next »

[ViridianGames]

You know, I could have sworn I already did this.

ANYhoo, the name's Anthony Salter, and I run two websites.  ViridianGames.com is the site where I sell my games, and GameDevDad.com is where I talk about...um...something...

My gaming experiences started when I was very young.  At the age of 7 my dad bought an Odyssey 4000 pong machine.



In lieu of cartridges, it had a slider on the front that switched between about ten different versions of pong and was actually pretty fun to play.  My sister and I thought it was a blast.  Then, of course, came the Atari and arcade games like Pac-Man.

When I was nine, I was introduced to my first "personal computer" - the TRS-80.



While I was initially bored with it, a little more exposure to programming made it clear that, properly programmed, this thing could play video games.  So I determined to properly program it.

I eventually wrote a little game where you fired a stationary gun at a duck who would run across the top of the screen.  Fire the gun at the right time and the bullet would hit the duck, who would then stop and say, "That's my butt!" before continuing on.

Whaddayawant, I was 10.

I continued to write games in BASIC (and then GW-BASIC) through my teens; never did get into assembler.  Shame, I probably could have made some money that way.  Once I got out of high school and into college it became clear that I wasn't going to learn what I wanted to know (C programming and game development) in college.

Please recall that this was in 1989-1990.  In most colleges, even as a CS major you wouldn't touch C until your third year.

So I ran.  I ran so far away, to the then-gaming mecca of Austin Texas, with one goal - to work at Origin Systems, the company that was making my favorite games at the time.

I then spent ten years scrubbing floors in fast food joints.

BUT!  I never stopped buying, playing and loving games.  Wing Commander, TIE Fighter, Daggerfall, X-COM, The 7th Guest, I tried a little of everything.  I owned an NES, a Super Nintendo and a Genesis.  And I started learning programming in my spare time.

And then the unthinkable happened...Origin needed someone to man the hint lines, and I applied for and got the position.

My time at Origin was wonderful and terrible.  I loved being there, but I got there just as it was arcing downward, poor sales and pressure from EA both impacting the company culture.  And after 18 months, I was laid off.

Then I spent another ten or so years bouncing around the gaming industry, until I eventually managed to get a programming position, which I apparently did well enough with that I didn't have to go back to testing or phone support

But after several years working on projects that either got cancelled or I couldn't get excited about, I finally gave up the professional game industry to become a part-time indie.  And you know what?  I think this is how it's going to work for me.  No, I'll never work on a AAA title, but heck, the way things were going that wasn't in the cards anyway.  Instead, I'll make the games I want to make.

[stigmawall]

Ok, let´s try it!
My name is Wallace Morais, a.k.a. Wakko, owner of a terrible english.

I´m developer, but I´m trying to learn more about other areas, like art, video and music. I want to follow the hard way be a Game Designer.


Killer is Me - Alice in Chains


I´m start my gamer life... don´t remember.. probably with 4 or 5 years. I remember my first video-game: it´s a Atari. I remember one day that I woke up and started playing, with no coffe break, no lunch, no dinner, all day long, until I went to sleep. Ahh good times...





For me, as a fan, the best game of all is Breath of Fire III. That RPG has changed the way I saw games (I played more Beat´n Up and Fight games before meet BoFIII). And the second one is Final Fantasy VII.





As a developer, I have interest of Funny Games (as Earthworm Jim or Worms) or Artistics Games (not as Shadow of the Colossus, more like Braid).

I have a website, with the updates of the games I made: http://www.piritubano.com/
In the site I have the twitter and facebook link if someone wants to make contact.

See ya!!

[EliteKill]

Hi, I'm EliteKill (stupid name, but I used it since I was 7 and it's easy to remember) and I just got into game development. I'm in 11th grade, but I love programming and been learning it myself using books because the school programs here don't do a good job. I'm also a part of a project in the Weizmann Institute of Science which I hope to learn a lot from. Anyways, I came here following suggestions from other indie developers. I hope I have a good time posting here!

[Girlbrush]

Hello, my name is Alisa(I go by Girlbrush on the web). I'm an aspiring graphics artist, currently studying a digital graphics program in Stockholm, Sweden. The program mostly revolves around 3D for film and commercials whereas I enjoy making 2D-graphics much, much more! Prefereably for games ^^, but beggars can't be choosers, I guess.
So far only one of the few games I've been involved in has been completed. It was a rhythm-based game called Go, Go Samurai!!. It started as a web-version when me and my codemonkey made it for Swedish Game Awards and has later been ported to iPad.

Hoping to make more games soon! And getting in touch with more indie-developers through here =) Check-list of games to make before I die: 1. Game with zombies in it. 2. Game with cats in it.

