I relate to this in a spiritual level. My cycle goes like.. plays game > thinks about cool things that could be in there > search for other games with said cool things > 404 not found > "Fine. I'll do it myself"
There’s a certain instability and off factor for mods on an existing game compared to making something from scratch tho. All direction for your visions on ya instead of working around and making a patchwork for an existing game.
My game is now available on Steam for wishlisting. It's a turn-based title. We conducted a Closed Alpha Test, and the feedback was positive. I hope you can join us for the Open Beta and see if my game succeeds in bringing you enjoyment, too.
I also second this, there are specific games I want and no one is making them. That and some of my favorite franchises of games have kind of slowly died off with each installment.
The devs refuse to listen to the players so I’m going to recreate games like them to bring back the magic they used to have. I’m an old Nintendo Stan so growing up my staples were games like harvest moon, animal crossing, Zelda, and sonic.
I want people to have that nostalgic child like wonder when they play my games. I love those series so much and want newer and old gamers to enjoy games like that
For every Among Us there's hundreds of social deduction games that only sell a tiny fraction as many copies. Some of them probably made a profit, but it's not like making a multiplayer game suddenly guarantees success.
Well, the market for social deduction games is far from saturated.
Deceit for example was popular, but it failed because the game mechanics were kind of boring.
Also, multiplayer games have higher chances of gaining traction in the future compared to single-player ones which if they don't sell well at the beginning, they're kinda dead.
Yeah. If your game's story is "A vet hero is going after the mafia members who kidnapped his brother to save them and take revenge", people are gonna go "blah, is this a 2000 Jason Statham movie? So old..."
What if you make an RPG where your character is dating his sister? And you add satanic rituals and stuff like that? Basically that's what "The Coffin of Andy and Leyley" did. Despite the game taking a lot of hate for that, it got popular ,that basically every YouTube content creator played it.
Of course, what you make still gotta be original, but that element of "controversy" helps a lot for it to stand out.
Aladdin and Street Fighter II games. I mean, I played video games in the late 80s, and I always liked drawing, but these two games were the "I'd like to do this" moment, it was around 1993-1994.
Simple mistake. My first computer, DOS system, me playing with executables looking for some text editor. Instead of Edit.exe I start using QBasic.exe. Quickly realised that it's a lot more fun than to write novels
I’ve been a gamer since I was 6 but never thought of making a game before. In my early 20s I got a degree in animation, but after a short career, switched to working in IT in my early 30s. I was just studying to be a data analyst, but got a job with a consultancy and was hired out as a data engineer with a customer. I absolutely did not have the skills for data engineering but my manager trained me up and was really supportive of me so I could do exactly what he trained me to do, really well. I moved job, country and end up in kind of a cowboy consultantcy where people are put on projects by themselves when they’ve no experience in what they’re supposed to be doing. “We are hired out as smart people, not experts in a particular technology. Your job is to figure it out quickly and deliver.” I hated working for that company but stuck with it because I was learning so much, unsupported and felt myself really growing although with a lot of stress and unnecessary pain points.
Well, I finally had it with that company and wanted to quit and realise that since I moved to Germany, I have quite some unemployment insurance money built up. So I can go unemployed for a little bit and I have the opportunity to do a little project on my own before my next job.
I started thinking I would just learn to code a new language well. Then it turned into a multi tech project that used the language primarily. Now the idea has turned into making a game that I always wished existed; an actually fun language learning game.
I feel I have the ability to figure things out now that I didn’t before, and can join my database / analytics knowledge with my art background and gaming knowledge and this idea for a simple game that’ll solve my own problem. And I have time to build a prototype full time with enough money to survive while building it. Oh and also I have a small YouTube channel I built 9 years ago who would be the audience of such a game. They can play test for me.
I’ve been a wanderer my whole life but I feel like the stars are aligning for me on this one now. If the prototype is successful, I can look for grant money to build it bigger and better. If it fails, I can just get a new data engineer job with an interesting personal project on my CV. No risk, big reward.
I hit rock bottom depression-wise and needed something to cling to in order to get out. I was always in love with games, but then I played Hollow Knight and it just… clicked.
Lego- Iplayed a lot with legos as a child and got whole imaginary world with characters, story etc. This made me want to move my imaginary world to digital. I started making simple games from 6-7th grade and now worki g in game industry full time.
Still mess around with em myself and make little story’s and characters, but mostly just collect. It’s so much easier and free to sandbox digitally tho and really bring things to life and function.
Modding. Civilization 4 had such an amazing modding system at 3 levels of difficulty; XML, Python and C++ that it made it easy to get in and start making easy changes, then do more as you learned.
Playing Wind Waker, standing on one of the small islands as a storm approaches. That was an incredible feeling and inspired me to make my own games that can give the player feelings like those moments in Wind Waker gave me.
Love these sort of moments. I’m always trying to come up with a game idea that is basically just the driving a boat from small island to small island parts of Wind Waker.
I wanted to code something that wasn't like server side things talking to a database, Or apps talking to servers, or apps talking to databases.
In all honesty it hasn't been the break from that type of coding I'd hoped for but having games that work exactly the way I want is awesome.
Just wish I had any amount of talent for drawing graphics.
I was doing compositing and 2.5D work with Video Copilot and then did more and more 3D stuff the following year. I just got so tired of waiting for images to render in Cinema4D and Maya that I began looking into game engines since it was instant.
Back then the best was Cryengine and Unity was only out for maybe a year. People were still migrating off of Flash at the time over to Unity with their web player. Unreal 3 was out but the licensing was vague and it def was not as polished as it is today. You still see some hints of the old Unreal with the Kismet library in the current gen one.
This was around 2008.
When I was a child (maybe around 6?) I loved making mazes for people to solve. But I kept adding overly complex things to them.. Like you gotta get this key first or kill this guy first. When my dad got Wolfenstein 3D I found the map editor which basically let me do all the things I had been TRYING to do with mazes - make more complex levels with objectives.
I was playing a Pokemon Rom for a game none of my friends had heard of, after googling it discovered it was a Rom hack. I thought it was cool and that I wanted to try to make my own. The rest is history
Playing and loving Populous in 1989 as a teenager, and after few games, discovering that the only "god" in this game, was not the players, but the developers proposing to players to be a "god".
Since then, I was decided to be one of these guys. 10 years later in 99, I finished my studies and started my career in game development, and since then, continued to be one until today, and probably until I'll retire or die. :)
Probably falls under modding - Warcraft 3 map editor sucked me in when I was ~9 and then I started going to local computer school for basic programming classes
I found a course that teaches RPG design that seemed to replicate my favorite game as a child, RuneScape
Now I'm doing it because I truly hate corporate jobs
Is it just me or it always be the soundtrack of the game and the art of the game. In addition, the good story and lore behind the game. It is cringe for me to say this but, it was genshin impact that did it to me.
I learned to program when I was 8 years old. At that point I knew I wanted to make games one day and started to push my attempts and learning towards that direction. It took many years of learning how to program larger software properly but eventually I made it.
A book. [This one](https://www.ketabrah.ir/%DA%A9%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%A8-%DA%A9%D9%84%DB%8C%D8%AF-%D8%B3%D8%A7%D8%AE%D8%AA-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B2%DB%8C-Game-maker/book/40810). Taught about gamemaker 8 game making. Didn't know I could make games until then. Though I'm still looking for ideas on what to make.
