I was intending on waiting until I had my masterpiece finished before I let my presence be known on this website because I HATE people who talk about it more than they do it But according to your rules, I'm not allowed to show up and advertise my game unless I can prove that I've been here for a while. So here I go.
My name is David Wilson. I am 24 years old and live in New Zealand. I've been making games in one way or another since I was 10. It all started with the "Fighting Fantasy" series of choose your own adventure books by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson. I couldn't program back then on account of my dad's computer being an amstrad, and me being 10. So I just typed out stories on the amstrad and printed them off. I had one of those dot matrix printers with that fucking paper with the holes down the sides that you have to tear off and they always rip into the page and fuck up your adventure book.
Anyway,
I got a 386 a year later, but didn't have the patience to learn a programming language, so I made sprites instead. The funny thing is that I didn't have anything to do with these sprites, but I kept making them anyway. Here is a sprite sheet from 1997.
I know it sucks, but I was 12 and working with a 386 so give me a break.
Heres some stuff from 1998, got a bit better.
In 1999 my dad bought me a pentium 233 which was pretty sweet, I also got a pirated copy of microsoft visual studio from my malaysian cousin and started pissing around with visual basic.
Unfortunately, I lost all the games I made during 1999-2001 because of a "cyclic redundancy error" on my backup dvd. They all sucked except for one which I spent a year on called "killer" I have 2 gifs that survived the backup. Here is 1 of them.
Because I have a short attention span, I never bothered to learn visual basic properly, all I knew how to do was timers and image arrays. So basically, you'd see a short animation then get 3 or so choices. Each choice would play a different animation and then present you with another set of choices. Just like the Adventure books, but with more animations and deaths.
the thing was made up of bmps that I'd copy paste into a form and controlled the speed of each animation with timers.
I kept making games until 2001 when I got a girlfriend a decided to stop dreaming about becoming a game developer and focus on a getting a real job.
In 2003 I went to university and started a degree in psychology, but changed it to operations management after discovering that psychology was a terrible career choice.
I did do a few design papers because I like drawing, but it was all wankery so I stuck to management.
Here are some drawings. They are cliché, but I like them. Hardly anyone spends more than 100+ hours on a single piece of art these days and I'm proud to have done these with nothing but bic pens over the course of a year.
Man this post is going to take up like a whole page. Clearly I need to get out more.
After I graduated, I worked for a year as the director(coolie) of a 2 man (indie?) mushroom farm that me and a friend had started at uni. I got sick of it and we made fuck all money so I quit and became a janitor.
I could go on a rant about why (most)education is a lie, but I won't.
After realising the above statement and getting sick of taking orders from people with no qualifications treating me like some sort of retard because I'm the janitor, I decided to return to my childhood passion of making games.
I'm using Game Maker because as I said earlier, I have a poor attention span and I'm sort of using it as a stepping stone to C++ which is apparently quite similar.
Here is an screen shot of an unfinished game which will probably never be finished. It was my first project and the coding is so bad I get lost trying to figure out what I did. The gifs are pretty neat though.
it was going to be a side scrolling action rpg based on mushrooms with an emphasis on science. i.e. the abilities all share some relationship to what the mushroom does in nature. Like the coprinus comatus can fling spore laden ink at enemies etc.
Now, here is the game I'm getting very close to finishing, it doesn't have a name yet, probably something like "ARENA ...for men" or "capitalist space robots"
Its an arena shooter combined with an rts with elements action rpg and tower defence thrown in. Like you can drive vehicles, build units, buy weapons, build towers, lots of stuff. The engines pretty much done now, got 7 weapons, 8 buildings, 1 vehicle, 10 different kinds of enemy, 2 suits, and 3 levels in so far. Gonna keep going till I got at least 10 of each, and 5 hours worth of unique levels. So maybe another month or so.
I hope no one steals my idea lol since whether I have to clean toilets for a living for the rest of my life somewhat depends on it. I only need to make $2500 USD a year to survive without being a janitor so I don't think I've set the target too high.
This game will be free, but I intend on having a small expansion for a small amount of money after the initial games release.
I'm feeling a little bit ashamed for masturbating all over myself in this post, but like a person mentioned earlier in this thread "everyone else was doing it" lol.
I hope to be accepted into this community and that my image links don't get fucked up.
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