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.
Game dev experience?
I've documented some of my whole deal with game development in a video on my YouTube channel, so it goes without too much extra context that I've played around with various game engines, at the very least. Before I did that, though, I tinkered with whatever I could get my hands on, within the scope of being something I could easily understand, at least. If your game had a level editor, and I had my hands on it, I was probably poking around in there trying to make something or other.
The prime example of this would definitely be Super Mario Bros X, which I really loved messing around with, making little Mario levels and world maps and trying to string them together. Making my own graphics also got me into a more artistic side of things too, though I think my taste for pixel art really came more from later projects and my affinity for making sprite animations.
I also wanted to poke at modding or hacking games that I liked, like Terraria, Portal 2, Super Mario 64, and Garry's Mod, but I think at some point I figured I'd rather use a game engine to make a game I could really call my own. I think I tried Game Maker at some point pretty early on but got frustrated with it, but eventually I looked up online tutorials for the later GameMaker: Studio and thought it seemed doable, so I gave that a shot. And I think that was the first big step. I wanted to make my first big project with GMS, but right as I was getting comfortable, they started phasing it out in favor of GameMaker: Studio 2, and that kinda demotivated me a bit. Also at some point around here I took a summer class of some sort and worked a bit with Multimedia Fusion 2, but it was too far on the side of visual programming for me, and I wanted to have a better grasp on syntax for programming languages that I could take with me from one project to the next.
My knowledge from GMS didn't translate very well when I started trying to learn Unity. Unity did meet some of the criteria that I was looking for at the time, i.e. free fully featured engine, as well as having support for both 2D and 3D scenes, but I didn't really start getting good at it at that point, because I was kinda burnt out and I wanted to do some other stuff for a bit. Eventually I took a class that forced me to actually learn about it more closely. I feel that I did get to a pretty good point with what I'd learned using it, but it wasn't too long after that Unity was bought by some advertising firm, and also the whole Runtime Fee debacle occurred, and I was wanting to jump ship again, this time to Godot, as it was free and open source, and thus I wouldn't have to worry about the meddling of executives or whatnot in suddenly making it harder to access or use.
Godot is pretty neat to work with, I think. I'm meaning to poke at it a little more, but I've been pretty busy... I did get to make Rainbow Resort 3D, my Kirby fan game, with it, though! I had a 3D media class where I had to learn about Blender and such, and half way through after learning some basics we were kinda turned loose and just told to come up with a fun project idea and just go with it, and learn things along the way, so I decided I was finally going to start learning how to use it in earnest, and over the remainder of that year, and the summer immediately following, mostly, I managed to get it in a mostly finished state..! It's not as polished as I'd like it to be, for how polished I was able to get it in a lot of other areas, but I'm still very happy with how it turned out...
A little after that, a friend got me to poke at a little thing called SmileBASIC 3, for the Nintendo 3DS; a little bit of software that lets you write programs for the handheld in a dialect of Basic, which is pretty neat! I haven't dived too much into this, as I find myself tending to focus on other things, but I did start a little game project on there, trying to remake one of the smaller games from the UFO 50 collection on the platform. I'd like to go back and finish it some day, eventually..!
At the moment, I am taking a class on writing game engines, so I've been trying to work with OpenGL. I haven't really been focusing super much on the class these days, but I'm excited to poke around and make something cool! Regrettably, they're having me use Visual Studio, which I'm not a huge fan of, because it's Microsoft, among other reasons, but maybe I'll look into trying to take my code and compile it on Linux over the summer, once I get some free time. I don't think I'd need too much extra effort, since a lot of the libraries we're using are cross platform, but that's a bridge I'll cross when I get there.
Favorite games?
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, the game's got style. I'll karaoke "What I'm Made Of" by Crush 40 any day of my life. I haven't been able to really go back to Sonic Heroes in the years to really give it an earnest replay, which maybe has to do with its controls, but I maintain that the Genesis games are still damn fun.
Terraria (2011 - present).. which I got into because of Super Mario Bros X, since it was made by the same developer. Over many years it's become one of the most maximalist indie titles I know, with just how much stuff they've packed in over all these years and saying they're done updating it but they're not actually done updating 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. I love it very much, and I'll probably still replay through it all at least one or two more times, if not more.
(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!
Sonic Robo Blast 2 (1998 - present) is an incredible testament to how dedicated Sonic fan game developers can be. The timestamp of how long it's been being worked on is certainly impressive. I found it around version 2.0.7, and I was immediately enamored not only by how pretty feature complete it has been, for quite some time, as a 3D Sonic fan game, and as a playground for modding; built on a DOOM source port, it inherited much of DOOM's modding tool kit. It was probably the most free I felt to make 3D environments early on. I think there was just something exciting about exciting about using the same level editor the devs used. Source Engine's Hammer editor certainly wasn't as user friendly to me at the time. I also really liked SRB2 Kart and Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers, which are themselves mods of SRB2, which is getting very ship-of-Theseus-like with it by being racing games, which I enjoy. But more than anything, especially since Kart and Ring Racers are so multiplayer-oriented, and I haven't touched them in a while, I find myself more than anything coming back to SRB2, even just to replay the story mode one more time, maybe with a new shiny character mod. Check it out here! ..Check out Ring Racers, too, if you're inclined.
I don't really know if there's a single unified thing that ties together the games I like, but it probably comes through in my own work that I'm a big fan of vibrant, stylish settings, and eccentric, queer, and or furry characters inhabiting them, and so I think that's what I tend to seek out in new games, and what I'd like to make, when it comes to creating games. It's not the only kind of thing I'll put up with, but I am certainly drawn to these kinds of things. As far as making games goes, I feel like I keep trying to copy the Doom-esque rotational sprite pattern I fell in love with in SRB2, and I have a lot of fun making cute little environments feel lived in.
(work in progress page, check back later for more..)