The dream of my younger self

When I was in elementary school (about 10 years old) I wrote that my dream was to become a “video game maker”. The stories and experiences from video games were so amazing that I wanted to be part of that. But I was a kid, I had no clue where to start and when I attempted to pick up books from the library about making games I was completely lost. “Making video games must be for adults” I thought, and so I decided to leave the problem to my older self.

In high school I was able to take a computer science course and learn the basics of programming. The teacher was very open to our ideas as students and when the final project came around he let us create whatever we wanted as long as it displayed the skills we learned in the class. I decided to make a small game and had a lot of fun doing so (got a good grade on it as well).

After that rush of achievement I started to feel like anything was possible and decided now that was time to make my dream game. I downloaded unity, opened up a new project, and was completely overwhelmed with what I saw. I didn’t even know where to start and the tutorials I found didn’t have the content I wanted. Really I was just looking for a magical “make my game” button, not realizing those tutorials I was skipping were actually about fundamentals. I was arrogant and when I failed to meet unrealistic goals, I gave up.

I have to say, I let that failure in high school really stick with me for far too long. In university I had an opportunity to work on a game as part of the video game club, I passed. I told myself I was too busy with school work and running my Dungeons and Dragons game to have another hobby. All these excuses to avoid possibility of failure.

It was only when I came across the story of Tom Francis and his game “Gunpoint” that I realized that I was putting too much pressure on myself. Thinking of game ideas that were way beyond my skill (scope creep, overscopping, it has a lot of names) in which the only outcome was failure. I needed to do something more realistic. That’s how I started working on my current game. I hope to share more details about it soon, so stay tuned (wink wink, sign up for newsletter).

This time, the dream will become reality.