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[Le3F]

Hi all! I'm joe. I used to work pro as a game artist, but I'm taking a short break to give this indie thing a try. Wish me luck!

LUCK! 

[sigfarter]

ps: here's what I look like incase I bump into any of you around Los Angeles or indiecade or E3.....or where ever.

thank god, we need more black people around here, we have a substantial lack of funk

[Acegikmo]

Hello!

I'm Joachim 'Acegikmo' Holmér!
I've been interested in the creative aspects of gaming for a long time, starting out with simple level editors, and then went into more advanced ones as I grew older.

I think my first actual game creation thing was Game Maker 6. It was also the first time I coded something, using their builtin GML language.
After that I went into creating custom levels for Unreal Tournament 2004, Serious Sam, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, among others!
Most time was probably spent making Liero mods and Trackmania Tracks though, I even managed to become a moderator in the official Trackmania forums (Apparently I was 14 years old, just looked it up, heh).

I didn't take game creation that seriously until I started becoming more and more involved in TF2 mapping. When people actually started to like the stuff I did, and especially after placing second in Valve's TF2 art-pass contest, and being mentioned in the TF2 blog a few times, I got loads of motivation to carry on with game development!

During my TF2 mapping time, I was in a school where I learnt Java and C++ programming and a bunch of neat mathematics (Although most coding was done in my spare time). Of course, there was a bunch of other things you could learn there at school, but I generally didn't care all that much about the things I didn't need to learn to become a game developer.

After that I went to a Game design school called FutureGames, where I met loads of like-minded, motivated people! FutureGames introduced me to Maya, UDK, Unity, which is pretty much everything I use these days.

During FutureGames, one of our teachers (Sjoerd 'Hourences' De Jong), asked my friend Marko and I if we were interested in joining him in developing free DLC levels for his game "The Ball", so we did! We were excited to join it since we hadn't done anything commercially released at the time, but we were to find out something even more exciting after signing an NDA.

We had accidentally walked in on working with Valve and the promotional campaign for Portal 2! "The Ball" was one of the games to be released into the Portal 2 Potato sack bundle, where every game did something as part of the Portal 2 ARG.
So I worked on that as a level designer and a level artist, I also did some modeling!




Somewhere during FutureGames, a team formed to create a game called Unmechanical. It developed further after the 4-week project time was over, and that's where I joined the Unmechanical team.
I worked mostly on Tech-art/shaders, some slight animations, modeling, and environment art. I also designed one of the game's puzzles, as well as created most of the intro (The underground part).
Unmechanical has actually been released now on Steam!
You can pick it up for $9 if you want to play it

After FutureGames I went out applying for internship. I started doing Level Design at Avalanche Studios (Just cause 2 developers). Unfortunately I was doing mostly trigger placement and scripting on an unannounced title, which to me wasn't really creative or work that I actually learnt much from. I left Avalanche (Regrettably, the people there were amazing), and started working with Zeal Game Studio, a much smaller studio currently working under Paradox, soon releasing Starvoid and A Game of Dwarves. I work there as a tech-artist/shader coder/modeler/environment artist/animator/level designer, which is very fun!

So that's where I am now!

Currently I'm working hard on a Unity game, which I'll announce later this month!
I'm also making electronic music in my spare time, you can find me on Spotify/iTunes if you do a  little search for Acegikmo

Here's my outdated portfolio if anyone's interested!
(It's lacking Unmechanical and my current work, both professional and personal)

www.acegikmo.com

Looking forward to posting and lurking around here, haven't done that enough :D

[Sidius Nova]

Alright, so this is us, team Sidius Nova:


The mad scientist on the left is Ben, the one on the right that's me, Stefan

We met at a game dev meetup in San Francisco and have been tinkering on a little mobile game for a little bit now. Only problem: we've been forced to do so.
Forced to work on a game? "Why?", might you ask, or "Who?"
Well, there is this 'lady' called  Sidius Nova... she is one of those almighty god-like creature types -- you know, the ones that do whatever they want... She kind of consumes whole stars and told us that if we didn't make a battle simulator for her she'd annihilate humanity, so we sort of agreed to it...

Doesn't sound like fun?
Fun? Are you joking? WE ARE SCARED! If Sidius Nova won't like the game, than that pretty much means the end of the world! I'm talking: Huge cataclysmic explosion type of end of the world...

Better get back to work now before she sees me chatting with you guys

[Graham-]

ps: here's what I look like incase I bump into any of you around Los Angeles or indiecade or E3.....or where ever.

thank god, we need more black people around here, we have a substantial lack of funk

This might be true.

[Haga]

Sup bros!

My name is Chris Haga, though most people just call me Haga.  I've been an avid gamer since I could muster the dexterity to operate a keyboard with my tiny little baby hands.  Pretty much spent my entire life doing any combination of the following three activities:

1.) Drawing

2.) Daydreaming

3.) Playing every game I could afford to get my hands on

Unfortunately, those three things in excessive quantities don't prepare you for the wide-scale collaboration and political maneuvering required to work in the mainstream games industry.  Despite this, for some reason, Blizzard tricked me into working on Diablo 3 for nearly a decade until I finally flipped my desk over and escaped, quitting in December '11.  It was my first job in game development: I worked on Combat, Skill/Hero Design, FX and PvP primarily.

