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[Derek]

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.  You know, like I want to know that DrDerekDoctors is a conjoined twin with a nipple on his forehead before I actually see him live.

Let us know what you're all about... how did you get introduced to gaming?  What are your passions?  What makes you tick? Let's go!  Feel free to pimp a website or art or anything here, too.

I'll start, and I'm going to rock it so hard so that you'll all be shamed to rock it even harder:

My name's Derek, and I'm the editor-in-briefs of TIGSource.  Eternal Daughter, I'm OK, and Aquaria are the games I most commonly associated with.

I look like this when I'm riding the subway without having slept:



How did I get into games?  When I was very young my uncle bought a NES for my cousins hoping he could get into it with them, but it ended up being ME that got hooked.  Super Mario, man!  It was amazing.  From then on, I started designing games on paper with my friends.  When my parents got a computer, the first thing I did was start making games on them.  The rest, as "they" say, is history.

I tend to like lots of different types of games.  My all-time favorites tend to be that way because I associate them with good memories with family and friends... as a result, my (incomplete) list may seem a bit pedestrian.  Oh well!



When Zelda 3 came around, wow!  That first sequence when you're wandering around in the rain, trying to follow Zelda's voice, really blew my mind when I first played it.  What an incredibly tense introduction.

The Zelda series has always had a fond place in my heart because of the time I spent playing it with my dad as a youngster.



Phantasy Star II - Wonderful RPG for the Sega Genesis and another one I played with my dad.  Along with having great presentation, it also contained one of the saddest events in videogame history (at least for me): the death of Nei to Neifirst. *Sniff*

Street Fighter II - My friend's dad would make us say Buddhist mantras 1,000 for a single quarter to play this game, and we'd fucking do it just because we were so obsessed!  Seriously, it was all we talked about for like 3 years.  Until this game came along:



Doom II, natch!  I won't say much about this one.  I was approaching my teens when this came out and, what can I say, I dug the great graphics and extreme violence.

Castlevania: SOTN - Pure 2D gaming bliss after such a drought of good 2D games.  I was like an old man being introduced to Viagra after years of impotence.

To be honest, I haven't played an indie game that I've fallen in love with the way I did the games of the NES/Super NES/Genesis era.  Not sure if that's because I'm too old now to be wowed the way I was when I was a kid or whether I just haven't played that magical game yet.  Cave Story definitely came close:



One of the things I (and I know Alec, too) want to capture with Aquaria is that feeling of bliss when playing those games of yore.  When you get so caught up in a story or idea that you lose track of time.  If even a single player experienced that from the game, I'd die a happy man.

So that's me in a (game-oriented) nutshell.  What about you?

[Inane]

I am an artist and wannabe programmer.


That's all.

[Slash - Santiago Zapata]

Ooook, here goes me and be warned, this will be long :D

Name's Zapata, Santiago Zapata

Mostly associated with: everything you can relate to roguelikes, including but not limited to: my games (CastlevaniaRL, MetroidRL, DrashRL), my community contributions (initial idea for Roguebasin, my reviews site, the roguelike world map), my ramblings (mainly at r.g.r.d) and off course, my genroguelikelike projects (GREEKIE, Guardian Angel)

I look like this when I am playing SMB3 with my friends


I look like this when I am away from a computer


First encounter with videogames: I got a pirate 2600 sometime when I was a child, and broke many joysticks... (MANY joysticks)



but that was not as important as getting infected with...

FRIENDLYWARE





Yeah, FRIENDLYWARE, a DOS collection of games and some useless programs (like biorythm or anything) written in good old BASIC (not Basic, BASIC)

Some time passed, and then came the ROMS, wow... you mean the WHOLE game fits on a 1.44 disk! :| that was amazing, I still remember how amazed I was I could have Zelda III on a diskette, when most crappy games I had had to be installed from multispaning zip distributions



I had SO MUCH fun with Zelda III! even while my PC had no sound, and couldnt handle transparencies

Then it was Final Fantasy, ALL.OF.THEM. and when they were over I was hungry for more, tried Phantasy Star, but somehow could never like it (sorry :D)



Then came Ultima VII, on the accursed Creative Labs CD I love Ultima's since I played this, Underworld and The Savage Empire :D




Then I had to answer the final question in Ultima IV for the SMS (played using an emulator), I wondered and wondered for many days, "what word creates and is created by the union of truth, love and courage" (or something similar)... I wondered, and wondered, but never found the answer, until I was illuminated, and so, I fired nu (Norton Utilities) hex editor, looked for some critical data and then there was the answer... "infinity"... INFINITY? Blah! at least that started my career as romhacker



I made many things.... translated FF1 into spanish, lots of sprite hacks. These times are long gone.

