Hi, my name is Mark and if I'm not playing games, reading this site or dealing with errands, then I'm either drawing concept art for a client, or working solo on my own video games - doing the sound, music, programming, design and testing myself. Also a warning: this post of my past involvement in video games cannot possibly be done in chronological order because I have constantly been jumping over from one aspect of game development and returning to another over many years.
I first got into programming by way of DOS QBasic on an Intel 25Mhz/80486 PC when I was in junior high school and made several clones of other games and a few of my own shooters. I later learned Object Oriented Programming by creating modifications for id Software's Quake, which used a scripting language called Quake C. I had been making mods for Quake for about 6 years due to the ease at which I could change the rules and tools (or weapons) that the player used.
I also toyed around with adding in features that are pretty standard for more advanced games (but were not implemented in Quake) such as headshots, full-level darkness where your eyes would adjust to the dimness but your nightvision would decline if you were staring at light or saw muzzle flashes, and you would have to avoid enemy flashlights and enemies would create chains of breadcrumbs of sound clues you made either by mistake or intentionally (such as shell casings hitting the ground, or gunshot sound locations).
Later, when Quake II came out I switched to C++ since the mods had to be made into DLLs, and also played around with Unreal C and much later, I worked on simple mods for Half Life II and DOOM 3. I also made a game called
Gunner with Flash MX 2004's actionscript.
Programming opened a great many doors for me. When I was in high school, I had partaken in a pilot project where our public school had secured ridiculous funding for state-of-the-art Silicon Graphics Workstations upon which we were to learn to use Alias|Wavefront's PowerAnimator and several Macs (I use personally-built PC's) for Photoshop and Macromedia Flash. I was the only student of my class to get heavily into using the IRIX operating system and acted as a part-time system administrator, and the only one who went on to earn a degree in Computer Animation in Post Production at the now-defunct International Academy of Design (the degree was worthless). It was there that I learned to use particle effects and to continue working as a part-time system administrator, and one of the instructors there got me a job at the now-defunct Calibre Digital Pictures as a
Technical Director, where I would make a lot of software tools for other animators and deal with dynamics simulations necessary to create special effects for film and television.
I then went on to work for MR. X. Effects and worked again, as a technical director, but by then being pegged as "the programmer guy" was beginning to wear on me and I knew that I didn't want to be a programming gopher forever. I quit and became a freelance visual effects artist, but it should be noted that during that time I had NO drawing ability and that I *wanted* to be able to create my own digital comics.
I taught myself to draw, largely out of an understanding of how 3D modelling/rendering/animation software works and shared my findings of drawing techniques by recording over
250 long-winded YouTube tutorials.
I was also dissatisfied with how my WACOM tablet functioned (the software is garbage)
so I hacked it.
By then, a lot of things had changed about how games were made, bought and sold. There's Steam Greenlight. There's the Google Play Market. There was Game Maker Studio. There were game jams in Toronto. These things reminded me of my original dream of developing games, and motivated me to redirect my efforts back into developing games.
I work with Game Maker Studio because developing engines does not interest me. I don't care to fight with sound libraries and sprite libraries and controller libraries. Instead, I want to deal with a game's rules and tools. I'm interested almost entirely with the goals the player is trying to achieve, the limitations the player must deal with, and the possibilities that the tools and interface provide the player to get those jobs done.
Examples:
This is a game I made in 3 days called Gravitron.This is another game (prototype) I made called Akimbo.This is a prototype remake of Gunner that I did in Game Maker Studio.Unfortunately, the things I value in a game do not create nice screenshots or box art. But since I believe in being an entirely self-sufficient developer (I've begun to hate the word "indie") I use my own self-taught skills to
draw my own art, and
make my own music and sound as well. Sadly I have never developed any marketing nor business skills so at present, all of my own projects are on hiatus while I work as a concept artist for another self-funded developer to keep myself afloat.
And yesterday, I discovered this site and am here to learn. I would talk more about the games I've played and love but I feel that my involvement in producing games is more uncommon and of interest than my consumption of them.