[Matouri]

Hey, everybody. My name's David, aka Matouri. I'm currently an animation student, and I'm really enjoying it, but I'd like to make games as a hobby, too. Over the years I've had game ideas and dabbled in Game Maker, but never did anything significant. However, I completed my first, simple game for a class this semester, and I think I've been bitten by the bug.

I've lurked here for a little while and I've seen so much awesome stuff created by this community. It seems like a great place to get inspired and motivated.

A little bit of background: I started gaming with the original Game Boy, and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening is still my favorite game today. I love platformers, point-and-click adventures, puzzle games (even though I'm terrible at them), and fighting games (even though I'm terrible at them). But really I just like video games in general, although I don't have as much time to play as I used to.

I'm looking forward to getting to know everyone here, and to making some games.

By the way, I'm selling these fine leather jackets...

[MikeSw]

Hello, I'm Mike and I've just started to learn Flash and AS 3 to make games (and only games ). I have already made an online strategy game (asp.net based with static graphics like travian, ikariam) which didn't have much success but at least I've gained experience.

I play mostly strategies (big Civ 1-4 fan) and rpgs with a dash of good ol' fps from time to time.

[The Asking]

Hi all!

I'm Guy.  Like (I assume) everyone here I'm a long time fan of games but I never really realized making them was a possibility - or at least I wish I'd realized sooner.  That's what comes from growing up on console gaming rather than the pc I suppose.  So anyway I am a programmer and have been meaning to get into writing my own stuff for a while now and this is me trying to make a proper go of it.  My first attempts have been pretty feeble but how else are you meant to learn.  Anyway, I've never been into the whole forum culture but I figure I need to stop working on an island, so yeah, Hello World and all that.

I have a game I've recently finished working on that I would be eager to get reactions to.  Nothing complicated, just a text based adventure - thought I'd ease myself in slowly, but I reckon I'll post about that in a separate thread.

[Vimmelv]

Hello.

I am a programmer and 2d-graphics-artist. I'm okay with most genres, but I especially like turn-based-strategies (Heroes of Might and Magic series, Master of Magic, Warlords 2), you-control-a-small-group-of-people-games (Syndicate, Commandos, Gobliiins), platformers (Liero, Another World) and stealth games (Thief 2, Ultimate Assassin 2).

[Amanda Williams]

Hi, I'm Amanda! I live in Austin and I'm an artist at Tiger Style Games. I was an environment artist on Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, and I'm currently making concept and environment art for our next game. I've also had the pleasure of working with Damien Di Fede and Heather Kelley of Kokoromi and Perfect Plum, and Borut Pfeifer of Plush Apocalypse.

I still feel new to making independent games, but it's hard to imagine doing anything else. I've met some truly amazing people who've really enriched my life, and I hope to do the same for others! It can be a lonely job sometimes!

I have no idea where this Spider screenshot came from, but it's my favorite:



Until I stumbled into indie games a couple of years ago, for years the only people I knew in the industry (mostly from Ion Storm) made 3D games. Encouraged by friends, I tried working as a 3D artist for a short time but never really felt at home with it. I loved to do my sculpting on the page with detailed drawings, so fortunately for me Tiger Style decided to make an old fashioned looking illustrated game with lots of detail. By the end of it all, I had fallen in love with making 2D, and I really enjoy making elaborate worlds in Photoshop. I'm totally hooked.

Early Spider level work:



More about me: As a kid, I was an Air Force brat and lived in many places. Germany was my favorite, and I adore German Baroque architecture! I also love Scotland, vintage mechanical things, read weird fiction, grow strange plants, and wish humans would live more in harmony with nature.

In the future and as time allows, I'd absolutely love to work on my own side projects.

Thanks, and I look forward to knowing you better!

[hewwo]

Hewwo there,    (<- not sure what that means)

I'm a guy living in the Bay Area, currently doing artwork and flash assets for a social games comp'ny...also in the Bay Urrea.  That's been one of the coolest experiences in my life, I'm surrounded by dozens of talented people and veterans I never thought I'd meet.  I go to school, too, but I don't wanna talk about it.  I've always been fascinated with making games, ever since my mom and pops (<3 you Mom, <3 you Dad) bought an NES for my siblings and I.  But it never really got past writing ideas down until I was about 13, and my brother (<3 you Bro) and I found a tool called RPGToolkit.  My brother was taking basic programming courses in high school and he was able to help me make some simple programs, and I've never really forgotten about variables and strings since.  But that's about as much knowledge as I have with programming.  Since then, I've been into independent gaming, but never really to a hardcore level.  Skip ahead 7 years, and I found Game Maker.  I started reading up on the tutorials and I've gained a new fascination with game design.

Also, I have a sister (<3 you Sis).

I think that's everyone.

Uh, I've almost burned down my place using a microwave about 4 times since childbirth.

Also, I think I saw Derek on the BART once, but I'm not sure.

