduating college I'd played a substantial role in somewhere around 45 videogame projects, 21 of them GCS projects.  During that time I also helped a bit when my fraternity built the shrine to Nintendo by programming two of the booth's three electronic games.

I worked for 11 months at a corporate game development studio (6 as an intern, 5 full-time), and found my way out after coming to terms with my love for little abstract games and working on multiple projects at once.

Since then I've been making a new experimental web game alone every day in AS3, something I've kept up now for around 95 days and counting. They mostly focus on mechanics and compulsions, but the purpose changes frequently.

My favorite games are Bubble Bobble, Goldeneye 007, Gravitar, Warlords, Myst, Secret of Mana, Super Paper Mario, and a handful of games that I've helped make but don't suspect many others will know about.

Outside of that, I've been Vegan for 5 years, used to break dance and serve as the head of a submission fighting group, take notes in my own form of shorthand that no one else can read (also 5 years), and am known among friends for listening to 1.5-60 second loops of original NES/SNES music for hours on end.

[PeteMedina]

Hi, I'm Pete.

My friend "Blademaster Bobo" suggested I join the TIG community, so here I am. Good advice, Bobo.

I'm an art major specializing in animation -- I know a bit of Lightwave. In reality though, I have more fun writing HTML and CSS. No online portfolio yet. I also shoot film photography on the side. Film has lost so much ground to digital that I consider it "indie" photography, ha.

Anyways, my bro and I want to get into game production, and were very inspired by the talks we saw at the Indie Games Summit at GDC 2008 -- if anybody was there, we were the two guys sitting in the right column, second row to the back.

So as it is, I want to learn how to program. I know it'll take a lot of time and patience on my part, especially since I struggle with math anxiety. I'm dedicated though. In the meantime, if anybody needs help getting a site up, let me know. I can, at least, provide whatever self-written templates I have sitting around on my hard drive.

Later,
-Pete

[Retro]

The indie games community is so small... let's get to know each other!  So that when we end up meeting in person it's not too frightening.

I knew I should have joined the forums BEFORE going to GDC. Ah well, for next year(s), here is a short introduction since by page 32 you realy don't want to be reading personal essays about people you don't know. Well, Derek Yu and Petri Purho met me personally and I've had the pleasure to see (but not the balls to introducte myself to) Cactus, 2D Boys and probably many more people I'll find out are members of this forum.

So here is the latest thing I made - last year's Dream-Build-Play warmup entry (click on pretty picture for youtube video):


It's been too long time since then, so I am getting pissed that instead of making games, I just write about them in this otherwise wonderful magazine:

I am also the editor of the DVD that ships with the mag and I put lots of indie games on it - the page is in some strange language, but you can use this search to see if I had the chance to meet your masterpiece: http://www.joker.si/ploscki.php?searchquery=yourgamenamehere. Psychosomnium, Dwarf Fortress, Cortex Command and Audiosurf are just the ones on the latest disc. I gave Derek one with Aquaria and Petri one with Crayon Physics on GDC and that as much as you know about me so far.

Anyway, I'm quiting the writing part of my job so I can make more games and when I make anything new I'll write more. I'm going to keep the DVD part of my job so I'll keep delivering your creations in front of 50.000 slovenian gamers. If you find this interesting at all (I think Petri was like WTF is this guy giving me a strange DVD for) I can keep you posted, which indie games I've put on the disc.