Video games
One of my earliest interests, and the seed from which many other of my interests stem, from as long as I can remember. I love playing them and I love to make them, sometimes. I'm scared of the industry, so I'm not planning to work in it, but in my free time I do wish to spend my time making some games that are meaningful and interesting in some way.
Favorites?
I have a lot of favorite games, so I'll narrow it down to a few that exemplify my tastes, for the sake of time.
I think Cave Story (2004) is really one of the earliest games that inspired me as far as indie development goes, if only just because of the old tale I was told about how it was a game pretty much developed just by the one man, Daisuke "Pixel" Amaya.
(In more recent years, I think it's a little clearer (to me, at least) that solo dev past relatively small scales is somewhere between "a swift path to lengthening development time and burning out" and "very much a myth", and it helps greatly to have even modest amounts of external support, if nothing else. But there's still a part of me that wishes to make games fully colored in my own vision, even if it becomes infeasible to do 100% of the hard parts.)
Sonic Heroes (2003) was maybe my first Sonic game, unless it was something in Sonic Mega Collection Plus (2004). Either way I've spent a large portion of my life thinking about anthropomorphic animals, and before I considered myself a furry, largely that was thanks to Sonic. What can I say, I like when there's stylish creatures running around in vibrant environments.
Terraria (2011).. or, well, actually to start, Super Mario Bros X... or, well, actually to start, Super Mario Flash- okay, well, Super Mario Flash wasn't that much to write home about I think looking back, but it satisfied an early desire for level editors that I could poke around at to see what makes a level fun and such. Eventually SMBX pretty much supplanted it for me, as it had way more features, and I really loved playing around with those to feel like a game dev making my little levels and writing NPC dialogue and such. Terraria is a very different game, but it was developed by some of the people who originally worked on SMBX, which is why I got into it. I have 5000 hours on this game because I kept coming back to it a lot, and also forgot to turn off my PC or close the game a fair amount back in the day.
(At time of writing, some of my friends have been getting into it for the first time, and I'm trying really hard not to get sucked into a new playthrough and lose all free time to it while I still have a lot of other important things to do in the immediate future.)
Petal Crash (2020) is a much more recent title than the other ones I've listed. It's a colorful puzzle-versus game with a fun cast of characters, like Puyo Puyo or Panel de Pon. After getting into online Tetris versus games with a friend some years back, I find that I like puzzle games a lot. Puzzle versus games honestly might even be something I feel more fond of than fighting games at this point, which I've also played a bit here and there. There's a sequel to Petal Crash coming up that I've got my eyes on, and I've gotten to play the demo a bit as it's been made available over the past year and I'm excited to see how the full game is and get back into it for a bit!
(work in progress page, check back later for more..)