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[ClickShake]

Hi there, Steve Castro here from ClickShakeGames.com.  I went to school for programming and learned game design through trial and error.  I started making Flash games back in 2001 on NewGrounds.com under the alias EntropicOrder.  I made Rooftop Skater and Sik Trix BMX which did pretty well back in the day.  More recently I made Shape Switcher and Paradox Embrace. 

Zeebarf (Jay Ziebarth) and I teamed up last year for Paradox Embrace, and this year he and I formed ClickShake Games LLC.  We're now expanding his Several Journeys of Reemus series with Chapter 4: The Beastly Blackhole of Beauracracy and Ballads of Reemus, our first downloadable game.

My first game console was the NES, so I'm a big Mario fan and used to be pretty loyal to Nintendo but now my console of choice is the XBox 360.  I'm not a huge fan of first person 3D games.  I prefer 3rd person or 2D games, though I'm no 8-bit junkie as I love HD graphics.  Assassin's Creed, Shadow Complex, Castle Crashers, New Mario Wii are some of my favorite games recently.

Also, I love training in parkour.

[GMacD]

Hi

I'm LuckyTest apparently.  I make games during the day, but I'm very interested in a lot of the more indie games out there.  Who knows, maybe I can stop procrastinating and make one myself... 

[Jeriaska]

Hi. I do interviews with music composers working on independent games.  These are some of them for those who are interested.

GameSetWatch Sound Current Column

- Aquaria soundtrack
- Flower, PixelJunk Eden
- NightSky

IndieGames.com

- Melolune soundtrack
- Hydorah
- BlindEdge

1UP.com Chiptuned Blog

- Super Meat Boy
- Superbrothers Sword&Sworcery
- PixelJunk Shooter

[miascugh]

Hi,

my name is Martin, 23 years, I live in Vienna, Austria, and am professionally poor. I recognize a few names here from pixelation, have been lurking more off than on here and started wondering why, recently.



I don't think my bio would stand out much here - bottom line, I like video games, and have done so for a while now and been wanting and trying to make some myself for almost as long. My brother introduced me to pixel art when I was 8 (when it really wasn't called that yet, but curiously enough we were only working at an 8x zoom level back then) and I stumbled upon pixelation pretty early in its swoo.net days in 2002. It's been since, that I concentrated on the visual aspect and my brother on the technical realm of game design (what in our case means having left behind a gigantic graveyard of rudimentary game engines for equally half-baked ideas, all of which only blurted stolen audio, on numerous hard-drives over the years).

After some time (years) of detouring and ending up in unknown, hostile waters, I'm starting to grow a lot more interested in the backstage of gaming culture again and here I am. My gaming preferences are very much pedestrian, as Derek put it in the first post here, as well, mostly influenced by being raised by an NES and SNES as well as PCs from a 386 upwards.

A quick list of games that got me excited about people making games from time to time were, chronologically, and very much just from the top of my head:

the Mario Bros. and Zeldas from 1 onward, Street Gangs (River City Ransom), The Monkey Islands and other Lucas Arts era adventures, Yoshi's Island, StarCraft, Half-Life, Psychonauts, Cave Story, Portal, my discovery of games like Messhof's and Braid and that's where I started to lose the overview of the scene known to me and was baffled more often than once in a while

And to celebrate the new freedom that graduating and being poor brings, I'm involved in a game project with my brother for the first time in years again, which is well beyond the risk of sudden infant death now and about which you'll hopefully hear within the next few months

Really excited about, which is to say overwhelmed with and slightly intimidated by, the liveliness of this place. Cheers

[Hamrath]

Hi,

my name is Oliver. I'm 36 years old, living in Hamburg (well, moving there this week), Germany. I work as a webdeveloper, but I'm into game development since I got my first C64. I had endless game ideas in the past 25 years, started a few, finished none yet.

My nemesis is a Sokoban-style game I'm working on since almost 20 years (started it on C64, restarted it on almost any possible machine, that can display sprites. So there don't exist versions for C64, Amiga, Gameboy, Gameboy Advanced, NintendoDS, DOS, Windows, Mac and Linux - and that's the machines I can remember... ;-)

At the moment I'm (really!) working on a Ultima I style RPG. I'll show this as soon as I have the map editor finished.

- Oliver

[simono]

Err... so I finally made it into the TOIY Thread. I'm doing it wrong, though: I already posted in other forums. Oh well.

Hi!
I'm Simon from Europe. I write software for a living and games for fun. A couple of times every year I have this strong urge to write games. This most often happens when I have no games to play.

