I’m kind of bored right now during this free period I have in school, so I figured I ought to do a blog article. I’ve been thinking a lot about game development over the past couple days, and I’m really starting to get into it again after my long post-SQUAM hiatus.

I’ve never been amazing at any specific form of art. Now, I believe that if I practiced any one art form enough, I could become good at it, but there’s never really been one that drove me to work at it. Keep in mind, this is just referring to the act of making the art. I love admiring art (including music and writing as well,) but I don’t enjoy creating a lot of it.

However, I’ve pretty well excelled in most school subjects. I’ve always been proficient at math, specifically. My writing isn’t so great, but I’ve done well enough with it to ace all of my English classes.

I’ve always enjoyed video games, but I didn’t really think about them as a form of art until I grew out of my early childhood. Up until that point, they were like interactive cartoons to me, which was still a pretty neat way of looking at them. When I did, I was fascinated with the idea of making them. For whatever reason, it was the one form of art that made me think “I would be willing to learn anything to make that.” For a long while, that idea just stuck in my head pointlessly, as I had no concept of how to actually make a game. Then, my dad introduced me to programming.

I was maybe nine or ten. Perhaps eight even? He found a programming language called SiMPLE, or something like that. It was basically a fork off of BASIC. It made for my first exposure to understanding the processes that a computer goes through to do anything. At the time, I simply looked at the example programs, copied them down, and tweaked with them a bit. I didn’t really understand the code, but I was starting to see how I could change it in order to change the actual programs.

Then I found Game Maker somehow. Like with SiMPLE, everything I did was copied from something else. I especially liked the platformer example that YoYo Games had, and I constantly made Mario and Rayman fangames based on it. Then, eventually, I started branching off to making games from scratch. At the time, they were still fan games, but they were my own creation. I didn’t touch GML then, as it kind of scared me, but I still constructed programs from the drag and drop interface. No matter what though, my projects were always too ambitious, and I never really “finished” a game.

Fast forward to recently. After a long break from doing anything with games and shifting my focus to school work, I suddenly felt unfulfilled. There was something missing, as if my life were nothing but a series of processes without output. Sure, I was getting good grades, but they didn’t mean anything to me. I kind of broke down, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with myself. When school let out for summer, I used my free-time to consider the issue. Eventually, I decided that I had to get back to games. That summer, I dedicated entire days to working on SQUAM and, though I didn’t get it finished as early as I would have liked, I completed it and realeased it to the world.

The process of making it had its ups and downs, but I mostly enjoyed it. What I really liked, however, was seeing people play it. I liked watching them discover ways to do things, and solutions to puzzles. To make people light up with something that I had created was just awesome to me. It still is.

So, yeah, this has been mostly just a stream-of-consciousness post, but I wanted to put it out there that I love making games not only because the process of making them can be fun, but because I love it when people play games. I love playing games, and I want to pass more of that onto others. It’s as simple as that.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, I know it’s sort of random and scatter-brained, but I felt like writing it. Be sure to check out my games if you would like, and feel free to comment on this post or message me on Game Jolt with anything you would like to tell me.