GameDevs
Where do I start, At this time I have not much to say but this will be updated with something, more than likely the mobile game I am working on called Patrolling which is based on the web animation of the same name on my main web portal. Lets being.
My venture into game design and development was green lit several years ago I would say round 2008 I can’t quite recall the moment that sparked my interest except I was getting tired of playing games and wanted to figure out how a game was developed especially when I saw so many indy product being made. My first game Bornfighters was my first attempt at making a game. At first I was initially trying to make the game with some friends but no one at the time wanted to aide, also I simply could not afford anyone I was broke as heck, so I did the next best thing I bought several books and read up on actionscript2 which was the programming language of flash8 since that Bornfighters was made in Flash. BornFighters gaged my interest into game development as I was an artist coming from an animation arena and I was really clueless and naive. Creating a game was beyond what I expected and was seriously draining both on my mental and physical state. I learnt a great deal from that production process and respect developers who work tirelessly to make games. I encourage young developers to attempt a deep dive such as that but not in the manner I did as I went deep not knowing how to swim.
That initial first dive led me GDC(Game Developers Conference) which oddly enough I knew nothing about. I came across the most interesting group of people who worked on some of the amazing games that we all play. This in it’s self was what I thought I wanted to do referring to game development. Several years later I decided to move to cali this in itself was a wonderful wakeup as I came at the worst point which was 2012 when there was a mass layoff of several game and animation studios, which made it hard for a novice to step in and learn and for a studio to take that chance. This all led to discouragement and since I had more skills thank just being an animator or programmer I venture into my secondary skill that payed the bills I.T. This in itself was a blessing as I found a job that paid well where I could work half the year and stack up and simply do whatever I wanted the other half of the year. During that time I have created many small projects mostly animated pieces and most recently I shifted one of the animated pieces into the game now called Patrolling.
Looking back I can truthfully say that Bornfighters was a failure, not my first but out of that failure I knew my capability and I was not as limited as I once thought. The failure was mostly due to my lack of experience in development and marketing and also because the game was still rough and needed some refinement from a seasoned developer. Many look at failure as a bad thing but I needed to fail. Much like how I failed on one of my first big animation project ARBEZ. Out of that failure I learnt so much, I became very skilled at using the tool Flash much as I am getting the hang of Game maker studio the tool I utilize for game development much as I learnt Softimage a 3d program I utilize for 3d animation.
Now several years later and after doing several other things I lost interest with working with a major studio, mostly because I created my own studio to house my own production. Along the journey I have met several indy developers who are working on their own games like myself. Some have released some amazing games. All things led to this moment which I am working on my second game Patrolling the date of the write up is 12-31-2018. Stay tuned for some more fun in 2019. One indy game I followed was HYPERLIGHT DRIFTER which was in many ways the game that rekindled my game developing adventure.
Another thing to add was that for my second game which is being developed in GameMaker Studio I was brought up to speed on the application by watching alot of lecturers found on Udemy namely Benjamin Anderson also called Heartbeast. I have also found many videos on youtube by many amazing lecturers along with facebook groups that if asked they will share their knowledge. Before I proceed I must plug a thank you to Kevin Jackson for pointing me to Udemy. Kevin was a great Collaborator who I worked with on several shorts and who has provided great inputs on my projects. He is an amazing animator/writer/director/actor from my little island of Jamaica, big respect to that man.
Oh before I forget one of the most amazing games I played in 2018 was HOLLOW KNIGHT which I call HOLLOW FREAKING KNIGHT this game was really awesome as heck. yeah ok now see you all in 2019.