Hey gamers!!
I’m Emma Mohs, a senior at Pitzer College, researching how people discover and play independent games for my senior thesis. I’d love to have a quick 15-minute chat with anyone interested in sharing their experiences!
You can also reply to this post to share your story <3
Looking forward to hearing from you! 👾💘
hi, my first-ever game was made in scratch. I began my game development journey with small scratch projects then. I started making games in Game Maker i made a game called OBLIVION but when I was publishing it to itch.io I accidentally deleted it. then I lost all hope and in a few days or weeks, I was watching. a video about game engines and after that I discovered gdevelop. and after that, I downloaded it and made my first game after my first game. I made a few others and now I'm a game developer also Im learning unity to make 3d games = )
Ive always liked making stuff of my own ever since i was a kid, an then i decided i wanna try making my own games, which is how I started out with gamedev about 5-6 years ago, i found out about scratch so i made some shitty little games with it (i was like 10 or 11, so obviously they were pretty bad) which despite their quality i really enjoyed making, so i kept on slowly developing my skillset and would move on to godot on which i made a few slightly less shitty game jam games along with some cancelled/lost projects.
Then in the summer of 2022 i would unknowingly make probably the most important game in my gamedev "career", an amateur little RPG Maker game called The Greatest Story Ever Told. The game itself is nothing special (hell the first version of it is a buggy mess, considering it was made in like 2 weeks from sheer boredom) but its what got me to realize that making funny games is really fun and thats what ive been doing ever since, mixing my own stupid little brand of humor into my projects to make both my friends and any outsiders who may stumble upon my stuff laugh!
So pretty much i started out making dumb hobby games as a 10yo, and am still making dumb hobby games as a 16yo.
I've always liked story and character focused games but I find that as I grow older and busier, I have less time for games with grindy filler content. I find indie game space, it's easier to find more concise, female/story focused games. Admittedly, as a dev who participates in game jams, discord and social media, it's easy to stumble into things that catch my interest. The hard part is having enough time to play.
It's been a while since this thread started, do you still need stories?
Well, in case you need it, here's my story.
I started developing my game for therapeutic reasons, I used to be addicted to video games and... adult stuff, you know what I mean.
But then I found the solution that helped me the most to overcome my addictions: "If you have a problem, sell it".
First I started a YouTube channel, which I don't want to share here because I don't want to mix the two things, but with that I realized that the addiction to video games completely disappeared, sharing everything I had in my head with people, doing something productive, was the perfect solution.
Then I wanted to extrapolate it to my other problem and I developed a NSFW game, all the fantasies I showed in the game disappeared from my repertoire in real life and now I can live my life normally.
That's why I love this game. It has helped me improve my life.
No idea if the thread is still active but here's my story:
I want to create mindfulness and relaxation games but without them being boring. Most apps are pretty bare bones and simple that have minimalist approaches to helping with anxiety. I wanted to change that and add stories and characters that are memorable and stick with people.
The market is also oversaturated with hypnosis content that is almost all exclusively NSFW oriented and wanted to change that to have content that's recreational and is strictly SFW for larger audiences since that niche is non-existent.
I had no coding skills at first and collaborated with my friend who used Renpy but over time I taught myself Gamemaker. Now I'm developing a new game more complex than my last, inspired by games such as Yume Nikki and Undertale.
In 2007-2008, I went to follow a university degree in video game programming in partnership with Ubisoft. I had so much fun with the programmers there and made some friends! But the problems was that I didn't have a good health and most often. In the game industry, they were working 70 hours a week crunchtime at the end of project. I decided to put my dreams of working in video games on ice and worked as a programmer in other industry: full-stack, 3D cameras, google map, etc.
I went through a rough patch last year — I was diagnosed with cancer in October 2024 and had to put a lot of things on hold. During recovery, I poured my energy into creating a small game project to stay sane and creative… and that project eventually became a full game called Rotem (now on Steam to be released on May 22nd). I am now completing my second game, a point-&-click adventure. My health is getting better and I am hoping I can continue in this path as Indie gamedev.
Hi! Since i played for the first time to Super Mario World (snes), when i was 4-5, i always wanted to make videogames, back to that time i could only try to do it with paper and pen, or toys (i also mastered some D&D campaign during highschool).
Then when i started Highschool, a PC finally entered in my house and so i started dealing with game makers, editors and making hacks of snes videogames (mostly FF6 and SMW), i also worked on RPGMakerXP and i worked on a fangame of IWBTG which i made with Game Maker 8, during those years.
During University i worked in parallel to an unfinished project with a dear friend (it was supposed to be a Browser game ala Travian), i focused on Game Design during that period of 7-8 years (i identify myself as Game Designer by the way, even if i can program as well).
After that period, i discovered a game design course 5 years ago and started to approach to game industry in a more professional way, i worked during this last period on several videogames which are now released on Steam: 2 horror audiogames (which will in fact be released on icth sooner than later, a series called Hell Hunter); then an RPG videogame called Dragonero: the rise of Draquir. Recently i'm working and keep fixing/updating my latest project, even after release, namely a roguelike called The Rogue of Nexus.
(Here on itch they are released under the name of the publisher, which is PowerUpTeam)
