A couple of people have actually asked me how I got into game development in the first place, and since I've got a headache and nothing else prepared today- why not?
So probably my earliest attempt at game development took place on an old Windows 98 laptop that my dad let me use periodically. I couldn't work out how to connect it to the Internet and in retrospect I'm not sure that it was possible to even do so since it was pretty decrepit.
However, I still somehow figured out how to make little choose-your-own-adventure games in Windows Batch Script. They were really simple and mostly unfinished since I'd just start a new one whenever I got bored, but it was fun enough for a 6 or 7 year old.
After that, I found Macromedia Flash 2008 wherein I created a bunch of really bad games that basically only utilized buttons since I couldn't quite work out how to use ActionScript at the time. I uploaded many of them to Newgrounds and all of them got banned, but I also uploaded a couple on Kongregate which I guess is stuck there for all eternity. One of which is on the account I use currently, but the other is actually on another account which I can't be bothered to find at the moment.
Unfortunately, after this I kinda got demotivated with making games and resigned to playing them a bunch and I decided that I'd become a physicist, since I thought it'd be a bit more dignified and grown-up than being a silly lil game developer. Over the next few years, I began to want to become a software engineer instead, since physics became really quite tedious and I really enjoyed programming.
At some point a couple of years ago, I kinda started thinking about the fact that years of not using my creative brain had actually damaged and degraded it fairly significantly. I was a bit unhappy about that since I think some part of me still really wanted to be a game developer, so I took a bit of thought and decided that being dignified and grown-up is not actually very useful or cool or fun and it's way more cool to say fuck that and literally follow my life-long aspiration.
So this happened in about 2016 I think when I decided I wanted to get into game development. At around the same time, I also made the decision that I want to be indie. Both of these decisions were helped and inspired in no small part by my friend Magos, who made similarly tough decisions at around this time.
So I did a bit of digging around and I found the Phaser framework for HTML5 games. At this point I was extremely bad at pretty much anything that wasn't programming, and even looking back at my code around that time... YIKES.
But I did it anyway and made a few unfinished games with my boyfriend(who contributed the art assets primarily since he's a proper real artist boy), then I realized that I'm a terrible team-mate and stopped doing that pretty quickly.
The problem with Phaser is that it's not super easy to make standalone executables with it, so this means that distributing on proper marketplaces like Steam becomes quite difficult. At this point I had no hope of actually distributing on Steam of course, since this was around when Greenlight was a thing and even the best moments of my games were not very good.
I wanted to try to learn a proper visual engine like Unity, though I had my doubts about how intuitive it might be and the learning curve kind of made me hesitant. At some point, I bit the bullet and spent like 3 or 4 days trying to learn Unity. However, Unity on Linux is absolute trash so I decided fuck that I'll just use Godot.
From there I made some pretty bad small projects, some less bad small projects, some kinda okay medium projects and now I'm here- makin a pretty cool medium project.
That's pretty much all I've got so far, and I'm still not really "into" game development- I've not really got a product that I consider a proper attempt at a game. Mass O' Kyzt is the closest contender, but since that game has so many issues and silly things that I would not do the same way now, I definitely don't consider it representative of my real abilities.
Anyway, thanks for watching, and feel free to let me know in the comments what kinds of things got you into gamedev! Stay tuned for more videos about my games and things related to my games, goodbye!
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