It took me 10 years to finish my first game... that's 5 years ago. Now I kind of learnt to manage my expectations and only start projects where I know from start to finish how they will pan out.

Since I managed to do that I've written quiet a lot of - very small! - games. I still often fail to finish.

I'm a big OpenSource fan and involved in a couple of projects, mostly JavaScript stuff nowadays! I think it's an awesome language... had to learn that the hard way

See you around
 simon

[DanFessler]

Welcome miascugh!

Glad to see you over here!  Now you can show up my pixels around every corner.

[pelle]

Pelle, 35 years old, Sweden. Found my way here from some post on playthisthing.com.

Started with BASIC on some old CP/M machine, then GWBASIC in MSDOS (ca 1985) on to Turbo Pascal, Microsoft C, Microsoft Micro Assembler, DJGPP, Inform (for interactive fiction), ..., Java, Javascript, Lua, Python... Have been working as a (non-games) programmer (Java, C++, Python, ...) for the last 10 years. Permanently left the Microsoft world for Linux in 1996.

Never released a computer game, but last year a small board (war)game I designed was published by a small US publisher.

Current semi-active projects for Android (and more boardgame design projects) and possibly something for Javascript+HTML. Not sure about desktop games at the moment. Still want to do (complete) something for the GP2X I bought ~4 years ago. Maybe play around a bit with DJGPP in Dosbox (who needs cross-compilers?).

[miascugh]

Cheers Dan, will do

 

[simono]

Current semi-active projects for Android (and more boardgame design projects) and possibly something for Javascript+HTML.

Yeah, I love the new influx of JS developers Welcome to the world of tomorrow...

[Conker534]

Welcome miascugh!

Glad to see you over here!  Now you can show up my pixels around every corner.

Hot. Your pixelart is amazing. I hope I can get to be as good as you. :3

[Shockroach]

Hello I'm Beth :3 I'm 18 (although I'm 19 in less than two weeks) and I've never made a game before, but people have been persuading me recently to get into it. I study Digital Art & Technology at the University of Plymouth, as that suggests, I like doing a bit of arting (I want to get back into pixel art, I used to be somewhat good at it) and I like programming.

Here is me as a bunny:



My favourite games are Pokémon, Bomberman, LocoRoco, Final Fantasy games, LittleBigPlanet, everything from Team Ico, Worms, The Sims, good Sonic the Hedgehog games, lots more things :3

OK that's all I can think of to say, now I'm going to go put a pizza in the oven because I'm hungry :D

[Kyuur]

Hey everyone! Thought I should probably introduce myself as I'm finally getting the urge to get involved in game development communities again! I'm Robert, a 17 year old high-school student in love with programming and game design. I've been dabbling in game design and programming ever since I can remember, my earliest memory being making a small text RPG battle thing in QBasic when my uncle tried to teach me programming around age 7.

I'm heading off to NAIT (a technical institution in Alberta, Canada) next year to take a Digital Media & IT course, specializing in game design. After that I might hit up the standard Bachelor of CS just for learning more. I just recently finished my very first complete game, You Are the Missile with my girlfriend. Was a pretty awesome experience and I have another project under way now!

I don't much else to say and I don't have an awesome bunny picture like Shockroach to keep you interested, so I'm gonna stop here!

[Kayla]

Hello, my name is Kayla and I'm a game developer. I've worked professionally in the industry for 10 years now but have only recently started doing my own personal projects in my spare time.

Picture 1: Here is me with really bad hair and an even worse expression collecting money and taking attendance after rollerskating.
Picture 2: I'm more recognizable with my hats. This is basically what I looked like at GDC 2010 with my pink flower black fedora and a pint of beer always close at hand.


How did I get into games? When my family got our first PC (286 8Mhz) I think the first game I played was Snarf. I learned BASIC programming and entered games in the school science fair. When I was 16 we finally got The Internets! I found a home on IRC and met some people that were making an RPG. I joined their group and for a few years we bumbled along trying to make something. We were so nieve and inexperienced and never got very far. At 19 I dropped out of college and moved to Vancouver where I made Flash games for an ESL site. Then the dot-com bubble burst and I was lucky enough to land a job at a local AAA game developer. They've been paying my mortgage ever since. Now I'm making a conscious effort to start my own small projects in my spare time.

Favourite Games / Inspiration:
When I was a kid a friend down the street had an NES and I was over there almost daily. I got a paper route to save up for my own NES and bought that system and all my games on my own.
Memorable NES games: Super Mario Bros, Megaman 3!!!, Captain Skyhawk, Ducktales, Final Fantasy.