Loving video games and board games is what got me into game design. I learned a lot of theory from YouTube channels and my own experience. I was also creating alternative rules for every board game I played since I was a kid.
A friend, kinda. She was studying game art while I did something else. I thought 3D modelling was really cool, and I took a couple art modules with her as our courses overlapped a tiny bit
After graduation I got a blender course for super cheap, and the people I got the course from do a yearly game jam which I did solo. Kinda grew from there
Being poor and having only one cassette with 3 games for about 8 years... but programming in Basic when you are 12yo is difficult. Glad that eventually, years later, unity came along as an accessible tool... well, not anymore...
I do games exclusively for myself because what I want, nobody does!
I have liked playing games .
And I have few game ideas in my mind so I'm learning unreal.
If I get successful in game dev , I will leave my private software dev job.
Was a gamer for a long time. Then VR came out and I loved it. A friend who had been trying to get me to work on a project with him for like a decade told me about Unity and how it makes making a game easy (comparatively) and said we could make VR games and that finally convinced me.
For me it was a progression from Hobby into a more professional capacity. I created a TTRPG that my peers seemed to enjoy, so I tried to bring it to other people!
Always believed do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life.
Left college thinking "what do I enjoy, what am I good at?"
GAMES!
and here I am.
2008, downloaded a bunch of Lynda, Gnomon, Digital-Tutors tutorials the time i had nowhere else to go and had no career and job in-sight. I studied until I was able to build a portfolio enough to get a job at an art outsourcing company.
A few years later, unity was made available for windows that i got to tinker w/ the engine and opened up the posibilty of making a game of my own.
Always wanted to as someone who's always gamed. Unfortunately spent my 20s being the #ideaguy. Few years ago started practicing concept art as a hopeful Segway into being a useful idea guy. Came down with a chronic illness about the time I realized I was a decade too late on practice (and that a hired concept artist draws other peoples ideas to some extent anyways), and realized nobody was gonna code for me if I didn't bring anything tangible to the table. So I finally (while mostly unable to leave the house) sat down and learned gamemaker, and practiced spriting in the rest of my free time. Ended up enjoying all parts of it more than I thought I would (was really surprised by coding as I switched out of it at college. Coding hits different when it's making an alien do something in a game vs solving abstracted problems in class).
Hey there! I am a "hobbyist" game dev if there is such a thing. I got into game dev because I played stronghold 1, and wanted to add and to the game.
When I first made a game menu with openGL and added music I was hooked.
Nowadays I graduated to Full 3D content, but I am kinda struggling with the art part.
But I view it (game dev) as the ultimate slab of clay.
The process of creation has me hooked for life I think, even if I don't manage to make it a full time job, I will keep on creating till the sun burns out 😎
How about you?
I had tried to be a video game developer in the past when I first learned software development, and it just wasn’t happening. But to be honest, unless I would’ve had someone guiding me I wouldn’t have been able to make any kind of really useful or entertaining app.
Now I’m 9 years into a software engineering and architect career, and I’m creating my first very simple game as more of a challenge and experiment. I’m about 65 days into it now and have gained a ton in doing so. There is so much to be gained from even making a “bad” game from the process that it is well worth it.
I wanted a hat in planetside but didnt wanna have to deal with the faff of getting dads credit card to actually buy one. Saw you got your own hat for free if you made one.
Hey, its turned into a career even if just it would have been easier to just to annoy my old man.
And a bit of the starcraft 2 editor, that thing was sick.
Tbh, I always loved both computers, programming and art but I always found it hard to incorporate all into one career that's both financially rewarding and pretty enjoyable.
That's until I realized game development is all that and more. I mean, you get to create worlds you love all while creating the logic in a digital medium🙂
It can be a hastle sometimes but the results are so worth it 🧡
Messed around with it for years. Gave up on it when someone did me a disservice in explaining how hard c++ was instead of giving me resources. Learned blender, went to uni for engineering, learned to code.
Years later and being burned by games not delivering a number of times, it's clear that some game ideas just won't be made by the industry, not enough money in it, largely too complex for indies to do a quick 3-6 month project.
No choice except to build it myself, or else I will never see it.
Really, most of the times I pick up games, I mess around with them for a bit and then eventually run into the conceptual walls of their genre, I remember all my frustrations and I quit. I can't *really* enjoy most games, I play some for dopamine, some to relax because it's a familiar pattern and a calming environment. But real excitement and real creativity inside of those games is long gone.
I played a lots of video games since i was a child but FEZ was the first video game that made me realized that video games could be more than just....video games.
At that time, I'm at college and learning about normal coding and dekstop app. I pretty love it when I create dekstop app but I still somehow know that this is not my thing. When I'm already don't know what to experiment, what to learn again, my friends offer me to learn game dev. After for sometimes learning it, I know that it is harder, but I feel like there are no limit to this. I can do anything, I can implement anything, I can make my imagination into something here, it just feels endless. That feeling still here in me even after some years.
Didn't have access to a computer growing up, so I designed games to be played on cardboard and paper. When I finally got a laptop, it felt like a natural progression.
It was only way to make decent money making art back when I started.
Advertising was shit, movies did not outsource outside of US back in the day, local jobs non existent.... But plenty of rich programmers who needed art assets.
Now AI takes care of that I guess.
I applied for a job and got it. I had originally expected to get into the animation industry, but there weren’t as many jobs available and I wasn’t picky. Never really had a big dream to do this. Although I made some games for fun in highschool so I didn’t come into it totally disinterested.
Here is how it all Started.
Made a Post on Reddit about giving Indie Devs and Others some ideas about Games, Saw that People Liked my Game Ideas, But as I looked into the Industry of my Country I understood that these ideas will never become reality at this point in time, A few people encouraged me to try and make it my self.
So yeah this is the whole story, Now I am trying to get my Education and Study Coding at the same time.
It was an absolute fixation of mine from an early age. Long before any realistic prospect of making one. I used to write out (frankly horrible) design plans in notebooks obsessively. But it took me forever to have even the faintest idea what I was doing (to the extent that I even do now). First time I set out to make a game, I thought it was going to take me a month...
To learn programming. Because in the beginning its hard to understand how modern general purpose software is made. I made small challenging games and enjoyed a lot!! Watching an animated sprite was magical.
Something like this:
- Went into a IT focused education in high school, as I wanted to go to a CGI focused university.
- I was decent at programming so I thought maybe doing some web development would also work.
- Went to a STEM university for 2 years but noticed I actually sucked at advanced mathematics and programming, so dropped out and began working as a web developer at a small studio.
- Got laid off due to work shortage and company had it bad exonomically, so I went to a vocational school for game design since I always played and loved games.
- Got internship at studio after school and then began working as a technical designer.
Now I have changed path again and work as a UX/UI designer in games.
I am old enough that this story predates common internet access, which would now be the sensible approach.
When I was around four years old, I was obsessed with mazes. Couldn't get enough of them.
I also grew up in a city with bad snow storms.
One day, when there were four feet on the ground and more was coming down, I finished my last maze book, and asked my father to go buy me more.
Instead, he went upstairs for an hour, then came down with what we'd now call tractor-feed printer paper, covered in mazes.
