I love videogames. I’ve loved them since I was a tiny, boggle-eyed babby, too small to really play them myself but watching other people play their way through the brightly-coloured worlds of the old Sega Master System. From the moment I could hold a controller onwards, they’ve been an enourmous part of my life. And fuck me with a steel broom handle, have they ever gotten sophisticated over the years! Somewhere along the line, I went from laughing at the idling animations in Crash Bandicoot to crying over Thane’s death-scene in Mass Effect 3. My point is, they’ve become a medium in which it’s possible to tell some pretty amazing stories.

Then, a handful of years ago, I discovered this little program called Game Maker. Confession time: I know nothing about programming and coding. I know less about programming and coding than Elton John knows about vaginas (well, presumably at any rate. I suppose even though he’s massively homosexual, he might take an academic interest. I don’t fucking know. It’s not relavent. Anyway, I digress- we’re getting off-topic).

The point I was trying to make before I so rudely interrupted myself is that suddenly I had access to this program that let me make games without the necessity of having to teach myself how to talk computer.

Anyway, fast-forward a few years and despite GM’s limitations, I’m finally able to make games of sufficient quality that they might be worth sharing. I suppose I’d wanted to find a way to share my projects for a while, but finding an appropriate platform had always seemed like kind of an obstacle. Discovering GameJolt when I was already most of the way through a project was a stroke of luck.

The project in question, as a lot of you might realise, was Victor Victorious. Victor actually started out as a lot more of a slapdash game than it eventually ended up being: little more than a repository for small, interesting ideas. It didn’t take long, however to snowball into a massive, months-long build. You know how it is: you start off testing a new running animation you’ve come up with and before you know it you’ve programed two boss-fights and a moral choice system.

I mentioned how games have gotten to a point where they can tell vibrant, impactful stories, right? Well, that’s almost what Victor was about: I wanted to tell the kinds of stories I found interesting and which nobody else really seemed to be doing. I wanted to tell stories that rather than being ‘epic’ were more ‘cosmic’ in scope and surreal in style. That’s pretty vague, and I’ll have to explain properly in a later post. For now, the gist is that I got into this because one of the games I wanted to play didn’t happen to exist yet, so I figured it was about time I made it.

What I didn’t expect when joining up with GameJolt is the sense of community you almost instantly find yourself feeling. The ability not just to play other dev’s games (sometimes as they’re being developed) but to offer feedback and see the process of experimentation that led to their creations is really kind of an honour.

I’m new here: I’m not yet really a part of the community. But I can tell there’s something special happening here, and it’s a fucking awesome thing to be a part of.