Uh...on other forums, I'm known as Gnarf.

Uh...

[harkme]

Hello everyone. I've been a lifelong fan of video games and they're what have led me to studying computer science. I enjoy programming in my spare time. I'm currently creating a game as both a programming exercise and possibly to get some money over this summer. I've visited TIGSource for a while, but hadn't registered an account until now. I hope to be active here.

[gamegeek12]

Greetings my name is Simon, I am currently an animation student at university.
I'm a life long lover of all games and I've always been interested in being able to create games since a young age. But I have never really been able to get my head around the programming side or had the patience to teach myself after failed attempts.
I've been re inspired however by my room-mate (also a fellow member: 'Aquanoctis') from him mentioning this site and showing me some of his work.

I am a complete beginner at programming so I'm really hoping that my experiences on this site will be able to help me out in becoming a better programmer and provide a lot of inspiration. But luckily with studying animation, it's been able to give me a great chance of being able to imagine and create all the art assets I will need for any projects I work on... I hope haha.

[BrianF]

Hi!

My name is Brian, as my posting name may have revealed to a savvy reader. Born in Chile, raised in Australia, here is a picture of me with a lovely lady:


Grew up playing games as most of us have, most of my fondest memories are playing Megaman and Castlevania on my NES and SNES. Upon discovering emulation in the early 2000s I dug up a lot of classics I missed out on first time around, games that I was inherently restricted from playing due to the language barrier (only learned english when I moved to Australia). Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 really struck a chord with me among others.





Generally, if I enjoy an art form I like to contribute to it somehow, so I taught myself to program, starting of making crappy castlevania homebrews first in direct draw, then opengl, and finally direct3d, making my own map editors and engines.

Eventually I moved on to XNA when it came out, made a flawed but somewhat quirky shootem up that involved chaining hits to bring colour back to the world. I had some limited experience drawing so I used my tablet to draw segments and animate them with a tween engine I designed myself (a horribly programmed tween engine that was a pain in the arse to use). I also tackled the music, which at the time was something completely new to me.



Around this time I also picked up the guitar for the first time. I got obsessed with music in a way I've never been obsessed with anything else. My interest in game development took a back seat, though soon enough I started a project with some people, a Castlevania influenced title to be called Vampiria.



Vampiria became Parasitus and took a more Contra like tone. The direction of the game changed numerous times, with its nature never concrete.



Anyway, after a while we got our act together and committed to a more solid vision, more akin to the original concept, a castlevania like game but with combos and powerups, just generally something faster. The past year has been tough, but we are nearing release now and the game feels very solid.

Below is a trailer of the game at its current state, along with a screenshot:







Hopefully the game does well, and I can keep cranking out games for years to come!

[Charybdis]

Hi there
It's about time I introduced myself. I have been here on and off for a while now.
My name is Dale Thomas. I am 35 years old, British, currently living in Kyoto, Japan.
I am married, have 2 gorgeous kids and a little toy poodle called Scylla. Scylla is also the name of my new company, Scylla Games. At the moment it's just me, but once my fame and riches start rolling in, which should be any day now (yeah right!), then I will expand.

I started programming when I was about 10. I got a Acorn and then, a year later, a Spectrum 48K. I started with Basic, which extended to the Amiga (anyone remember AMOS?).
Anyway, I went to uni where I spent too many years studying cybernetics, artificial life, artificial intelligence and robotics. I have also had a few years in the games industry, in Cyberlife (remember 'Creatures') and more recently in Q-Games, where I made the original graphics engine for the PixelJunk series. I also made the background waves and music visualisers for the PS3 menu.

My main areas of expertise are in graphics programming, physics, and AI/AL.
Currently I am trying to be an indie developer and have made a few games for iPhone, notably Angel Bounce and PinPon.

I have 2 games currently in the works. BlibBlob, which is just a little game I will finish soon, and Glade, which is more meaty, and will take quite a bit longer.

Anyway, enough blabbering. I plan to be more active on the forums and I hope I can become friends with other like-minded developers. I am particularly interested in technical discussions. Graphics techniques, optimisations, algorithms, etc. Just let me know if you have anything to discuss or any questions for me.

Best regards

Dale

[igor]

Hi,

my name is Igor (shockingly...). I have always been toying with the idea of making games or game related things. I programmed some smaller things of this kind in the past but now I know I absolutely need to start something solid (still not sure what that should be exactly...). I love good indie games and I feel sympathy for the bad ones :-) I'm primarily a programmer, but I'm interested in all aspects of game developement.

[Sam at FPS]

Hey all,

My name is Sam Cox. I've been playing games since my dad first brought home an Apple IIE. I'm also a long time programmer, relatively short time game developer.   

A year or so ago I started Friction Point Studios and decided to make games. I've been contracted as lead programmer on a number of iPhone games. A few due for release shortly, but if you want to see my work search for Spartan Athletics in the App Store (no profit sharing on that one, so just a plug for my work). 

