Once upon a time…
Nah that’s not how we’re doing this. Hi, my name is Chris and I have been a gamer since, well since I could pick up my Nintendo controller and play Super Mario Brother on the Snes.
Let’s get the boring bit out of the way first… I’ve always had an interest in Game Development, although I never actually had the resource at a young age to pursue it as an option. So I went to school, found IT was the closest thing to computer games and so I invested my time in that. Eventually, I went onto college, however, having not really done any programming I continued down the route of computing. This was good as it introduced me to web and software development. Started programming with Delphi Pascal if anyone remembers that.
I then went on to University where I studied Web development as I didn’t have the right programming knowledge for computer games (and still don’t). I was still working out what I wanted to do in life and I realised Education was a big factor for me. Learning was essential to everything and I wanted to help other people achieve their goals. So I became a teacher at a local college!
For the most part being a teacher was great. I got to see other students learn and I could take a bit of satisfaction in knowing I helped them through their education. However, being a teacher also made me realise that personally, my education stopped the day I started in that post. You teach the same thing over and over, every year, just to new students so you never really expand your knowledge.
I decided to leave my teaching career and move to become a full time web developer. This has again been great and my learning of new technologies and programming methods has rapidly increase which I’m grateful for. However, I’ve still always wanted to do game development and so I decided to spend time learning game engines to one day make some games I can release and be proud of. Thus, Squixl Games was born.
I have been spending a lot of time time watching videos, practicing with game engines and trying to understand how to build games from start to finish. I’ve come to realise that game development is not just programming a game and releasing it. There’s so much to do, there’s programming, there’s design work, there’s audio, planning, project management, policy writing, web development, testing, graphc work (2d / 3d). There’s just so much to learn and I’m very behind with skills and have a lot to catch up on.
So I have been working on games for a number of years, I started with Construct 2 so help me understand programming logic and general gaming principles. I created two games with Construct 2 and released them a few years ago. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to keep up the learning and my mental health got the better of me. I didn’t put any time into any game development or even maintaining the games I had. I lost my account and the games went with them.
Fast forward to the present day. I am now very keen and eager to progress my learning of game development and I so I decided to start by learning a new, more advanced game engine, Unity.
I’ve always had my eye on Unity and I tried learning it a few years ago with my friend (also named Chris). So I decided to pick it up again and use my games I lost as a starting point for development.
I have re-created Tap That and Reactagon but this time in Unity. This has given me a fantastic basis to rebuild from the ground up, refactor the code to improve the games from what they once were and take my game development journey to the next level.
I can’t wait to see where I go with this and hope that everyone will enjoy my games and join me in this journey.
All feedback is welcome and I hope you enjoy what we at Squixl Games are going to make moving forward.
Take care and Keep Playing Games
~ Chris