That same paper route also netted me an SNES when that system was released. The SNES is and always will be the greatest console ever made. I was blown away by Super Mario World. I still consider that one of the tightest, most fun platformers ever made. But it was Final Fantasy II (4) that stole my heart. I cried at moments in that game when I got so attached to characters that died. Final Fantasy III (6) was an epic masterpiece and probably my favourite game of all time. Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, the Squaresoft games of the SNES era were pure gold. I lost myself in their worlds and cared deeply about the characters.


Other Favourite SNES Games: Zelda:Link to the Past, Flashback, Uniracers, Starfox.
Super Metroid was a brilliant game and is tied with Castlevania: SOTN in my mind. Both games had fantastic level design, spine-tingling music and brilliant art direction that made the most of their respective consoles.

In closing:
I believe strongly that games are developing as a mature artform. The indie scene is inspring with so many individuals and micro-teams building very personal pieces of work. Everyone I meet in this scene is passionate about games, full of ideas and so down-to-earth. I look forward to chatting or even meeting you face-to-face sometime soon.

[AlexDJones]

Well hey there. My name is Alex and I'm a videogames journalist-turned-indie dev. I'm starting a small studio with my partner in crime William, and we have a soup-er sekrit project in pre-pre-pre-alpha stage right now.

This is me at Halloween, in the middle:



I'm not the most experienced of gamers (my first console was a Dreamcast) but I started with a Game Boy and Super Mario Land and, as my parents would describe it, everything went downhill from there.

I spent most of my childhood revelling in the colour and light of Sega and Nintendo mascots with games like Sonic Adventure, Super Smash Bros Melee, etc defining my ideas of what games are. However, more recently I have become enamoured with the artgame movement, and have spent the past three years as a games journalist for a variety of sites, the last two years or so of which were focussed on editorial work examining what makes game mechanics work. I'm hoping these studies will influence my game making, but only time will tell that!

[Marc Truant]

I'll start off by saying that I'm not gonna put up my life story or anything like that, because I honestly don't think it's something anyone's really interested in knowing. I will say, however, that my name is Marc, I'm 18, and I'm a film major in college.

I love music, literature, and video games, and I love anything with either a lot of substance and style. Favorite mainstream games right now would have to be Demon's Souls and Fallout: New Vegas. As far as indie games go, I recently enjoyed The Baron, I HAVE CANDY GET IN THE VAN, and Spelunky. I've played a ton more before, but nothing terrible notable other than Seiklus, Cave Story, and Sandbox of God.

If anyone's interested, I do a lot of writing and music. Some acting here and there too, though I'm not sure how useful that is to any of you... And I can't say I'm a decent programmer or visual artist, so best not to task me with anything like that.

Also obligatory picture of my ugly mug:

[BomberTREE]

Time for a nice short introduction 

My name is Steven and I've been lurking around this forum for a while now and finally decided to set up an account   
I have been attempting at game development for some time now,
but that's just the thing, attempting xD
I'm in love with the idea of creating games, I'm pretty good at thinking up idea's,
even starting the project and building the engine up, but when times get busy or stressful, I tend to lose.. hp.
I'm 15 and still in high school, I play Football and spend nearly all my at home time on the computer or on some gaming console. I have become pretty familiar with a program called Construct but felt it was a bit more on the side of designing the game with events instead of actually coding it, so to fix that I decided to start working with game maker 8 and see what happens.
Since I've been on this forum I've been feeling more motivated to get things done and so here I am introducing myself in hope of buckling down and doing something amazing.
 

[ink.inc]

I'm 15 and still in high school, I play Football

or

[BomberTREE]

The first one 

[Tokinsom]

Hi.

My name is Matt, I'm 20 years old, and I'm from Illinois. Here's me being all orange.



I'm a self-employed Lampworker, but it looks like I'll need a real job soon :T 

I've been making games (cough fan games*) since Klik n Play, but only recently got "serious" about it and starting coming up with my own ideas. Minitroid is an exception I try to make graphics and music for my games but I have a long way to go.

My favorite games are Chrono Trigger, Super Metroid, Megaman 2-6 & MMX 1-3, Zelda II, Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, Illusion of Gaia, Yoshi's Island, Super Mario All-Stars, Tetris Attack, BattleToads, and pretty much everything else from the NES/SNES days. Eternal Daughter, La-Mulana, and Cave Story are my favorite indie games. I'm not a fan of 3D games.

I love meeting new people and working on things together, be it games or music or whatever.

I also love jagerbombs 

Good day.