Jonathan Blow's talk at Rice had a tremendous impact on how I view gaming, and the responsibilities we all share as game makers.  If you've not seen this: go watch it now!

I try my hardest to be an empiricist.  For me, endless expositions on "fun" are as useful as "phlogiston" was for providing a framework for understanding fire.

I make games because I feel compelled to, I feel an overwhelming desire to share my imagination with others.  I would rather go back to working at Domino's than make games that hurt or deceive people.  I see my job as being more than just soliciting someone's striatum into producing dopamine.

Thanks.

[Graham-]

Oh yeah. It's good.

[Haga]

I was afraid to link it.  Not sure if it was free to watch :D

[Squid Party]

Hey peeps! My name's Chris McDonald, I write lots of things with lots of words for a few sites (Indie game mag, neoseeker, nerdgasmatron)so if you have a game that needs a bit of attention don't hesitate in contacting me!

I'm pretty fond of 2D games, weird junk, neon colors, and cute crap.

ps: here's what I look like incase I bump into any of you around Los Angeles or indiecade or E3.....or where ever.

you look like a young Denzel washington

[FemtoKitten]

I am a 17/18 year-old girl who has always been interested in strategy/thought-needing games over action oriented games. Only recently though have I been feeling like I have enough skills/knowledge to actually start to produce quality games.

I have been developing games for 6 years, but only recently have I started seriously considering working on games as more than a hobby. I started out with DarkBasic, but moved onto an journey that took me through VisualBASIC, C++, Java, Flash, and I finally ended up with C# (I juggle between XNA and Unity, I prefer XNA in general usage however).

I have had a few programming jobs, I had an internship programming lab equipment during my Freshman year, and my most recent internship with a iPhone development company (they used Unity) gave me enough insight into the industry to realize that I actually have enough skills to start being serious. Of course because of my age school comes first.

For my senior year I am going to make a proper game company with website plus the first product out the door. If done properly I should graduate with high honors... and hopefully have some scrap for college survival.

I look like this:

[iggynore]

My name is Igor Noronha and I like to do comics and games...
5 years ago I left my home country of Brazil to go to Denmark study art, and today I find myself working with games, which is great. Our first game is called Light Apprentice, and it looks like this, and we've been making it for over an year now, but I'd like to make some smaller games on the side, like this one.

Nice to meet all of you

[alfredosays]

Heya!

My name is Alfredo - like the sauce. I'm fresh out of college and looking to learn as much as I can about developing games and making friends along the way. I went to school for marketing at Emerson College, a media/communications school in Boston, and dipped my toes in fashion, TV, radio, film and ad agencies only to realize that what I really wanted to do wasn't being offered - video games! I pushed for a video game curriculum my senior year and it's in the process of being organized :] I'm in Boston but looking to move to San Francisco soon.

So here I am. Here's to friends, learning, and ice cream!  

Edit: Oh, and here's an obligatory photo of myself

[tacograveyard]

Yellow,

My name is Sal and I am one half of Taco Graveyard. I started off making ASCII art racing games and text adventures on my Tandy 2000 when I was wee little lad. I continued to make strange games over the years that nobody ever played but me while people paid me to make less interesting pieces of software. Last year I teamed up with Steve (the other half of Taco Graveyard) and we started making games for iOS. The first project we worked on never saw the light of day, but we managed to release two games: Four Hats and Omegapixel.

This is me:



And this is Steve:



As you can see we were sucked into video games in the 80s and have remained 8-bit ever since. We can only travel in 2d which makes it hard to get around in this 3d world. We are always juggling a few projects at a time, but our primary focus right now is Penumbear. Here is a screen shot from last week:



I heart video games,
Sal

[Jondog]

I'm Jono, I got into games rather young but my memories of them are hazy, first game I ever played was either Super Mario World (I barely had any idea of what I was doing so I kept dying from the piranha plants) or playing some game on my Uncle's PlayStation (which thankfully convinced my parents to get me one.)

Games that influenced my decision to get into game making would have to be the Ratchet and Clank series and Metroid Prime because they had some really cool concept art galleries.

I've worked on a few student games in a kind of bad multimedia course I did last year and the year before. I'm currently trying to learn new tools and some programming for a few small games before I start on a few ideas I have, I'm also doing casual work on an android title called Legacy of Barubash.

[_Grey]

hi guys,

my name's is Matteo Gregis, i'm italian and im'a 17 years old guy interested from when i was 6 (or something like that) in video games(and for about 3 years also in electronics): that's why i've decided to create games in my free time (in practice during my summer holidays).