Come to think about it, it all began before, when I accidentally opened a .BAS from friendlyware into a text editor, and realized I could edit the Strings! then it was pure fun changing everything inside

I began programming when I was like 13 or 14, QBasic, from the examples and the inside tutorial. These were good times... I eventually got to where I wanted to be, and made some shooters, to the amazement of my classmates :D




I finished all RPGs of interest, all Final Fantasy's all Ultima's, then I began looking for more like crazy, but found nothing. Abandonware, Freeware... then I stumbled uppon.... roguelikes. Didn't like them very much at first sight, it was rogue and adom, and then I couldnt stop collecting them... I had like 120, most of them incomplete alpha's actually

And well... when I entered college, my obsession for roguelikes began, and I guess it hasn't ended yet, now I can say I have enjoyable products to show, which may be considered a success on a genre filled with impressive content-less engine wannabe's, there still a lot of road to be walked

So yes, I have all my things under a website at http://www.santiagoz.com including pics, blogs, blah, lots of useless stuff, articles, reviews, and off course, my games website...

And I think this is becoming too long so yes, I guess this is enough for today :D I had never talked that much about myself :D

[johanp]

Allrighty, I'm Johan and I run Free Lunch Design. I guess the biggest mark I left on the scene is Icy Tower, and some other more or less successful free games. Been playing board games since I could walk and started adding digital games when the first personal computers popped up. I used to make my own board games so when I started using computers the transition was natural and I learned programming. Never owned a NES until a few years ago when I imported one from Germany.

This is how I look when pretending to be someone else (no prizes for guessing who).


I usually don't get absorbed by any game but sometimes it happens: Head over Heels (C64), Super Mario Bros 3, Wind Waker and San Andreas are a few who actually made me stick to them for a bit longer.

My biggest problem when it comes to developing games is that I always raise the bar. This goes for code, graphics and design. And it ends up with me never being happy about the product (well not always). My current game engine is even called Duga ("good enough" in swedish) in order to remind me that it doesn't have to be perfect, but still I push on, searching for the ultimate solutions. I also have a really bad habit of writing answers to posts and then deleting them because I get a feeling of "who cares?" just before I'm about to submit.  But this time I made it.  :D

I'm currently working as game designer and researcher in a big project about pervasive games and teaching in some game courses at the university. However, in april I'll work less with that and more with Free Lunch Design. A lot more actually. It's really exciting and I'm looking forward to be able to spend huge amout of time on making games and hopefully some money.

Cheers! 

[RobF]

Hi, my names Oddbob and I like Tempest

More seriously - I'm Rob, first computer was the lovely piece of rubber keyed beauty, the ZX Spectrum - my best mate had a C16, Amstrad and later a C64 so I got pretty much the best of all worlds over the course of the years - especially as when he was finished with them and moved on I'd buy them from him. (Something that still goes on to this day!)

When staring into the feedback fields I look a bit like this or when I'm trying to annoy DrDerekDoctors, this.

My first addiction was Jet Set Willy where the poor Spectrum would be left on for days in the dining room, my first arcade loves were Scramble and Tempest as there was shit all else around the area I grew up in. It wasn't until the local arcade got a dodgy pay to play Megadrive machine I truly discovered consoles beyond the Atari 2600. Drifted off from playing games in order to get excessively drunk for a fair few years, sorta picking back up with the PS1 for post pub Super Puzzle Fighter battles, then dropped off the face of the planet till getting a decent enough PC about 5 years ago.

I run Retro Remakes these days along with a few very lovely admins including my long suffering wife, also where DrDerek exercises his terrorism board moderating skills (its just an excuse to get him in the secret forum where we swear about people a lot really ). As well as RR, I've been known to have a little rant on my blog every now and then, even though its meant to be mainly a development diary for whatever I'm working on.

Currently gamewise, I'm putting the finishing touches to the Jet Set Willy Online final build along with Stu Ovine, Scotty and Smila - which is unfortunately taking up the few hours of spare time I have right now after we neglected to test 2.11 properly and it emerged a bag of bug ridden shite - all the while desperately trying to find the time to finish off my "its not Tempest,k" remake of G-Force.

These days when not making games or tripping over a 2 year olds booby traps, I'm spending it playing games. Especially ones that look like Tempest.

[guillermo]

Hello, I'm guillermo, I'm from the (third world) country of Mexico, where every morning people take their sombreros, jump into their horses and, enjoying an amazing pyramid filled view, go to their jobs to proudly work to deliver what's now our national product: Piracy.

Anyways, I've been into gaming for more than 17 years. Right now I'm SICK of the commercial scene, so I'm all indie... And retro too!, as emulation could be illegal but it's totally moral from an insightful greed-free point of view.

I, of course, am not just a passive hedonist, I've made a couple of games so far. A simple action-puzzleish game that goes by the name of The Nest Guardian (currently only playable through the lame Vitalize plug-in). And the always fun R-Shmup Engine, a stand-alone easy-to-use engine that includes its own scripting language to allow you to create glorious retro-styled horizontal shoot'em ups. I'm not far from releasing a new version of that, with new shits and stuff. Though, the current one is fully functional.

I'm in the process of getting my shit together, and when I'm done I'll release a cool site and more games, blah, blah. I've got some projects that are gonna be really worth your time. I Hope you live long enough to see'em

In my spare time I also pretend I'm popular and socially accepted, so I've got myself a myspace page, don't look, as it has been set to private after hearing how easily girls could invite me to have sex with'em, but feel free to add me if you want to add more indieness to your profile. Or feel free to create an indie gaming group (hint, hint) and invite me to join. Thanks, I'm back to my usual lurking-mode now.

[BenH]

Hokay! I'm Ben and I run K-ero which I like to pretend is a real games company. My mummy says it's a real games company, anyway.

I look like this when I've used too much hair dye making myself go slightly mad


and I look like this when I'm in the pub taking Myspace-esque phone pictures


I first got into making games when I nicked my friends copy of Klik & Play waaay back in 1996. I had actually played about with the Shoot'em Up Construction kit on my Amiga years before that, but I was a stupid child and all I could do was change the graphics of the built-in game to look like christmas decorations.
Eventually my friend got The Games Factory which I prompty nicked from him again. I actually only used it for a very short period of time before I decided to get Multimedia Fusion for my birthday. This was when things started improving and my 'games' actually started to play like proper games. Once I'd started making semi-decent games, I started releasing games under the company Kedamonoware (which is now dead, replaced by K-ero, yay!), and I was also a part of O³ Software (also dead now ) by that point, too.
The games I created during this time were the following (oldest to newest): Martian, Nekobot, Osanta and Up Yours.
In 2002/2003 I pretty much stopped making games, atleast nothing worthwhile. I'd moved on to learning how to draw and art in general. Thats how things like this ended up coming into exsistance!




These days I'm managing to juggle games development and artwork at the same time, but the break from games development definatly did me a lot of good. I'm much more clear thinking about my games now, and I'm no where near as afraid to actually plan things on paper as I used to be! :D Unfortunatly taking a break from it ment that my website eventually died and I lost the audience I used to have. Now I have to start from scratch again!

Anyhoo, I think I've ranted on about myself for long enough!

Cheers!

[Eric]

My name is Eric Vaughn. I started off making Klik & Play games about seven years ago and releasing them on my own geocities site which hardly anyone knew about. Beau from Fallen Angel Industries, another game making site, found my site and we started talking via email.

Then 83rdstasis, the most ambitious game making site ever, was opened. I got a copy of MMF and started making shmup for them. 83rdstasis crashed later, so I talked to Beau again and he said I could make my games for Fallen Angel Industries

Time went by and I made my own faind.com branch group, Plasticow, which is what most people will probably remember me for. I released my first game into the greater public of the games community, which was a snake game called Crawler. Then I started making a game called Disco Dan, which got everyone excited for a long time.

