I got into game development around 4 years ago. I was in my last year at college and we were challenged to create a game for our last assignment. My teacher was a great person, he was really enthusiastic about games and taught me how to code in C#.
So we got started on the game, and first things first was what game should we make? We all had ideas and presented them back to the class. Mine didn't win (I'll tell you the idea another time if you'd like to know). However, the idea that did win was a fantastic one. It was a randomly generated dungeon crawler. The most exciting thing about this game was that the possibilities were essentially endless. Each level was different from the next and you never got the same level twice (unless you played it for an ungodly amount of hours), the items were different, the enemies were different, it was a really fantastic idea.
Now, the biggest challenge with developing games in college is that all of the computers are VERY restricted. Yes we had Visual Studio (A piece of software used to code C#) , but that was about it. No game engines, no unity, no unreal engine, nothing. So we created our own running off of Visual Studio timer components! We managed around 30 fps in the end which was pretty good!
An picture of the semi-completed game.
Anyway, after college had finished I had an overwhelming feeling that I could not let this game go to waste and never get into the hands of people. So, my lecturer and I decided we would make the game in our own time using a proper game engine. As the game is of quite significant size, we spent a long time on game design (longer than I'd recommend actually) to try and get the game right. This is when I realized that it doesn't matter what the fuck we think. We may think the walls should be blue and the player thinks they should be green. So we decided that we would put game decisions out to the community to get their thoughts, this way we could create a game the PLAYER wants.
This whole process was a bit of an eye opener for about what I wanted to do in the gaming industry. I found myself sitting at my laptop with hundreds of lines of code, just day dreaming about all the fantastic ideas we could have in this game. Then when I found that I had to code them, I just became unmotivated.
Finally, I found myself drifting further and further away from the game development / coding and more into the game design side of the gaming industry. Coming up with new ideas all of the time. That is how @gamesbykalon was born. I wanted a way of other like minded people to come together to create amazing game designs for the game developers that love to code and get stuck in with unity and unreal engine, but may not have the developed ideas to create a successful game.
I hope you enjoyed learning about my gaming story, now let me know yours in the comments below.
- Kalon Martin
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