Although I've worked with many programming languages, I've mainly been a .Net/C# man since about 2002. And that's why I love Unity, because it lets me make cool stuff in C#.

[PeterG]

Hey guys, as you can probably tell from my user name, I'm Peter, a fellow game developer/designer from Vancouver (well, "metropolitan" Vancouver, at any rate), Canada. I'm attending Simon Fraser University, part of the SIAT faculty (School of Interactive Arts and Technology), I'm in my 4th year doing my Bachelor of Science undergrad degree there in New Media & Informatics (whatever that means ).

Anywho, enough about my personal life, more about my gaming life .

So I started gaming when I was... oh, I dunno, 6 or so, my first system was the Super Famicom (yes, I grew up in Japan; moved to Canada when I was around 8 ). I grew up playing Donkey Kong, Super Mario, Kirby and side-scrolling shoot'em'ups (Gradius-style). After I moved to Canada, I never did get a new console until the PS2, so between the SNES and the PS2, I played a lot of PC games, and ran a lot of emulators and played a lot of classic console games from the SNES that I missed out, as well as on the GameBoy.

I was very into RTS's during my PC gaming era, so a lot of my time were spent playing the "classic greats" like Red Alert, Warcraft 2, Age of Empires, Age of Empires 2 (still one of my FAVOURITE RTS's of ALL TIME!), Starcraft, Homeworld and probably a handful of other games I can't even remember.

Once I got my hands on a PS2, some of my attention then shifted to playing games on the PS1 that I had missed out on (I skipped the entire N64/PS1 era, and jumped straight from SNES into the PS2 era, heh), like MGS1, FF7/8, Xenogears (quite frankly, I found it to be very overrated; certainly not a bad game, but not worthy of all the hype. Just imo, of course), Resident Evil, Clock Tower, and a few other notable titles that I'm sure I'm forgetting right now.

On the PS2 front, I played action games like the Jak & Daxter series, Time Splitters (was a LOT of fun playing with friends in 4 player split-screen with a multi-tap!), MGS2/3, FFX (I never really played FFXII in any serious amount, was not entirely impressed by the after taste FFX and FFX-2 left in my mouth...), Armored Core series (love them giant mechs ), Xenosaga (one of my favourite RPG trilogy of ALL TIME), Okami (ABSOLUTELY AWESOME!), Ico & SotC and again, more titles than I can possible remember.

I currently own a PS3/Wii, and my favourite games from the previous gen and this one has to be: Okami, Flower and Heavy Rain.

So that brings us to the present, and I'm currently working on a game called "A Cat's Tale" with my team of close friends (5 of us), and you can check out our website (with a playable build available):
Mr. Five Studios

Hope to see you guys all around and learn from you all !

[Cain]

Hi!

My name is Cain. I am a 22 year old student of music and sound recording fortunate enough to be part of the original tonmeister course in Surrey, England. I have also studied and worked making recordings in Canada for the past year but am now back in the UK.

I am here because I feel like composing music for games would be something I would enjoy immensely and want to explore it as a possible career. Video game music is actually the reason I because interesting in music production to begin with. I got started recording myself on guitar making silly rock arrangements of final fantasy music, some of which has gotten fairly popular.

This is probably the only forum I could say this on, but you may just have already heard my music before. I am a remixer and judge over at OverClocked ReMix, much like the awesome AnoSou and Danny B who already do such fine work on indie OSTs. I hope I can follow their example of remixers turned composers with as much enthusiasm.

Thank you for reading!

[Cosr]

Hello good sirs and ladies,

I'm Jonathan, a Canadian student, currently in somewhere around my fourth year of a bachelor of computer science at the University of Waterloo.

I'm not really sure what first got me into games. But somewhere along the line I decided it would be cool to make games for a living. Then, a little further along, after getting deeper into indie games, I decided that I was, specifically, interested in games as a medium of expression. Similar to my interest in writing (short stories and comics, mostly, but maybe something a little longer in the, maybe near, future; nothing published).

I like to think I'm sort of a jack of all trades when it comes to making games, though I'm mostly a programmer and designer.

I've participated in a couple Ludum Dares in the past (16 and the recent 20). I've also made a few games at events held by my university's Game Development Club, which I help run. And had a lot of discussions concerning game making with other student developers.

I recently started a website/blog thing, which can be found here, though there's not much on it yet.

[IceCreamJonsey]

Hey there, my name is Robb. I run the gaming website Caltrops, at caltrops.com, and I have also been making text adventures for over 10 years. I have a home arcade that runs 14 games and I live in Colorado, where my interests include mountaineering, disease control, scotch and white collar crime. Glad to make the acquaintance of everyone here at tigsource.