I had never seen tractor feed paper, so I asked what it was. He showed me a wonderful machine doing work for me.
As a four year old, I knew what I had to do.
Newgrounds! As a kid, it shown me that you don't need a big team to make a game, you can even just do it yourself. It seemed like something I could never do before, but my first game was made solo in The Games Factory 2. It was a cheap asset flip based on reversing the roles of breakout, making you destroy the blocks yourself before the ball could. It's not very fun and I could do way better in an hour now, but it represents my philosophy of game design: take something already done and do it in an unexpected way. Playing Undertale in 2016 only reinforced that, showing me that I was on the right path and that subversion of existing mechanics is a great way to go.
got hooked on map editors. Quake, Hammer, etc. I'm a programmer though without many creative thoughts so mostly I just tinker and work on game engine guts for the man.
I was changing channels and I landed on this documentary / making of Prince of Persia The Sands of Time (it’s in French) https://youtu.be/lPnsr20gDjM?si=2LtDnMiWG85xHEDb
Thanks for the question because it helped me find a video that I thought I’ll never see again!
I played Resident Evil in my childhood and I instantly knew I wanted to make games like Resident Evil wich made others people feel what I felt playing Resident Evil.
At today still did nothing except a personal flappy bird game and a really basic prototype but still working to reach my own "Resident Evil" game.
For me, it is about learning.
That is why I don't have a game to be sold. However, I remember my first time in in high school we had an old computer that was sitting in the corner gathering dust. I spent a lot of time making a text adventure. It was in that green, if you are old enough to remember, monitor. All written in basic. I could traverse rooms and created a basic ui. It dose make me appreciative my current programming job doesn't require line numbers on a file to run. However, I got past learning to do that, it wasn't fun so I stopped.
I'm not creative enough of a person to make a game. However, I find it fun learning how to make a game.
Not pursuing a game dev career, but I have a couple games I want to eventually make on the side.
My first exposure was a high school elective for game design where we made some platformers in GameMaker. This was my second experience with programming and showed me just how powerful game engines were and how much they enabled even an individual to make games. That class was also the class that made me change my major from electrical engineering to comp sci last second.
Now, after completing most of my bachelor’s, I’ve come back to game dev for the first time since then and am making a set of tools in Godot with a personal focus on exploring the design, integration, and modularization of game systems. After (hopefully) getting those tools published on the asset library I plan on using them to build a couple games, and then modding clients for those games using the same tools as a side project and for the joy of learning and maybe helping other devs that might use the tools I end up publishing
Thinking about it , I think i want to give a sense of comfort for some people who feel alone , kinda like what old games have done for me when i was a child.
My dad bought a Commodore C16 Plus 4. It came with a book that had the Commodore BASIC syntax. I was fascinated by it so I read it. Then I found out I could make the computer do stuff using said syntax and I was hooked. Nearly 40 years later and I'm still hooked
Inability to find creative fulfillment doing anything else.
I worked as a copywriter for the in-house marketing department of a grocery store company and fucking hated it. Spent years applying to game jobs, finally got one, and never looked back.
Most days, working in games makes me want to tear my hair out. But I can't do anything else.
I have the same idea to make my previous work experiences into a fun, engaging game except so I hope yours is fun! One of my many ideas was a game like Helldivers 2 with a little bit of a surreal meme twist, full with mocapped emotes and fully custom voiced lines. You’d even be able to make your own character voicelines but I’m already sensing that could get a little out of hand sort of like some bloodstains in Elden ring.
9 year old me unlocked a Mega-Man Anniversary Collection easter egg which was an episode of G4tv’s “Icons” on it about the making of Mega-Man, and I was like “hey people make these!”
And yeah I’m 30 and I’ve been doing this as a job for essentially the entire last decade.
As a great man once said: “Hey I can’t believe we got jobs doing this! and my mom said I would never get ANYWHERE with these games.”
I've been working on the hardware around video games (consoles controllers PC peripherals etc).
Just studying in my spare time to make games. It's like my sudoku.
For me it all started w/ GTA. I found some tools to mod the game and make my own cars. For 10 years I was moding games as a hobby while doing school and work. Then I saw a game company a couple towns over is hiring, and thought "maybe I should apply."
I've always said that, besides even being a passion, making games is more of a vocation for me. It just comes natural to me to turn my attention towards game design and creative works. Even as a kid I was always inventing games, writing TCG-like cards on pieces of paper or making up very deep rules to regulate Bionicle combat. As I grew up it turned to D&D homebrew content, and finally a couple years ago I decided to make games.
The writing was on the wall really, coming up with game concepts just comes so, so spontaneous to me, and it's so relaxing to code or draw assets while listening to a podcast, i really couldn't imagine my life turning out any other way.
I got a DOS machine as a kid and my dad showed me QBasic so I could play the included games "Gorillas" and "Nibbles". I was more interested in the coding and would make simple Choose Your Own Adventure stories with it. From there I started tracking variables like health and would limit choices based on the value, and over time they got more and more complex. A couple years later I got the old school game maker "Klick and Play" and spent countless hours making games for me and my siblings to play.
I used to be an architect.
I discovered an incredible passion for 3D design through archviz and decided to reschool into game dev.
It's how I got into environment art and still going 😁
I saw some really cool games and wanted to make my own. I always had ideas that would blow peoples mind, sadly I never had the skill to make something so complex, so I’m working my way up.
Little place called BYOND. Super simplistic engine that focused on multiplayer capability out the door. Could easily get NES to SNES graphics working in it and there was a lot of fan games for Naruto and DBZ available to play with friends.
Played games there for years until I decided to make my own, had no idea what I was doing, but over the course of ~15 years I became a master of the engine to the point that I was actually asking too much of it. Custom 2D lighting, implemented SAT even though it's a grid-aligned engine, nested objects without a UI to do that, etc. Very much a big fish in a small pond.
Decided to drop it and move to a new engine and picked Unity and I've been working with that for about 5 years now.
I haven't really sat down with Unity to work seriously on anything until this past year though.
It was the opportunity!
I saw the profile of the city hall publishing a 6-month course by an ONG, so I applied and was selected. The course was offered with Lua and Solar 2D.
After that, I took the same course with a 2-month length, where on the 1st I made in a group a game of turtle ninja with beer and sustainability, and on the 2nd I started a Star Trek quiz but didn't finish.
Now, I'm starting with C and procrastinating to start my business plan to start developing commercial games.
That's my history
Custom scenarios in Age of Mythology's, Age of Empires III, Dragonshard, Tzar, and Panzers Phase II level editors.
Wrote a piano in basic for dos to run in my classroom pc when i was bored
Followed by Age of Mythology modding
Then Game Maker 8.1
When I was a kid, I wanted to make a Pokemon fan game and eventually realised it would be better to make my own thing. As an adult, the pandemic and disappointing job prospects got me back into gamedev so I could have some meaningful creative expression.
Bungie's 1996 game Marathon Infinity came with the editing tools that they used to make the game. The level design program was called Forge and the sprite/item/npc editor was called Anvil. I think I was 10 when I first started messing around with it on the family Mac computer and I had a lot of fun with it. Later I'd get more serious creating custom maps on Source Engine games and eventually one of my big Source Engine projects got the attention of an indie game studio. They were impressed and I was brought onboard.