I played a lot of games during my existance, but just some of them have a place in my memory: some games avaiable with MAME, in particular Motos (i really loved that game because of its semplicity and concept); Monkey island, one of my father's favourite games; Pokèmon, a classic; Kirby, really loved this too as the abilities of the main character have impressed me a lot; Metroid, in particular the NES version; Cave Story  , one of the coolest game i've ever seen! fallen in love quite istantly; Super Smash Bros. Brawl: oh god whaen i've seen that game for the first time i've said <<Damn, that's fantastic!! it's so fun to see all those Nintendo's character fighting each other! Amazing!>>; The Legend of Zelda: in particular Oracle of Ages and a Link to the Past, i really enjoyed them!; Boktai: the sun is in your hand, a really cool experiment that have impressed me a lot.

In practice, most of the games that have brought me to the world of videogames were made by Nintendo: i've never played a non Nintendo game that gave me the same feelings of a Nintendo's game (yes, i'm a big Nintendo fan :D).

I really love 2D and pixellous games, and that's why i think old games are the best! i think the new generation games work too much on graphics and stuff like that and not on what it really counts: how much it's fun.

that's all guys, see you later on this forum!

[lynks]

Hi folks,

like many of you I got into the gaming thing at a young age. I grew up glued to random free arcade-type games such as Jason Storm and the Space Chase and Jazz Jack Rabbit. My passion for games and virtual worlds really took hold when I discovered Quake (which later led to my love of all things Lovecraftian, but that's another story).

Chip's Challenge deserves a mention as I vividly remember moving Chip to the outermost reaches of the map to chance a glimpse of what lay beyond the walls, not from a technical standpoint, but from a deeply held belief that the virtual world of tiles was in some way real. I had the same feeling when looking out into Quake's purple sky from some gothic window.

Fast forward to today, I still play games. Work full time as a software engineer and have a huge interest in all things information security - often spending long evenings hijacking global offset table pointers and such.

I have an altogether impressive portfolio of unfinished games reaching far back into my history - my first language was OPL, similar to Microsoft's BASIC, at the tender age of 11, and I haven't stopped not-finishing games since.

My latest unfinished project is a 2D isometric MMORPG that has been cluttering my desk for the past 4 years or so. I'm hoping one day to actually finish this thing.

Love the site, even the forum with its ferocious reputation for 'constructive criticism', look forward to getting to know a few of you, learning a lot, and getting some much needed inspiration to finally finish this damn MMORPG.

~lynks

[dcfedor]

Hey All,

My name's Daniel Fedor, and I founded Blue Bottle Games in January 2012. I look something like this:



I worked at BioWare from 2004-2011 as a lead technical artist on DA (and a bit on DA2), and later, as an associate producer on ME3. In April 2011, I decided to take the indie plunge, and turned in my resignation. I started a blog about the experience called Game Dev Gone Rogue.

My big thing right now is my first game, NEO Scavenger. It's a turn-based, isometric survival RPG set in a post apocalyptic, future Earth. It's pretty hardcore, with a lot of focus on the details, such as inventory management, metabolic maintenance, strategic movement/combat, and has some choose your own adventure thrown in. Think Fallout 1 or STALKER meets Nethack.



I've been a long time lurker, with only a few posts to my name. But I dig the community, and think it's a great resource for indies just starting out like me.

Thanks for reading, and great to meet you all!

[enthrallstudios]

Hey guys,
So my actual name is Charlie Gilchrist. I grew up in a very southern family in the suburbs of Atlanta, GA. I somehow managed to escape the stereotypical accent and lifestyle and spend 99% of my day working. I work full-time at a software company, and am finishing my final year of college getting a degree in CS. In all honesty though, I despise the corporate software field almost as much as I would hate working somewhere like EA or Activision.

I started gaming with an SNES and Legend of Zelda : A Link to the Past. A year later I got a NES from a garage sale. I was too young to read, so my mom spent a lot of her time reading the text from Zelda to me, so she decided to stop doing it. I ended up teaching myself to read so that I could finish the game. Thanks Link!

I started developing games when I was 11 using RPG Maker and other random tools on the internet. About a year later I decided to begin self-teaching C++. It was love at first site.

I am currently working on a very dark and emotional platformer with a small team. I am writing the engine myself using SFML and OpenGL. My engine is very simple to customize and add on to, which is why I am releasing the engine open-source after I release this first game. It's targeted specifically for us indies with great ideas. It can also handle a full-3D game so it's not genre specific. I plan to release a small demo here and start talking more about the game and the engine in the coming months.

I'll see you guys around!

[dcfedor]

Thanks Gabriel! Nice to be here!

Also, judging by your blog, looks like we have similar taste in pixel art

[26PM]

Hey fellow creators of all sorts. My name is Josiah Munsey. I recently released my first game called Missile Monkey. I created all the art and most of the levels and my Dad did all the programming. We chose to make a very simple arcade style game as our first game to keep things simple. Working on an arcade game was fun, but I plan to now shift my focus to creating games with a "beautiful experience" as their cornerstone. Games much more focused on a visual and or emotional experiences combined with an emphasis on exploration. I work full time as a 3D artist for a video game company (n-Space) and create personal games (under Munsey Clan Games) during my early morning hours.
My website: http://www.26pm.com/ Missile Monkey website http://www.missilemonkey.com/
Me:
Missile Monkey Screen: