My story starts unofficially as map creator for old game called Heretic 2 and level creator for Jazzjackrabbit 2. Those are small steps but it was a good start to develop games.
The official start was when I decided to modify Beats of Rage after playing and completing that beatm up game. The game allows modifications BTW. While doing that, the game was expanded by multiple coders allowing C script to be run in game. This was a huge change, not just to change my first project but my future projects as well.
After completing my first project, which is named Crime Buster a beat'm up game, I challenged myself to create fan game called Contra : Locked 'N' Loaded, which is a run n gun. It was tough but fun.
These projects gave me confidence to start creating games.Started out using Klik n Play way back in 1999. Spent a lot of time on MFGG, Kirby's Rainbow Resort and other fangame websites back in the late '90s and early '00s. Sometime in the mid 2000s, I started making Sven Co-op and Garry's Mod maps that me and my friends would play. In the 2010s I picked up game development again, but by that time, new gamedev software had come out so I had to catch up on the new tech. And now, here I am.
Before the internet I used to draw designs for games I wanted to make in my notebooks. I only have a few images left of those.
For me I literally always wanted to make games since I've been playing video games since I was extremely little, I just wasn't sure if I could for quite a few years.
Then I ended up learning music and convinced myself I will become a composer for video games. Then I learned pixel art since games need art too, college ended up teaching me Python which is what Ren'py uses and I realized I actually could make video games now! So I now team up with my teammate, who learned different stuff like writing and other types of art, and a few other people to make or help others with visual novels now! Hoping to work with other types of games eventually too.
Basically my game dev history can be broken down into 3 periods:
Late 1980s - Early 1990s
I followed the instructions to make a lot of games in QBASIC, but many of those games were very basic (pun intended!) and I didn't really understand the programming language itself at the time. Also I remember seeing ads and articles about Digipen Institute of Technology in issues of Nintendo Power, but the cost of going to a school like that and the math involved scared me away from that route.
High School and early College years (late 90s, early 00s)
Not sure which year it was, but I took a QBASIC class in High School. The class itself didn't teach me much, but I learned a lot by taking other QBASIC games and modifying them and reverse-engineering them to see how they worked. In my spare time I started making an RPG (with graphics) based off of Robert Jordan's book "The Eye of the World". Things were going well until I hit some critical error and I couldn't find a solution.
2019
I found my thumbstick with all my old QBASIC programs on it and found that I could run them with the new QB64 version of QBASIC. By this time of course, there were a lot more tools available for indie game development. So here I am!
Used to draw Sonic-types of landscapes that I thought were fun to trace with my fingers in my notebooks in elementary school, and in preschool I used to make little islands with fun little pathways out of Play-Doh.
Learned how to script for some games and learned some basics of gamedev in middle school. Never finished a project because none of the communities I got in were good (not that I was anything worth writing home about, again, middle school). Stuff like BYOND and a few others.
Took that one step further and learned LUA and a bit of C++ in high school, but took that towards .NET around senior year in high school.
Got a job as a programmer. Now I have Unity. Have my "big idea" game, but I'm sitting on the backburner with it, and making a little comic of one of the characters when I'm burned out from something.
And here we are.
I have an incredibly boring job. I spend a lot of time sitting at my desk just waiting for something to happen. So I decided to learn something new. I jumped on Udemy and found a course on Python. Learned what I could from that and then decided to take it a step further, so I started following some tutorials on YouTube about making games in Python. That was fun, but I felt like I couldn't really go very far with that.
Next step, Unity. It was not too hard to pick up C# now that I had a better idea of how coding works. I made some really bad games while trying to get to grips with the engine. Let's not talk about those. But now I am working on the first game I think other people might like to play. Who knows, if it does well, I might be inspired to make more.
When I was 5, my dad bought me a Commodore 64. Back in the day, a disk drive cost a ridiculous amount, and so the easiest way to play games was these books they sold that would just list out the program. They didn't teach you to code, they just listed the program and you typed it out, typed "RUN," played the game, and when you turned your computer off, everything was lost and you had to do it all over again next time. I started with those, and then I changed things around until I figured out what they did. By the time I was 7 I had taught myself to make text adventures and other small games completely from scratch. That was in 1987. I never stopped making games.
I live in Malaysia, and am 43 this year. Always wanted to be a game dev since school.
But when I was younger it was virtually a pipe dream to study game dev unless I studied abroad.
There were no local studios to work in, until I was over 30 years old. Even then those studios failed because of lack of experience.
Times got better, with so many tools readily available and youtubers teaching game dev, but I was scared and felt I was too old to get into it.
Finally when I was 39, I grew a pair and dove in, haven't looked back - my pockets are empty but my soul is at ease :)
I am an eternal being from another world bound by a curse which brought me here a few years ago. I am tied to this reality by an angelic spell which chains me to the Earth. I use my mythical powers and fairy dust to steal games from the futures of others and bring them to the present, all in the hope of achieving human wealth. I just want cookies, am hungry.
I first made some games in eighth grade computer class using qbasic; a rocket ship of words, hang man, things like that, that's the first programming I can remember.
That was in the 90's, by 2006 I was in a rock and roll band and had learned some web design in college and was using what I knew to make a site for the band.
The band had the idea of making a game, so that there would be something unique on the site. I found flash, and specifically a rickety program called swish max, lol, and using nothing but if else statements and a very procedural pattern I made a ship shooter, I think I stayed up for 24 straight hours making that game, I was hooked. And that also happened to be around the start of the glory days for flash, so I went fully into the flash game dev world, eventually learning to code in AS3 with classes and interfaces; actual programming, which also propelled me into other languages like Java and C++.
And since then I've just really enjoyed making games, playing them and having others play them.
