Hi my name is Tan Tuncag, an indie developer from Istanbul, Turkey. My gaming company is called Santima Games.
I've started my career as a professional musician then worked as a film director and then I went on to become a game developer. Funny where life takes you...
So here's the long version: my obsession with games started when I was 9 years. My dad bought me ZX Spectrum 48K and that was it, I was hooked.
What really fascinated with the ZX Spectrum (compared to C64 for instance) was the absurdity and the vagueness of its games. eg Lords Of Midnight. It was a fairly popular game and I loved playing it, yet I couldn't quite figure out the purpose of the game. Remeber those times? No guides, no tutorials, zero hand-holding.
Maybe if I've bought the original game there would be a some sort of guide in it but remember I was living in Turkey, it was 80's and original games for the Speccy did not quite exist here then, so we'd end up getting cassette copies from these "special" game shops. The funny thing was, when they fast-copied the games especially, the sound quality would be lowered, you'd go home and it would load for ten minutes and you'd see the dreaded glitched out "fail" screen.
But the interesting thing was, a few months after I got the computer I started writing my own games. Fortunately programming books for Speccy were available (in only one bookshop in my hometown of Izmir) but I was still writing in Basic of course and I would quickly run out of the 48Kb memory
For this reason I could never finish a game I've started but I'd made enough to dazzle my friends and watch them suffer trying to figure out/survive my games.
But somehow I did not pursue this direction in life. I was always good at science and math but I wanted to be an artist. So after high school I entered the art school and studied acting which I also did not pursue.
Fast forward to 2005; me and a musician pal of mine decided to make a game. It would be an adventure game shot as a movie (eg. eleventh hour) At the time there was nothing like Unity or UE so I was building the game on Macromedia Director. It was a great tool, intuitive and easy to program. We were so serious about it we even went to Paris to shoot some futuristic scenes in La Defense. But then we realized the game was too big for us to handle. Instead we formed an electronica music band called "Portecho".
Portecho became a huge success, I made a living by making music for 5-6 years. We toured a lot, released 3 albums, EPS and a remix album but then it all went downhill when my band partner moved to US and I stayed in Istanbul. Even after that we kept it going for a while but then we decided to quit recently since it became really difficult to go on like this and move on with our lives.
Meanwhile I was shooting our own video clips and I started getting offers from other bands and musicians to shoot clips for them. I shot video clips and moved on to television and made a living on that. I was also doing visuals and animations so I started teaching myself proper Maya. I was using 3DSMax before, mainly for the 3d stuff for the clips but then a friend of mine told me Maya was better for animation.
Then in 2014 I started working with a production company called F5 Productions, mainly to develop visuals and animations for clients but I still had to urge to make games. I just did not know how.
Then I discovered this thing called Unity. It was V3.5 at the moment.
We started developing custom made games for clients, mainly for events and such. I was learning Unity and coding on the go and of course having Unity's asset store in our disposal was great. We were mainly building games using stuff like Kinect, Arduino or RFI. Having learned some Maya was a bonus too since Unity's controls worked very much like Maya and the integration between two programs were really great.
A few years later I've started developing my own games. First ones were for Apple Store and they were really crap but they gave me really valuable experiences. One of them was a platformer/adventure game that looked like this:
It was so unoptimized that it would crash even the latest iPhones, running out of memory. It's not available anymore unfortunately. I can easily port it to PC and re-release it but I'm a bit embarrassed so I probably won't.
While all this was happening I wanted to go on making music and I started a solo project called "Cava Grande".
So here I was thinking of making a video clip for my Cava Grande track "Sentinel" then I decided to make a game instead.
Last summer I made "Sentinel" and put it up on itch.io. It looks like this:
Remember when I told you about dreaming of having huge characters on the screen?
This was 5 months ago; since then I've developed my second game called "A Fine Mess" and it looks like this:
It's a walking-simulator/horror game and it was (kind of) praised for its vagueness. (Again, remember vagueness of Speccy games?)
So here we are. This is my story. At the moment I want to follow up on A" Fine Mess" and see what happens.
By the way I've discovered TigSource via Derek Yu's excellent book: Spelunky.
I've actually read it twice cause I hadn't played the game at the time so I played the game and read it again. I've read a few books kinda like this but none of them were so engaging and fun to read so I'd recommend this book, even to seasoned developers out there.
Thanks.
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