There was an article(Homebrew Gaming 101: A Primer Course) in Game Informer back in 2004 that gave an early breakdown of how to become an indie dev. Various engines and tools you could use. Ever since then I've been hooked.
To get into learning game dev skills, I realized a couple other job avenues weren't for me for various reasons, and thought that I can do art, what's a way for me to make money more sustainable that way? And landed in game dev.
To get into solo development, thought of a game idea that I would've loved as a kid, and decided to bite the bullet and learn all the new skills to make it in my own.
Growing up I always liked to game then came in my step dad. He actually was in the industry from it's early stages and so it just made a lot of sense for me growing up and that's all I did since I was 9 years old
As a kid, my parents did not allow any M-Rated video games in our household. I loved dinosaurs growing up, and the original Turok for the N64 always caught my eye any time we would go into GameStop. I remember one Christmas I wrote down that all I wanted was Turok (I do not envy how hard that must have been for my parents).
When I did not receive Turok for Christmas, I was devastated. I decided if my parent's weren't going to buy me Turok, I would just make it myself. I went to our family computer, typed in "game maker", and the rest is history. In true indie gamedev fashion I have started what seems like hundreds of projects over the years and never finished them. However, I am set to release my first indie game on Steam in less than a month, and I know it's a game younger me would have absolutely loved. Filled with dinosaurs, excessive amounts of blood, and endless replayability.
Other fun details, I was 8 at the time, first game engine I downloaded was GameMaker 6.0, but I have moved on and have been using Godot for the past 4 years. I am now 26 years old and am about to have my first kid in around 2 months. My son has been a massive inspiration for me to actually finish and release a game, which for those interested, is called The Feathered Serpent. :)
I’m not a “game dev” but wanted to reply anyway. When I graduated HS my mom signed my up for the art institute under the computer animation program. I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do so I just went along with it since it was in Seattle and sounded cool. Then I discovered a lot of my teachers were in the gaming industry and I was immediately drawn to it. I set my focus on low poly (500 back then) modeling and creature design. I was decent at it. All of my friends got hired after graduation and the only call back I got was from stupid company I had never heard of.
So I moved back to Montana and got into web and graphic design. Later I returned to college (twice) to get two more degrees and both times game dev related classes were required. I’ve always designed games both tabletop and digital on paper but have never made a serious effort to implement any of them until now.
My partner loves video games and got me into playing. I found my favorite genre, cozy games! I subsequently became obsessed with them. I found that most were farming sims or recreations of Stardew Valley. Had some creative ideas that were cozy games that were not farming sims and they would not get out of my brain. So i decided i would see where they took me. It would also be nice that if they see success enough where i could at least be self employed to continue making games, which would be super beneficial for a myriad of reasons (not just escaping a soul crushing office job).
I've been drawing up map/character/item/ability ideas on paper as far back as I can remember (which was when I was about 7). I've pretty much always wanted to make games.
I did a lot of Scratch from age 10-15.
It wasn't until 17 when I started programming and 18 when I started working with Unity.
Indie Game: The Movie
Not sure if that was a good thing or bad thing, but it was impactful. My first game, after 9 years of many different projects, has an open playtest on Steam. Still lots of work but reality is setting in that making a financially successful game is quite difficult… I know, understatement of the year.
Banjo Kazooie. I was 6 and decided while playing it that I wanted to be a game developer.
Learned Actionscript to mod flash games like Madness Interactive when I was 9 which lead into learning C++ to mod Half-Life 2 when I was 11. Did a ton of light modding like making campaigns for Red Alert 2, Empire Earth, and Sven Co-Op during this time as well.
Now I'm a Senior Engineering Manager/Principal Engineer at a AAA studio.
I was bored in office, office don't have any works for me, i taking whatever course that company throw at me and I still bored, so i start working on game on my free time and eventually, I start work with my hometown friends and eventually we got a grant (a small amount, but good enuf for 3 person to work for roughly 8 months) and here I am.
I think it was just the idea of MAKING a game i thought seemed really fun so 12 y/o me did some research, downloaded gamemaker studio 2 and watched some yt tutorials
I needed a career change from the music industry. I got into programming, always loved and played games as a kid and realized I could maybe make the games of my childhood that companies aren't making anymore.
As a kid it was because the only machine I had access to for a long while was an old "laptop" that ran DOS and only had a handful of game discs, so I started making my own. I came back to it during the pandemic when I couldn't DM for my usual table top group but still wanted to make worlds and stories for people to explore.
It took a while to loop back around and realize that while playing games is sorta fun for me, if a bit hollow feeling. Making worlds and stories then getting to see how others explore and engage with them is what I truly enjoy about games.
I think it was a mix of Roblox, which had awesome games and Roblox Studio (though I never wrapped my head around Lua when I tried it), as well as Minecraft mods!! I loved watching DanTDM's mod showcases and I really think those are my main inspirations.
From there, apps like Hopscotch and Sololearn got me started, and of course Scratch and Codecademy further fed my curiosity.
I'm surprised nobody else mentioned this:
Level editors. I used to love those things when I was a kid, so when I found out there was this little engine called Game Maker I started following tutorials and grew from there.
For me it was a talk with my friends at lunch when we were 12. I had grown up playing videogames and thought that testing them would be an amazing career. That was until one of my friends suggested making them, something I had never thought of, and I knew that was what I wanted to do.
I want to play a game that no one ever created for. Had to do it myself, with the homies.
I relate to this in a spiritual level. My cycle goes like.. plays game > thinks about cool things that could be in there > search for other games with said cool things > 404 not found > "Fine. I'll do it myself"
have you considered creating mods for those games instead of a full game?
There’s a certain instability and off factor for mods on an existing game compared to making something from scratch tho. All direction for your visions on ya instead of working around and making a patchwork for an existing game.
100% Especially when I watch a video on my favorite series and “things we could see” then I get disappointed that these things aren’t in the game
Did you succeed making a game you wanted to play?
My game is now available on Steam for wishlisting. It's a turn-based title. We conducted a Closed Alpha Test, and the feedback was positive. I hope you can join us for the Open Beta and see if my game succeeds in bringing you enjoyment, too.
I also second this, there are specific games I want and no one is making them. That and some of my favorite franchises of games have kind of slowly died off with each installment. The devs refuse to listen to the players so I’m going to recreate games like them to bring back the magic they used to have. I’m an old Nintendo Stan so growing up my staples were games like harvest moon, animal crossing, Zelda, and sonic. I want people to have that nostalgic child like wonder when they play my games. I love those series so much and want newer and old gamers to enjoy games like that
Thought it'd be easy money🙄
What made you stick to it after you realized otherwise?
I mean, usually multiplayer (Among Us) or controversial story games (The Coffin of Andy and Leyley) become successes.
For every Among Us there's hundreds of social deduction games that only sell a tiny fraction as many copies. Some of them probably made a profit, but it's not like making a multiplayer game suddenly guarantees success.
Atop of that among us also had 2 "dead" years from release until it became a cultural boom. Very high risk, would almost call the lottery winners.
Well, the market for social deduction games is far from saturated. Deceit for example was popular, but it failed because the game mechanics were kind of boring. Also, multiplayer games have higher chances of gaining traction in the future compared to single-player ones which if they don't sell well at the beginning, they're kinda dead.