Next, I move my rig over to Virtually Real for some reason. After that, Derek Yu gives me a call about Disco Dan and says that it would be a cool release for Blackeye Software in it's dying days. I took this as meaning "I am in Blackeye Software" which I told all of my friends. At this point, I realized that I haven't really been making games at all, but just jumping around to lots of different game development groups so I could get as much attention as possible.

The entire time this is going on, I am an editor for Total Klik, writing garbage articles for stuff. I come up with that 2-bit game competition that gets everyone on Total Klik excited, and Johan from freelunch comes out with that Alligator game that is famous.

I kind of disappear for a while after this and resurface later working on Zombie Smash, a zombie shooting platformer in MMF. The project eventually goes wild and I have like 8 people all working on it, including Derek Yu and Texmo from Fallen Angel. It becomes too chaotic and everyone disbands.

Then I disappear again and surface again to try and make Zombie Smash again. This time I wanted to program it myself. I start learning Blitz Basic and I hire a few artists with my own change to help me make the game.

A lot of shit has gone down since then (including winning the Worst Blog of 2006 award), but today Zombie Smash is still slowly gravitating towards being finished one day. I've learnt my lesson about being an attention whore, so now I have done a complete 180 and NO ONE knows what I am doing anymore

Apart from working on Zombie Smash, I'm also working as a world designer for an indie game in the works that you probably know about. But I'm not going to tell tell you anything about that.

To sum up my "career" in the free and indie game scene, I was an attention whore that started lots of awesome games but never finished them. Today I am a mysterious stranger.

[Xion]

'Dup.
X to tha Izzle, yo!
I growed up arting. Oldest videogame system I can remember owning was an N64 (Yeah, that's right, I'm a youngin' alright. What is, how you say, See Six Tee For? )

Never really played any of the 2d classics on a console. Mostly I got 'em as ROMs. But they're what made me realize how much better games were then than they are now (don't get me wrong, I still think todays games are awesome). So I started wanting to make games like that. Old, you know, but new, see? I suck at programming because I've never tried it because I'm so completely and utterly intimidated by it. So I took to what I did know a bit about. Art.
And here I am.

[Shinji16]

I write music, play shmups, and play a LOT of Bemani games.

Oh yea, I do musical work for Puppy Games when it comes up.

http://web.mac.com/shinjisixteen is my site.

S'bout it I guess...

[Caio]

Hello there,

My name is Caio and I'm a Brazilian student. My first contact with the gaming world was thanks to the Atari 2600. I was around four then. To this day I still love River Raid.

Eventually, I came to found a little amazing software: the RPG Maker 95. I then started making games, and I was hooked. I've since played with several simple game making tools. Never finished any serious game.

Even though I've been doing something that could be called "designing games" in endless notebooks (I actually just drew the levels and imagined how it'd be to play them; I guess most were point-and-click adventures) and writing stories since I remember, I learned what the term meant and started reading about it only when I was 14. I have around half-a-dozen half-baked games (which unfortunately don't make a dozen baked games) (wait, I don't think a baked game would play) on paper and am currently learning trying to learn C++.

My favorite games are Cave Story and Chrono Trigger . I plan on moving to the US or perhaps Australia as soon as possible.

Edit.: Just because everyone has pictures and I didn't.

[progrium]

So I'm Jeff. I'm helping Derek with this site as the resident web hacker and sysadmin, however I'm a great lover of playing, and even more so making, games.

I started playing games super young starting with Nintendo and Super Mario, so I'm very heavily inspired by Miyamoto-style game design. When I was little I would design games on paper, usually Mario brand games, and I would mail some of them to Nintendo of America. They had awesome reps to mail back. Zelda had a big influence on me as well, mostly of the idea of a world in a box. Later, Ultima Online would intensify this and add in the social aspect.

In high school I did a lot of 3D game stuff. My favorite project looking back was an incomplete game called Dark Forest, which was an experimental game where I was trying to take the gameplay mechanics of Pac-Man and package them in the experience of a 3d platformer. You were a forest girl that ran around a maze-like forest collecting fairies while avoiding ghosts. You could find mushrooms that would allow you to attack the ghosts, so those were the Pac-Man gameplay mechanics. The levels were generated randomly (early generative systems!) and the music would progressively get more complex as you approached the end of a level.



I was also very much an FPS gamer during my teenage years. It started with Wolf3d, Doom, but especially Duke Nukem 3D. Mostly because of the Build engine, which was just amazing. I fell in love with making levels for Duke and other games built with  the Build engine. Half-Life would eventually replace this favoritism.

I liked making tools. I built a 3d building editor for an MMOG I was attempting to make once. It was heavily inspired by the Build editor and I got Ken Silverman (who built Build) to advise me with some stuff.



But I was also very much attached to the toy-style simulation games, and so I'm also very much inspired by Will Wright. In fact, his talks have had a very heavy impact on my approach to design, mostly in regards to designing systems. He introduced me to systems theory, which led to systems thinking, and I look at so much of the world completely differently now.

I built a web version of a theoretical game from one of Will Wright's talks. It was built using a magic web technology you may have heard of called Ajax, back before it was really hyped. Actually, we were using what is now called Comet before it had a name. Unfortunately it's not online, but you can watch a fairly quick demo of it online in this presentation on YouTube.

Lately I haven't been so active in game development, but I'm a very big supporter of indie games and experimental/progressive efforts in the game industry.

I do a lot of web stuff right now because I think it's a great new application platform and I like making tools for people. I'm really into ESR hacker ethic, open source, etc.

Those values led me to start a party here we do every 6 weeks called SuperHappyDevHouse, which is a party for hackers and thinkers. We've done 15 now and get about 100 people every event with developers from Apple, Google, EA, startups, as well as hobbyists, open source hackers, plus a few celebrities now and then. It very much evolved out of LAN parties.



I've always been very much an entrepreneur. More of a Steve Jobs than a Bill Gates. Right now I have a startup called DevjaVu that's about a product that everybody tells me is amazing... regarding version control and other software development tools. (That's why I asked about version control earlier.)

However, I still love games first and foremost... so after I get some time I'm going to get back into making great, fun and innovative games. And I'm going to do it indie style.

[ravuya]

SuperHappyDevHouse has been one of those cool things (like Dorkbot) that I wish were in my neck of the woods, but isn't.

Perhaps I should start a chapter.

[konjak]

My name's Joakim Sandberg. Yeah, try to pronounce that right (except you, johanp).

I still remember the christmas my brother got his first video game console and that's where I was introduced to it. It was a Master System with Alex Kidd in Miracle World built into it. That sort of started off my Sega craze. I would often get my mom to rent me a Mega Drive system and I played alot of Sonic 2 and Streets of Rage 2.



During the early years, when I was in kindergarten, I can distinctly remember I liked to get a hold of carton boxes I'd cut up to make a TV, and make smaller pieces for joypads and I drew the games on there... I don't remember if the teachers gave me odd looks.

After my dad got a NES off of a friend for us, all the classics came with it, like Mario 1 and 3, Castlevania and Megaman 2. Castlevania later disappeared. 
At this point I got crazy about Mario and loved to buy those checkered notebooks and draw Mario levels, because I for some reason at that point had a perception of tiles. I might've been 8 or 9.



Finally it was time for me to wish for my own console for my birthday, and my siblings bothered me about what to get, and it ended up an SNES, with Donkey Kong Country packed in. And from here on I was a Nintendo nut and got Zelda 3 and Secret of Mana and all the great games on following consoles. I kept wanting to make games myself and came across Games Factory from playing a game called Stewart the Dragon off some PC magazine CD. Now I'm still with Clikcteam products, which kind of sucks, but I'm so impatient with learning new things.

My favorite games are Majora's Mask and Yoshi's Island (best platformer bosses ever, period).



In my own little "career" of hundreds of abandoned games (like Mina of the Pirates, which I still hate today), I have only really released Noitu Love to any proper reception. I released Tripline and was satisfied with the idea, but should've put more meat on it.

Right now I've finally gotten to level making stages and am on a good path with a new platform adventure, a genre I'm crazy about (people should play Wonderboy 6, alot of people miss it). It's still early stages and I am weary about talking about my games at such a stage, but here's a part of a screenshot:



I'm not doing the 8-bit shortcutting as I did with Noitu with this.

For money, I 2D animate for Wayforward Technologies.

Oh, and here is me putting my arm to my nose:

[Derek]

This has got to be the best introduce yourself thread ever.