Feels like it took me forever to get here but I’m finally here.
If you are reading this, I’m willing to guess I did something you found valuable at some point and it was important enough that you asked yourself “who is this guy?” or “what was his first blog post?”… and hoping I guessed right, I want to thank you for being here.
If what brought you here was a belief in in me, in my potential either as a person or as a developer, may I ask that you hold on to that feeling and choose someone else that you’ve dismissed and try to believe in them too?
Some days I feel like the world is in dire need of a bit more empathy than yesterday, and as little as I can I’d like to push more empathy out there where you think is needed.
You see, today is a special day for me and I think that would be a great gift you could give anyone – a new beginning. A blank slate full of human potential.
It’s been a bit more than 10 years since I wanted to become an independent developer, and as luck would have it I feel I have finally made it here to my starting point where I feel I am ready enough, but I have to admit that it’s been very scary so far and I still have a lot more to learn.
Ever since I played Tetris on a Game Boy when I was five years old, I’ve always wondered how games were made.
I got my first computer when I was 13 years old in 2002 – a Compaq Presario 4160 with Windows XP if I recall. I learned to change its parts and by pushing all the buttons and eventually became a licensed technician several years later.
Along the way I stumbled upon Visual Basic and other programming languages but I thought to myself “making games can’t be THAT hard – there must be a GUI to make them easily” and with limited access to the internet and no guidance whatsoever I didn’t look into it for a while.
Having studied Math and getting obsessed with Arch Linux and learning just a bit of C/C++ at college by 2013, my “aha!” moment happened in 2015 when I stumbled upon the Cocos2D-X game engine as I was looking for a C/C++ framework to work with. Game development was all new to me and Unity and Unreal Engine were too heavy and slow on my low-spec laptop so I decided to just go for it and patch the engine where I could, and learn as much as I could. Within a year I made a small game in C++, but the lack of a game editor for Cocos2D-X in Linux back then left me looking into implementing my own using imgui.
That was until the next year when I stumbled upon the Godot Game Engine which I fell for. It ran beautifully in my low-spec laptop, although it did crash quite a few times and had some memory leaks that bugged me to my core (puns intended), its editor did everything I wanted and the documentation was, and still is, amazing.
After having learned so much along my journey, sitting down to actually make a game I feel proud of feels quite personal to me and I’m constantly worrying about whether people will like the game or accept it, or whether the message I want to convey will get lost in translation, but regardless of any of that I’m up to the task and excited to see where it will lead – good or bad I’ll push through as much as I can while at the same time respecting the player and avoiding using predatory tactics as seen on many mobile games nowadays.
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