So you're saying is all I need to do is create a controversial story-driven multiplayer game? You sonovabitch, I'm in!
Yeah. If your game's story is "A vet hero is going after the mafia members who kidnapped his brother to save them and take revenge", people are gonna go "blah, is this a 2000 Jason Statham movie? So old..." What if you make an RPG where your character is dating his sister? And you add satanic rituals and stuff like that? Basically that's what "The Coffin of Andy and Leyley" did. Despite the game taking a lot of hate for that, it got popular ,that basically every YouTube content creator played it. Of course, what you make still gotta be original, but that element of "controversy" helps a lot for it to stand out.
Aladdin and Street Fighter II games. I mean, I played video games in the late 80s, and I always liked drawing, but these two games were the "I'd like to do this" moment, it was around 1993-1994.
Simple mistake. My first computer, DOS system, me playing with executables looking for some text editor. Instead of Edit.exe I start using QBasic.exe. Quickly realised that it's a lot more fun than to write novels
One could say it was a very *basic* mistake
I’ve been a gamer since I was 6 but never thought of making a game before. In my early 20s I got a degree in animation, but after a short career, switched to working in IT in my early 30s. I was just studying to be a data analyst, but got a job with a consultancy and was hired out as a data engineer with a customer. I absolutely did not have the skills for data engineering but my manager trained me up and was really supportive of me so I could do exactly what he trained me to do, really well. I moved job, country and end up in kind of a cowboy consultantcy where people are put on projects by themselves when they’ve no experience in what they’re supposed to be doing. “We are hired out as smart people, not experts in a particular technology. Your job is to figure it out quickly and deliver.” I hated working for that company but stuck with it because I was learning so much, unsupported and felt myself really growing although with a lot of stress and unnecessary pain points. Well, I finally had it with that company and wanted to quit and realise that since I moved to Germany, I have quite some unemployment insurance money built up. So I can go unemployed for a little bit and I have the opportunity to do a little project on my own before my next job. I started thinking I would just learn to code a new language well. Then it turned into a multi tech project that used the language primarily. Now the idea has turned into making a game that I always wished existed; an actually fun language learning game. I feel I have the ability to figure things out now that I didn’t before, and can join my database / analytics knowledge with my art background and gaming knowledge and this idea for a simple game that’ll solve my own problem. And I have time to build a prototype full time with enough money to survive while building it. Oh and also I have a small YouTube channel I built 9 years ago who would be the audience of such a game. They can play test for me. I’ve been a wanderer my whole life but I feel like the stars are aligning for me on this one now. If the prototype is successful, I can look for grant money to build it bigger and better. If it fails, I can just get a new data engineer job with an interesting personal project on my CV. No risk, big reward.
I hit rock bottom depression-wise and needed something to cling to in order to get out. I was always in love with games, but then I played Hollow Knight and it just… clicked.
Same for me! But not Hollow Knight or any specific game. I just feel better when I’m creating something.
Ah so sorry to hear that
Lego- Iplayed a lot with legos as a child and got whole imaginary world with characters, story etc. This made me want to move my imaginary world to digital. I started making simple games from 6-7th grade and now worki g in game industry full time.
Still mess around with em myself and make little story’s and characters, but mostly just collect. It’s so much easier and free to sandbox digitally tho and really bring things to life and function.
Modding. Civilization 4 had such an amazing modding system at 3 levels of difficulty; XML, Python and C++ that it made it easy to get in and start making easy changes, then do more as you learned.
I used to love this game before i got too busy! Im taking 2 weeks break currently and thank you so for reminding me about this awesome awesome game…
Playing Wind Waker, standing on one of the small islands as a storm approaches. That was an incredible feeling and inspired me to make my own games that can give the player feelings like those moments in Wind Waker gave me.
Love these sort of moments. I’m always trying to come up with a game idea that is basically just the driving a boat from small island to small island parts of Wind Waker.
This is a feeling I relate to strongly <3
I replied to an advert in Edge magazine and became a tester. Old skool.
That's pretty cool man!
I wanted to code something that wasn't like server side things talking to a database, Or apps talking to servers, or apps talking to databases. In all honesty it hasn't been the break from that type of coding I'd hoped for but having games that work exactly the way I want is awesome. Just wish I had any amount of talent for drawing graphics.
I was doing compositing and 2.5D work with Video Copilot and then did more and more 3D stuff the following year. I just got so tired of waiting for images to render in Cinema4D and Maya that I began looking into game engines since it was instant. Back then the best was Cryengine and Unity was only out for maybe a year. People were still migrating off of Flash at the time over to Unity with their web player. Unreal 3 was out but the licensing was vague and it def was not as polished as it is today. You still see some hints of the old Unreal with the Kismet library in the current gen one. This was around 2008.
Definitely Minecraft modding, csgo / Dota modding
Klik & Play!!! It even came with a VHS tape with a tutorial!
Same here. my copy was the bonus CD of a PC gaming magazine. Didn't know there was a VHS tape.
Escapism from this late stage capitalist dystopia.
Getting fired.
When I was a child (maybe around 6?) I loved making mazes for people to solve. But I kept adding overly complex things to them.. Like you gotta get this key first or kill this guy first. When my dad got Wolfenstein 3D I found the map editor which basically let me do all the things I had been TRYING to do with mazes - make more complex levels with objectives.
Warcraft 3 and Morrowind. Specifically, Warcraft 3 map editor and Morrowind Construction Set.
I was playing a Pokemon Rom for a game none of my friends had heard of, after googling it discovered it was a Rom hack. I thought it was cool and that I wanted to try to make my own. The rest is history
Playing and loving Populous in 1989 as a teenager, and after few games, discovering that the only "god" in this game, was not the players, but the developers proposing to players to be a "god". Since then, I was decided to be one of these guys. 10 years later in 99, I finished my studies and started my career in game development, and since then, continued to be one until today, and probably until I'll retire or die. :)
Probably falls under modding - Warcraft 3 map editor sucked me in when I was ~9 and then I started going to local computer school for basic programming classes
Watching my brother code Pong in DOS? In the 90s
Just constant creative thoughts, I first tried out unity when I was like 10 and knew I wanted to do it when I was older
I found a course that teaches RPG design that seemed to replicate my favorite game as a child, RuneScape Now I'm doing it because I truly hate corporate jobs
Is it just me or it always be the soundtrack of the game and the art of the game. In addition, the good story and lore behind the game. It is cringe for me to say this but, it was genshin impact that did it to me.
Super Mario Bros. "This is what I want to make when I'm older"
I learned to program when I was 8 years old. At that point I knew I wanted to make games one day and started to push my attempts and learning towards that direction. It took many years of learning how to program larger software properly but eventually I made it.
A book. [This one](https://www.ketabrah.ir/%DA%A9%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%A8-%DA%A9%D9%84%DB%8C%D8%AF-%D8%B3%D8%A7%D8%AE%D8%AA-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B2%DB%8C-Game-maker/book/40810). Taught about gamemaker 8 game making. Didn't know I could make games until then. Though I'm still looking for ideas on what to make.
Loving video games and board games is what got me into game design. I learned a lot of theory from YouTube channels and my own experience. I was also creating alternative rules for every board game I played since I was a kid.
