Well I've been following tigsource.com for a while (and have been following indie game development in general for years before that)... and especially over the last year I've become increasingly determined that I want to make a serious go of being an indie game developer, and hopefully supporting myself and my wife doing it. Thought it was about time I got involved in the TIGsource forums, it seems like this is a hub of activity for a really active community.
I started programming games when I was about 12 years old when my dad brought home a copy of GWBASIC for our ancient DOS box on 3.5-inch floppies. I would check out books on BASIC programming from the local library and painstakingly type in the code line-by-line, with no idea what I was actually doing... my first program was a simple text choose-your-own-adventure game with exactly one decision, which would result in you either dying horribly or achieving spectacular victory. I still remember the incredible thrill of finding such a programming book that actually explained how to draw simple 2D graphics - lines and circles - on the screen, and realizing the fantastic world of possibilities that had just opened up...
Well fast forward a few years to C++, a BS degree in Computer Science, and a lucky break landing a job with a PC games company in Houston right out of college. I was completely a stereotypical exploited intern there and worked many 90-hour weeks a multitude of times for a criminally low salary... but again I was thrilled to actually be a professional games developer.
Fast forward several more years to me working as a programmer for Midway Austin, then Blizzard, then SOE Austin... and to me finding that the appeal of working for huge companies in huge teams on huge projects had worn off quite a bit. In particular, being a tiny cog in a very very big engineering team is demoralizing... especially because of the impossibility of actually contributing anything to the design or creative side of the project at that point.
Because it didn't take me long in this career to realize that it's not so much that I like programming... I like making games. I'm plenty left-brained, but I'm also strongly right-brained and creative. I found more and more that I wasn't just interested in creatively solving the problems of implementing a game design (though God knows those problems are tricky enough), but that I was interested in solving bigger creative problems... like how to create "Fun". It was actually pretty early in my game development career that I realized this, and began educating myself on game design as a discipline, as much as I was able to. (Unfortunately finding a role in the industry as a "Programmer/Designer" - without taking a huge pay cut as a Designer - is much more difficult than you might think.)
When I discovered Flash programming, it was a revelation. At the time I was working in UnrealEngine3 every day - changing a line of code, hitting Compile, and then pulling up a YouTube video to watch while I waited before I could actually see the effects of my code change. Then I got into Flash and could iterate on my code - and my game designs - in seconds. I suddenly remembered the old thrill of quickly making my own games in the good ol' BASIC days.
Suffice to say that since about 2006, I've never not been working on some little independent side project. It turns out that developing a game on your own is a very, very different skillset from developing a game as part of a big team/company... and forcing yourself to work on a game at home, after working on someone else's game all day, is
extremely difficult... But I've found it to be worth it.
I find that I make games compulsively, it's something I'll always do. And finishing a game project that I created entirely on my own is one of the most thrilling experiences I've ever had... I'm thoroughly addicted to it.
So this year I decided that I would make a go of doing several things, and one of them is developing games independently, as a microstudio called "Deep Plaid Games." I've been doing game design blogging at
http://DeepPlaid.com/, propagating that to Gamasutra as well. So since the start of this year:
- I put out
a silly Flash game, "ClickCraft". It was the first game since I was a teenager that 1) I made entirely on my own, and 2) I actually finished... I'm proud of it for those reasons. It's a simple joke game - if you've played some Starcraft then hopefully you get the joke - but for me, I finished it and that's what was important at the time.
- I participated in a Flixel Game Jam here in Austin... I proposed a game idea ("a game about falling", inspired mostly by the long falling-based segments in Super Mario World, my favorite platformer). After about 6 hours of coding (I worked on the random level generation), we had
Terminal Velocity, playable here. A playable game, if not an outstanding one, and it was thrilling to watch my idea come together.
- I got a Mac Mini and spent 9 months jumping into the deep end and teaching myself Objective C while making a game (a port of a friend's game) in it. It's called "The Great Land Grab":
http://www.thegreatlandgrab.com. My friend Jake Gostylo (an amateur game designer who's particularly into board games) made this, a unique Android game that plays like a cross between Monopoly and FourSquare... you can buy properties in the game, but only if the GPS detects that you're standing in that property. (The comparison to FourSquare is loose - Jake hates FourSquare, this game is actually competitive and much more "gamey.") It's waiting on App Store approval now. Jake and I will also be showing this off in person at the "Game On!" festival for Austin game development in a couple of weeks, look it up and drop by if you're local.
- I left SOE and decided to jump into the social games space - again I had done a lot in Flash, and figured I could do a "big fish in a small pond" sort of thing being an experienced traditional game developer within a small web game company ("Electric Bat Interactive"... I know). This kinda worked really well: I pitched (and wrote the design document for) a Facebook game concept...(something quite a bit different, and in some ways simpler and more truly "social", than the typical Farmville-style game. It got greenlit and, for 4 months, was in production. It was the closest I've ever come to being Designer/Programmer on a project and it was pretty thrilling to see. Then that company was suddenly shuttered 4 weeks ago. So much for that.
- Luckily that iPhone experience has worked out, and I'm now finishing up my first week as a contractor for an iPhone developer, NewToy, working on Words With Friends. I'll just say that this is a fantastic studio and I'm thrilled to be able to work for them (particularly since I'll be able to work for them from home soon).
- During all of this, I've also been working on an intriguing art game with a prominent game designer friend of mine in Austin. I've been doing prototyping of it in Flixel most recently. Can't say more about it yet but it's very experimental and I'm excited about it, though it has zero potential for making money I think.
I guess I should actually list the types of games I like... I'm pretty eclectic and like a little bit of everything... read my
"personal canon" of games. Although I like a little bit of everything, I especially tend to like anything that lets you face a challenge over and over and hone your skill until you conquer that challenge... which actually describes a wide range of games, from Tetris to my current obsession, Super Meat Boy. Creating the next Tetris would probably be my dream - although I've enjoyed games that try to tell stories and so on, it's not really the type of thing I'm very interested in making.
Anyway... it's been quite a year! And I've been working on other little things and game-development-related stuff as I've had time as well. But oddly enough I've been so busy developing games that I haven't had time to join a community like this one where people actually talk about the craft and the process and their love for it! I'm hoping to change that... I'm not sure how much time I'll have to spend on these forums but I'd love to be able to become part of the community and keep in touch with what's going on the cutting edge of the art form, which I think indie developers are exploring better than anyone else - which is something I hope I can be part of.
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