I’m 33 now and have been fiddling with computer games almost my entire life. I started on my C64, then moved on to things like Click-n-Play, spent thousands of hours with the Build Engine map editor (still do!), some console building programs like Fighter and RPG maker, played around a lot with WorldCraft (Hammer is a clone of it), Hammer, ES editor, Game Maker, and lots and lots of little game editing things in between.
Basically I’ve always loved to fiddle, but have never been very successful at anything because I’m a suck-ass student and time and money have never been a luxury for me.
I built it two years ago. Released about a month ago on Steam. It is not my “best work” as it is a couple years old now and built on Unity 3.5.7. I wish I would have worked on it more before the release but im now building a nice new update with multiplayer and a better controller mapping system. :\ Im learning everyday though.
I started coding dos and pascal, when I was 16…before windows, internet, or the ‘mouse’…
I am 47…developing on and off…for the last 25 years…
I’m currently working on 5 active projects, when I’m working , it will be between 10 and 14 hours a day .my biggest problem is organization and project planning.
I have so many pieces of paper with sketches and notes piling up!
doing it all …takes its toll …but also has its rewards
if I were to work on just 10 percent of the ideas in my mind and work 7 days a week 365 days are year, I would still need about 15 years to finish…
Been coding professionally for around 13 years now. It started when I was quite young though (10-12) - found a magazine with some programming article (some form of Basic I think) in it and thought it was amazing… Never dreamed of making a career out of it though - not until I was asked to do a small programming job for a company I worked for.
As for game development, I just mess around with it and discovered Unity about 6 years ago. Aiming to move into games full time one day - but for now, I have to stick with what is paying the bills.
I’ve been blessed to be doing this for going on 16 years professionally (7 years prior to honing the skills) and am 39. Skill set is in art, animation, comic books, design, programming, management, author, speaker, consultant, etc (Everything at one point or another). Lots of triple ‘A’ companies to start-ups and indies. You can check out my past work on my site in the signature below.
Great thing about our industry is it’s still young and open for innovative ideas and always looking for talented guys and girls to make beautiful things for everyone to enjoy. Thank you again for the question.
I’m 29 (30 in July ), and started developing in BASIC from my dads old computer books when I was 9, though I started drawing when I was a child. I picked up music for about 8 years starting in highschool, before getting back into anything game wise. In total, 20 years. 5 Years where I meant serious business about this being my career path, being in games in some way, shape, or form.
I am 49…Started programming on a TI994A in the early 80’s…I have a bad habit of moving from game engine to game engine and rarely complete a game…I just enjoy game making as a hobby and have no deadlines unless I set them for myself…Just having fun…
I am 28 years old.
Started becoming interested in Game Development 6 years ago when i started my bachelor education.
Been using Unity for around 5 years i think.
Just finished my master’s degree (M.Sc) in Games Technology.
Been working a bit in the industry while being under education to gain experience and a decent resume. Starting my first full-time job as a Game Developer next month
I responded to your other thread and thought I should expand on that to say there was a time I used to spend a massive amount of time working on this stuff.
I am 48 and have been doing game development for about 32 years now. Started programming on the TI-99/4A in late 1982 or early 1983. All BASIC programming at that time.
And here it is my first computer (image courtesy of OldComputers.net):
It was this machine that first opened the door to programming for me and as a teenager I spent a lot of time mowing lawns and shoveling snow so I had money to buy the few books and magazines available at that time on programming. This was where I first learned modular programming and through trial-and-error realized the importance of breaking things down into smaller chunks using procedures. It was also where I first learned what I call optimization-by-design out of necessity.
I was inspired at the time by games such as Parsec:
and Tunnels of Doom:
I also thought Pirate Adventure was pretty cool. It was one of, if not the, first text adventure games I ever played.
My next computers were the C64 and C128 (which I basically just used as a C64 anyway).
My first programming on the C64 was in BASIC working on simple text adventures. I thought it was very cool to be able to create a virtual world. Then I started messing around with sprites and tile sets (custom character sets they were called) to learn how to make arcade style games with graphics. And quickly found BASIC was pretty limited in what it could do. Rather than buying a compiler I decided to learn Assembly language. It was very empowering and I found that I liked programming in Assembly much more than I did in BASIC. It just seemed very logical and obviously it was lean and mean. I also learned PASCAL on the C64. Promal, Comal and a few other languages. Always my focus was just on learning and mastering this development stuff. I would attempt to clone bits of games I played. To figure out how it could be done in the best way. Which often meant completely throwing out what I had and restarting from scratch armed with what I had learned in the last iteration.
Then I got an Amiga 600. What a machine! I spent a lot of time working on game development using AMOS and later Blitz Basic. Then I got into some Assembly language programming and finally ended up with C and the Gamesmith API. During this time I released a few games for free into the PD (public domain) through Aminet.
Then around 1997 I got my first Windows PC that had Windows 95 and spent my time learning DOS programming with QBasic then quickly moved to DJGPP (a port of the GCC compiler) and Allegro. This reminded me very much of using C and Gamesmith on the Amiga. I made a vertical scrolling space shooter and released for free into the PD.
Then I moved into Blitz Basic and later into Blitz 3D. In early 2002 I released my first shareware game. It was an artillery game where you controlled a gun turret and attempted to destroy the enemies who were trying to land. I took a break for many years from active game development because of this shareware game. It was when I learned that marketing is the key to success. So I spent about 7 years or so studying and testing marketing in general and Website/ Digital Product marketing in particular. I did only a couple game dev related projects per year during this time. Then after completing my marketing journey I came back to messing around with game stuff a lot more and got into 3D game dev with Blitz 3D. Then got into Direct X and Direct 3D. Always just continually learning and making little games for myself and close friends to check out. Then got into C# and XNA and had a few game projects going on. Of course, one was another shmup. I think I must have made about 20 different shmups over the years on various machines. Also during this time I spent a lot of time working in Anim8or, Blender and other graphics programs. Music creation software and so forth.
Then I finally ended up in C# and Unity around September 2013 and joined these forums a few months later.
So… there you have it. Probably more than you cared to know but that is basically my history as far as game dev stuff is concerned.
I started out programming a lot in basic on the Commodore 64, but also messed with GWBASIC, QBASIC & later Borland Delphi heavily, making pong, breakout, and eventually a few galaga style clones. In the early 2000s I was employed as a programming in a language called Quancept for a few years, then I started my own web design company and learned PHP, Javascript, and MySQL.The next several years I sold PHP scripts and Wordpress themes for a living. Then I switched to writing Wordpress plugins and lived off of that for about 4 years. Since 2008 I’ve been developing games full time (made a 3d FPS flash game back then.) I picked up several languages along the way, such as Ruby, PERL, and C#. I’ve been using Unity full time for a little less than 2 years. I remember evaluating Unity for development in the late 2000s, but the editor was Mac OS X only at the time, so I went with CopperCube instead
), and started developing in BASIC from my dads old computer books when I was 9, though I started drawing when I was a child. I picked up music for about 8 years starting in highschool, before getting back into anything game wise. In total, 20 years. 5 Years where I meant serious business about this being my career path, being in games in some way, shape, or form.
