oss << “Hello, ” << adjective << ” World!”;
So I decided to ruin my life make a video game. Ever since I first saw that little red guy bouncing around the screen while barely old enough to hold a bottle, I’ve loved video games. Back then video games were a hobby only adolescent boys enjoyed, so it was unthinkable to take gaming seriously after puberty let alone make it a career. Nowadays, games are enjoyed by millions worldwide and are created by passionate people coerced into harsh working conditions.
College was never a question for me – literally, because the answer would have been, “Haha! No”. Pre 2000, college was for smart kids or kids with money. My family didn’t have much and I wasn’t exactly racking up the A’s, so grinding right out of High School was my destiny. Bouncing between service and odd jobs for years, my passion for art and technology always led me back to education. A photography class here, a theater class there, but the fear of college floated away as confidence took hold. “If I can do roofing in the middle of a Southern California heat wave, I can do math.”
A practical degree that was tangentially related to gaming could actually be possible. I settled on Computer Engineering – learn about computer hardware, software, and maybe even land a job helping to create cutting edge graphics with nVidia! Little did I realize a bachelors in engineering doesn’t prepare you for interviews or jobs or much really, but it was enough to trust my ability to see a software project through. And so I completed and released a side-scroller prototype to test my limits.
One night through the sweaty haze of a fever dream, inspiration struck. It was that twilight, in-between time of graduating or my first engineering job or more likely a bad case of covid. And it wasn’t your usual, ‘naked and scrambling across campus late on your first day’ kind of dream. No, I dreamt of a man desperately begging for a job. I may have envisioned another suffering in order to distance myself from an all too familiar situation, so I needed this person to win. I needed to deliver this character the kind of underdog, fight like hell catharsis only a video game could achieve. The Kafkaesque hallucination grew as the days and months passed and so did his story.
Making a video game is a monumental task akin to chiseling a statue from an entire mountain. From the point of view of a solo developer, this seems almost impossible knowing modern games are made with dozens or hundreds of people. Visuals, audio, software, and countless other gaming systems must play together seamlessly. Game success stories like Undertale and Stardew Valley prove it is attainable! Sacrifices to lengthy development may be required along the way, but I am nothing if not stubborn.
adjective = ””;
-Ryan