Making games is hard. I’ve known this for most of my life. I started writing code when I was five years old. My dad bought us a Timex Sinclair 1000…a little home computer that hooked up to the TV and booted up to a text prompt that just said “OK.” The stock version had a whopping 1KB of RAM, but my dad sprung for the upgrade to 16KB. If we wanted to do anything with it, we had to write code to make it do stuff.
So I learned how to code. I learned enough to scare my 8th grade teacher who didn’t know anything. I learned enough to impress my high school computer teacher who opened up a whole new world through other programming languages. And I kept dabbling. I kept learning. I would fall on my face, laugh about it, get up and dust myself off and then keep trying stuff.
When I was 27 years old, I got my dream job of working as a producer in the game industry. I loved it. In addition to my main responsibilities on the production side of things, I also got to do game design and I learned a lot about the 3D art and animation side. I did some programming on side projects, creating tools to simplify creating content for some of our games. And most importantly, I met some really amazing people.
Then one day, the studio shut down. It was over.
Eventually, I got into teaching…teaching computer science and game design mostly. And while I truly loved teaching, I felt that I needed to take a chance. I felt that I had games in me that the world just might want to play. I’m probably an idiot for trying this. I may go down in flames…but what a show that would be, right?
The great thing is that I’m a place in life where I just really don’t give a crap what other people think or what they say. So I’ll make the games that I want to make, that I think players want to play. And I’ll say what I want to say through those games. It’s an amazing freedom. If it all blows up and I’m back at a 9-5 job next year, I won’t ever regret being the idiot who tried.