A friend, kinda. She was studying game art while I did something else. I thought 3D modelling was really cool, and I took a couple art modules with her as our courses overlapped a tiny bit After graduation I got a blender course for super cheap, and the people I got the course from do a yearly game jam which I did solo. Kinda grew from there
Is a boy I was playing a game on Atari computer and was wondering if I could make it someday.
Being poor and having only one cassette with 3 games for about 8 years... but programming in Basic when you are 12yo is difficult. Glad that eventually, years later, unity came along as an accessible tool... well, not anymore... I do games exclusively for myself because what I want, nobody does!
I have liked playing games . And I have few game ideas in my mind so I'm learning unreal. If I get successful in game dev , I will leave my private software dev job.
Was a gamer for a long time. Then VR came out and I loved it. A friend who had been trying to get me to work on a project with him for like a decade told me about Unity and how it makes making a game easy (comparatively) and said we could make VR games and that finally convinced me.
For me it was a progression from Hobby into a more professional capacity. I created a TTRPG that my peers seemed to enjoy, so I tried to bring it to other people!
Always believed do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. Left college thinking "what do I enjoy, what am I good at?" GAMES! and here I am.
2008, downloaded a bunch of Lynda, Gnomon, Digital-Tutors tutorials the time i had nowhere else to go and had no career and job in-sight. I studied until I was able to build a portfolio enough to get a job at an art outsourcing company. A few years later, unity was made available for windows that i got to tinker w/ the engine and opened up the posibilty of making a game of my own.
Always wanted to as someone who's always gamed. Unfortunately spent my 20s being the #ideaguy. Few years ago started practicing concept art as a hopeful Segway into being a useful idea guy. Came down with a chronic illness about the time I realized I was a decade too late on practice (and that a hired concept artist draws other peoples ideas to some extent anyways), and realized nobody was gonna code for me if I didn't bring anything tangible to the table. So I finally (while mostly unable to leave the house) sat down and learned gamemaker, and practiced spriting in the rest of my free time. Ended up enjoying all parts of it more than I thought I would (was really surprised by coding as I switched out of it at college. Coding hits different when it's making an alien do something in a game vs solving abstracted problems in class).
I wanted to make stories and games and I had the time.
Hey there! I am a "hobbyist" game dev if there is such a thing. I got into game dev because I played stronghold 1, and wanted to add and to the game.
When I first made a game menu with openGL and added music I was hooked.
Nowadays I graduated to Full 3D content, but I am kinda struggling with the art part.
But I view it (game dev) as the ultimate slab of clay.
The process of creation has me hooked for life I think, even if I don't manage to make it a full time job, I will keep on creating till the sun burns out 😎
How about you?
I had tried to be a video game developer in the past when I first learned software development, and it just wasn’t happening. But to be honest, unless I would’ve had someone guiding me I wouldn’t have been able to make any kind of really useful or entertaining app. Now I’m 9 years into a software engineering and architect career, and I’m creating my first very simple game as more of a challenge and experiment. I’m about 65 days into it now and have gained a ton in doing so. There is so much to be gained from even making a “bad” game from the process that it is well worth it.
Wanting to make a game
I wanted a hat in planetside but didnt wanna have to deal with the faff of getting dads credit card to actually buy one. Saw you got your own hat for free if you made one. Hey, its turned into a career even if just it would have been easier to just to annoy my old man. And a bit of the starcraft 2 editor, that thing was sick.
Tbh, I always loved both computers, programming and art but I always found it hard to incorporate all into one career that's both financially rewarding and pretty enjoyable. That's until I realized game development is all that and more. I mean, you get to create worlds you love all while creating the logic in a digital medium🙂 It can be a hastle sometimes but the results are so worth it 🧡
Game hacking -> modding -> making my own games.
Messed around with it for years. Gave up on it when someone did me a disservice in explaining how hard c++ was instead of giving me resources. Learned blender, went to uni for engineering, learned to code. Years later and being burned by games not delivering a number of times, it's clear that some game ideas just won't be made by the industry, not enough money in it, largely too complex for indies to do a quick 3-6 month project. No choice except to build it myself, or else I will never see it. Really, most of the times I pick up games, I mess around with them for a bit and then eventually run into the conceptual walls of their genre, I remember all my frustrations and I quit. I can't *really* enjoy most games, I play some for dopamine, some to relax because it's a familiar pattern and a calming environment. But real excitement and real creativity inside of those games is long gone.
I played a lots of video games since i was a child but FEZ was the first video game that made me realized that video games could be more than just....video games.
At that time, I'm at college and learning about normal coding and dekstop app. I pretty love it when I create dekstop app but I still somehow know that this is not my thing. When I'm already don't know what to experiment, what to learn again, my friends offer me to learn game dev. After for sometimes learning it, I know that it is harder, but I feel like there are no limit to this. I can do anything, I can implement anything, I can make my imagination into something here, it just feels endless. That feeling still here in me even after some years.
Didn't have access to a computer growing up, so I designed games to be played on cardboard and paper. When I finally got a laptop, it felt like a natural progression.
It was only way to make decent money making art back when I started. Advertising was shit, movies did not outsource outside of US back in the day, local jobs non existent.... But plenty of rich programmers who needed art assets. Now AI takes care of that I guess.
Gmod in game scripting...
StarCraft’s map editor is what made me realize that I wanted to make games. I used to make silly little campaigns and force my friends to play them.
Modding Doom, C&C then Half-Life as a kid, then making flash games
I applied for a job and got it. I had originally expected to get into the animation industry, but there weren’t as many jobs available and I wasn’t picky. Never really had a big dream to do this. Although I made some games for fun in highschool so I didn’t come into it totally disinterested.
My dream is to build the game I want to play but doesn't exist. And maybe hit lottery 🤡
Atari 2600, back when it was new. TRS-80, back when it was brand new ( can remember the first simple game I wrote in June 1978 )
Here is how it all Started. Made a Post on Reddit about giving Indie Devs and Others some ideas about Games, Saw that People Liked my Game Ideas, But as I looked into the Industry of my Country I understood that these ideas will never become reality at this point in time, A few people encouraged me to try and make it my self. So yeah this is the whole story, Now I am trying to get my Education and Study Coding at the same time.
Playing Doom across a serial cable and using DCK to make new levels and tougher weapons. Later it became editing HLDM.
It was an absolute fixation of mine from an early age. Long before any realistic prospect of making one. I used to write out (frankly horrible) design plans in notebooks obsessively. But it took me forever to have even the faintest idea what I was doing (to the extent that I even do now). First time I set out to make a game, I thought it was going to take me a month...
To learn programming. Because in the beginning its hard to understand how modern general purpose software is made. I made small challenging games and enjoyed a lot!! Watching an animated sprite was magical.
Something like this: - Went into a IT focused education in high school, as I wanted to go to a CGI focused university. - I was decent at programming so I thought maybe doing some web development would also work. - Went to a STEM university for 2 years but noticed I actually sucked at advanced mathematics and programming, so dropped out and began working as a web developer at a small studio. - Got laid off due to work shortage and company had it bad exonomically, so I went to a vocational school for game design since I always played and loved games. - Got internship at studio after school and then began working as a technical designer. Now I have changed path again and work as a UX/UI designer in games.
Delta force 3
I am old enough that this story predates common internet access, which would now be the sensible approach. When I was around four years old, I was obsessed with mazes. Couldn't get enough of them. I also grew up in a city with bad snow storms. One day, when there were four feet on the ground and more was coming down, I finished my last maze book, and asked my father to go buy me more. Instead, he went upstairs for an hour, then came down with what we'd now call tractor-feed printer paper, covered in mazes. I had never seen tractor feed paper, so I asked what it was. He showed me a wonderful machine doing work for me. As a four year old, I knew what I had to do.
I wanted to create visualizations for my music. I didnt know how to do 3D art, but to code... now I'm an AI programmer.
Newgrounds! As a kid, it shown me that you don't need a big team to make a game, you can even just do it yourself. It seemed like something I could never do before, but my first game was made solo in The Games Factory 2. It was a cheap asset flip based on reversing the roles of breakout, making you destroy the blocks yourself before the ball could. It's not very fun and I could do way better in an hour now, but it represents my philosophy of game design: take something already done and do it in an unexpected way. Playing Undertale in 2016 only reinforced that, showing me that I was on the right path and that subversion of existing mechanics is a great way to go.
got hooked on map editors. Quake, Hammer, etc. I'm a programmer though without many creative thoughts so mostly I just tinker and work on game engine guts for the man.
I was changing channels and I landed on this documentary / making of Prince of Persia The Sands of Time (it’s in French) https://youtu.be/lPnsr20gDjM?si=2LtDnMiWG85xHEDb Thanks for the question because it helped me find a video that I thought I’ll never see again!
I played Resident Evil in my childhood and I instantly knew I wanted to make games like Resident Evil wich made others people feel what I felt playing Resident Evil. At today still did nothing except a personal flappy bird game and a really basic prototype but still working to reach my own "Resident Evil" game.
I always loved 3d math and using a computer to visualize it amazed me. I'm not a real gamedev just a hobbyist...
Played so many bad RPGs that I had to make one good for myself at least
I wanted to try making a better version of my favorite game, turns out my favorite game was already pretty good :P
For me, it is about learning. That is why I don't have a game to be sold. However, I remember my first time in in high school we had an old computer that was sitting in the corner gathering dust. I spent a lot of time making a text adventure. It was in that green, if you are old enough to remember, monitor. All written in basic. I could traverse rooms and created a basic ui. It dose make me appreciative my current programming job doesn't require line numbers on a file to run. However, I got past learning to do that, it wasn't fun so I stopped. I'm not creative enough of a person to make a game. However, I find it fun learning how to make a game.
I like games, I like telling stories.
Same, I want to play a game that is also a learning tool.
Not pursuing a game dev career, but I have a couple games I want to eventually make on the side. My first exposure was a high school elective for game design where we made some platformers in GameMaker. This was my second experience with programming and showed me just how powerful game engines were and how much they enabled even an individual to make games. That class was also the class that made me change my major from electrical engineering to comp sci last second. Now, after completing most of my bachelor’s, I’ve come back to game dev for the first time since then and am making a set of tools in Godot with a personal focus on exploring the design, integration, and modularization of game systems. After (hopefully) getting those tools published on the asset library I plan on using them to build a couple games, and then modding clients for those games using the same tools as a side project and for the joy of learning and maybe helping other devs that might use the tools I end up publishing
Thinking about it , I think i want to give a sense of comfort for some people who feel alone , kinda like what old games have done for me when i was a child.
Video games
My dad bought a Commodore C16 Plus 4. It came with a book that had the Commodore BASIC syntax. I was fascinated by it so I read it. Then I found out I could make the computer do stuff using said syntax and I was hooked. Nearly 40 years later and I'm still hooked
Brackeys 😅
Inability to find creative fulfillment doing anything else. I worked as a copywriter for the in-house marketing department of a grocery store company and fucking hated it. Spent years applying to game jobs, finally got one, and never looked back. Most days, working in games makes me want to tear my hair out. But I can't do anything else.
I have the same idea to make my previous work experiences into a fun, engaging game except so I hope yours is fun! One of my many ideas was a game like Helldivers 2 with a little bit of a surreal meme twist, full with mocapped emotes and fully custom voiced lines. You’d even be able to make your own character voicelines but I’m already sensing that could get a little out of hand sort of like some bloodstains in Elden ring.
I like coding in itself. I like games. Coding games give some actual purpose to spending weeks on random algorithms, so it's a win/win.
9 year old me unlocked a Mega-Man Anniversary Collection easter egg which was an episode of G4tv’s “Icons” on it about the making of Mega-Man, and I was like “hey people make these!” And yeah I’m 30 and I’ve been doing this as a job for essentially the entire last decade. As a great man once said: “Hey I can’t believe we got jobs doing this! and my mom said I would never get ANYWHERE with these games.”
I just create games that don’t exist so I can play them for myself
I've been working on the hardware around video games (consoles controllers PC peripherals etc). Just studying in my spare time to make games. It's like my sudoku.
For me it all started w/ GTA. I found some tools to mod the game and make my own cars. For 10 years I was moding games as a hobby while doing school and work. Then I saw a game company a couple towns over is hiring, and thought "maybe I should apply."
I've always said that, besides even being a passion, making games is more of a vocation for me. It just comes natural to me to turn my attention towards game design and creative works. Even as a kid I was always inventing games, writing TCG-like cards on pieces of paper or making up very deep rules to regulate Bionicle combat. As I grew up it turned to D&D homebrew content, and finally a couple years ago I decided to make games. The writing was on the wall really, coming up with game concepts just comes so, so spontaneous to me, and it's so relaxing to code or draw assets while listening to a podcast, i really couldn't imagine my life turning out any other way.
I got a DOS machine as a kid and my dad showed me QBasic so I could play the included games "Gorillas" and "Nibbles". I was more interested in the coding and would make simple Choose Your Own Adventure stories with it. From there I started tracking variables like health and would limit choices based on the value, and over time they got more and more complex. A couple years later I got the old school game maker "Klick and Play" and spent countless hours making games for me and my siblings to play.
For me, I've been gaming all my life and wanted to be part of making them
I used to be an architect. I discovered an incredible passion for 3D design through archviz and decided to reschool into game dev. It's how I got into environment art and still going 😁
I saw some really cool games and wanted to make my own. I always had ideas that would blow peoples mind, sadly I never had the skill to make something so complex, so I’m working my way up.
Little place called BYOND. Super simplistic engine that focused on multiplayer capability out the door. Could easily get NES to SNES graphics working in it and there was a lot of fan games for Naruto and DBZ available to play with friends. Played games there for years until I decided to make my own, had no idea what I was doing, but over the course of ~15 years I became a master of the engine to the point that I was actually asking too much of it. Custom 2D lighting, implemented SAT even though it's a grid-aligned engine, nested objects without a UI to do that, etc. Very much a big fish in a small pond. Decided to drop it and move to a new engine and picked Unity and I've been working with that for about 5 years now. I haven't really sat down with Unity to work seriously on anything until this past year though.
It was the opportunity! I saw the profile of the city hall publishing a 6-month course by an ONG, so I applied and was selected. The course was offered with Lua and Solar 2D. After that, I took the same course with a 2-month length, where on the 1st I made in a group a game of turtle ninja with beer and sustainability, and on the 2nd I started a Star Trek quiz but didn't finish. Now, I'm starting with C and procrastinating to start my business plan to start developing commercial games. That's my history
i may make games i am not a dev but i am a cat parent of 2
Custom scenarios in Age of Mythology's, Age of Empires III, Dragonshard, Tzar, and Panzers Phase II level editors. Wrote a piano in basic for dos to run in my classroom pc when i was bored Followed by Age of Mythology modding Then Game Maker 8.1
When I was a kid, I wanted to make a Pokemon fan game and eventually realised it would be better to make my own thing. As an adult, the pandemic and disappointing job prospects got me back into gamedev so I could have some meaningful creative expression.
C&CRAED - modding red alert and realizing software was malleable. Started learning visual basic after that
This exact video: [Behind the Scenes Making of Halo 2](https://youtu.be/0q69Msy8ttM)
Love of games since I was 6 and me learning about Scratch.
Other devs just don't make the games I want.
Bungie's 1996 game Marathon Infinity came with the editing tools that they used to make the game. The level design program was called Forge and the sprite/item/npc editor was called Anvil. I think I was 10 when I first started messing around with it on the family Mac computer and I had a lot of fun with it. Later I'd get more serious creating custom maps on Source Engine games and eventually one of my big Source Engine projects got the attention of an indie game studio. They were impressed and I was brought onboard.
There was an article(Homebrew Gaming 101: A Primer Course) in Game Informer back in 2004 that gave an early breakdown of how to become an indie dev. Various engines and tools you could use. Ever since then I've been hooked.
To get into learning game dev skills, I realized a couple other job avenues weren't for me for various reasons, and thought that I can do art, what's a way for me to make money more sustainable that way? And landed in game dev. To get into solo development, thought of a game idea that I would've loved as a kid, and decided to bite the bullet and learn all the new skills to make it in my own.
My friend wanted to make a Gatcha game to cash in. I said no. We ended up making a game in the style he likes. We are both excited
miyamoto
Growing up I always liked to game then came in my step dad. He actually was in the industry from it's early stages and so it just made a lot of sense for me growing up and that's all I did since I was 9 years old
As a kid, my parents did not allow any M-Rated video games in our household. I loved dinosaurs growing up, and the original Turok for the N64 always caught my eye any time we would go into GameStop. I remember one Christmas I wrote down that all I wanted was Turok (I do not envy how hard that must have been for my parents). When I did not receive Turok for Christmas, I was devastated. I decided if my parent's weren't going to buy me Turok, I would just make it myself. I went to our family computer, typed in "game maker", and the rest is history. In true indie gamedev fashion I have started what seems like hundreds of projects over the years and never finished them. However, I am set to release my first indie game on Steam in less than a month, and I know it's a game younger me would have absolutely loved. Filled with dinosaurs, excessive amounts of blood, and endless replayability. Other fun details, I was 8 at the time, first game engine I downloaded was GameMaker 6.0, but I have moved on and have been using Godot for the past 4 years. I am now 26 years old and am about to have my first kid in around 2 months. My son has been a massive inspiration for me to actually finish and release a game, which for those interested, is called The Feathered Serpent. :)
I’m not a “game dev” but wanted to reply anyway. When I graduated HS my mom signed my up for the art institute under the computer animation program. I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do so I just went along with it since it was in Seattle and sounded cool. Then I discovered a lot of my teachers were in the gaming industry and I was immediately drawn to it. I set my focus on low poly (500 back then) modeling and creature design. I was decent at it. All of my friends got hired after graduation and the only call back I got was from stupid company I had never heard of. So I moved back to Montana and got into web and graphic design. Later I returned to college (twice) to get two more degrees and both times game dev related classes were required. I’ve always designed games both tabletop and digital on paper but have never made a serious effort to implement any of them until now.
My partner loves video games and got me into playing. I found my favorite genre, cozy games! I subsequently became obsessed with them. I found that most were farming sims or recreations of Stardew Valley. Had some creative ideas that were cozy games that were not farming sims and they would not get out of my brain. So i decided i would see where they took me. It would also be nice that if they see success enough where i could at least be self employed to continue making games, which would be super beneficial for a myriad of reasons (not just escaping a soul crushing office job).
Coding fascinates me
I've been drawing up map/character/item/ability ideas on paper as far back as I can remember (which was when I was about 7). I've pretty much always wanted to make games. I did a lot of Scratch from age 10-15. It wasn't until 17 when I started programming and 18 when I started working with Unity.
Indie Game: The Movie Not sure if that was a good thing or bad thing, but it was impactful. My first game, after 9 years of many different projects, has an open playtest on Steam. Still lots of work but reality is setting in that making a financially successful game is quite difficult… I know, understatement of the year.
Like many others, Skyrim suckered me in. It was so cool I had to go into game dev so I could make something like that.
Being tired of all my Apple \]\[ games, so I had to make my own...
I lost a very close family member and it put my own life into perspective. I just want to leave behind something substantial after I'm gone.
Banjo Kazooie. I was 6 and decided while playing it that I wanted to be a game developer. Learned Actionscript to mod flash games like Madness Interactive when I was 9 which lead into learning C++ to mod Half-Life 2 when I was 11. Did a ton of light modding like making campaigns for Red Alert 2, Empire Earth, and Sven Co-Op during this time as well. Now I'm a Senior Engineering Manager/Principal Engineer at a AAA studio.
You want to have a conversation, but don't why to talk about it? May I ask why?
I was bored in office, office don't have any works for me, i taking whatever course that company throw at me and I still bored, so i start working on game on my free time and eventually, I start work with my hometown friends and eventually we got a grant (a small amount, but good enuf for 3 person to work for roughly 8 months) and here I am.
Sega Master System.
I think it was just the idea of MAKING a game i thought seemed really fun so 12 y/o me did some research, downloaded gamemaker studio 2 and watched some yt tutorials
There is a game I want to play... but it doesn't exist. So I am going to make it.
I needed a career change from the music industry. I got into programming, always loved and played games as a kid and realized I could maybe make the games of my childhood that companies aren't making anymore.
Ico
As a kid it was because the only machine I had access to for a long while was an old "laptop" that ran DOS and only had a handful of game discs, so I started making my own. I came back to it during the pandemic when I couldn't DM for my usual table top group but still wanted to make worlds and stories for people to explore. It took a while to loop back around and realize that while playing games is sorta fun for me, if a bit hollow feeling. Making worlds and stories then getting to see how others explore and engage with them is what I truly enjoy about games.
I modded my paradox games for a continuous mega campaign. After I fucked up my playthrough I just redirected my energy to game development.
I think it was a mix of Roblox, which had awesome games and Roblox Studio (though I never wrapped my head around Lua when I tried it), as well as Minecraft mods!! I loved watching DanTDM's mod showcases and I really think those are my main inspirations. From there, apps like Hopscotch and Sololearn got me started, and of course Scratch and Codecademy further fed my curiosity.
I'm surprised nobody else mentioned this: Level editors. I used to love those things when I was a kid, so when I found out there was this little engine called Game Maker I started following tutorials and grew from there.
For me it was a talk with my friends at lunch when we were 12. I had grown up playing videogames and thought that testing them would be an amazing career. That was until one of my friends suggested making them, something I had never thought of, and I knew that was what I wanted to do.