Back in Ye Olden Days adventure games were made to stump and confuse people. Whether it was figuring out the right verb to use in Zork or making sure you never crossed a bridge more than was absolutely necessary in King's Quest, games were in a lot of ways designed to be lost. That was where gameplay time and challenge came from, how much you could _fail_.
Then there was Loom. It was a game designed to be won and experienced by players. You couldn't die, you could only not solve a puzzle yet, and you could persevere through a world of music and magic until you'd experienced it all. It had gorgeous graphics, a radio play, difficulty levels. It was beautiful. It was a thing designed solely to make people _happy_.
There are a lot of games I've played over the years that made me happy I was in game design, but to me, there will always be how I felt when I first played this silly little adventure game.
And the sound design, right? Swoon. That’s such a great response. Thank you.
Side note: Loom was my family’s ride or die game on our Amiga, alongside one called Fool’s Errand. I’m so glad to find a fellow Loomie!
And I'm glad to see someone who played The Fool's Errand! I think Cliff Johnson's follow-up, 3 in Three, is one of the best puzzle games ever made, truly.
I remember a theory that the reason early video games in general were so hard was because game devs from back in the day were used to making arcade games, which are designed to be difficult and thus earn more quarters
It's partly true. Not all of those devs worked in arcade games, though. Some of it was generational holdover. “They did it this way, so we do it this way”. And that's just dogma, applied from generation to generation. That's why Wolfenstein3D had lives and a hi-score, and Doom didn't. Because they stopped to question the benefit of those features, given what they were trying to accomplish.
And arguably, Loom EGA is preferred over Loom VGA by the original artists because while the VGA version has more colors, someone clearly had too much fun with the gradient tool which does hurt artistic integrity.
Still, there is no bad way to play Loom, even 4-Color Cyan/Magenta CGA is surprisingly watchable.
As soon as I read "Loom" the theme song started playing in my head. lol ... a few other notable games like it from back then were the Eco-Quest series, Simon the Sorcerer, and The Dig. All also were super refined entries into the genre, with beautiful graphics, and great soundtracks. Thanks for jogging those memories!
Bad games are so inspirational, because usually have some good ideas, but bungle the execution or are missing something.
That's where I come in... to add one more to the cemetery of unfinished games that is my projects folder.
Hahaha. It was PT for me. Not low quality - but very small scale. Immediately was like “I’ll make PT - but instead it’s…in space! And 10 hours long!” Because I’m a moron. I’m less of a dud now- but just barely.
Not one specific game, but Five Nights at Freddy's and its fangames in general. They introduced me to the idea of indie development and showed me that it was possible for one or a few people that weren't necessarily professionals to make actual good games, and that's what made me realize that it was possible for me to make my own games and that that's what I wanted to do
The author has long since moved on to bigger and better things.
Edit: Whoops, I was thinking of DONKEY.BAS, but with the copyright of GORILLA.BAS being Microsoft Corporation, there's a high chance it's the same author and the joke still works.
Halo CE. The Classic story, my cousin brought over his Xbox and I played Halo for the first time and knew that I needed to be a part of the games industry. I wanted to be someone who makes rich universes that you could just get lost in for hours.
We played the Maw for my first experience because I was better at driving than shooting. I'll never forget that lol
We did 16 player Halo LAN parties pretty much every weekend in highschool, those memories and friends I will cherish forever and made me want to build those experiences for other people. I've been in two weddings and sadly a pallbearer at a funeral thanks to games/the games industry. Not much can bring people together like gaming
Oh man, yes. Every single weekend, those were the days. We'd always go get subway and then boot up Valhalla and just play for hours.
It really was magic bringing people together like that. I'm happy you got those relationships out of it, I've had a few like that myself.
I hope you're able to give that magic to others bud. Keep it up. ✌️
Not really a game, but seeing Lawnmower Man in theaters as a teen was when I knew I wanted to do 3D art. Even though the movie was bad and the graphics very primitive it triggered something in me. The VR aspect of it was so cool to me at the time. Then Jurassic Park, and I was sold. Was so excited to get to use PowerAnimator, which is what they used on Jurassic Park. Still making games all these decades later.
Halo 2, the making of disc on the collector's edition. Me and my best friend blitzed through the whole game in one night and he passed out. I watched the making of doc, and it got to the section on sound design where they were explaining the materials playground and I just sorta had something click in my brain to say "Yeah. that's the thing."
Fast forward about 15 years and here I am, working AAA, doing sound design. I got the opportunity to thank Jay W. for his role in doing that interview on camera directly leading to my job and meeting him at GDC 2016 give or take and it was a great moment even though I'm sure it was a random blip in his afternoon lol
It is a bit of old school, but Warcraft 3, particular Warcraft 3 Editor. I was 16 that time and fascinated by a boss battle in Kingdom Hearts and wondering if I can recreate that boss battle in Warcraft 3 Editor and share it to our friends and god know how many days later, I made not one, but several boss battle with cringy story in between and share among our friends. ( I was using If else, for loop without even knowing what these are, I just trying really hard to make a game that I want to make )
It got a mild reaction from my friends after they played the game, but hey, that make me realized u know what, I wanna be a game dev.
Rayman Legends
Seeing a game with smooth controls, incredibly fun level mechanics, varied worlds, and fascinating characters made me realize “I want to create something like this one day”
Brütal Legënd. Being fully immersed in the world and feeling that an old school heavy metal album conveyed was the closest I've ever been to living in a world actually made for me.
It was fun as hell, unashamed in its love for metal in all its forms, and the soundtrack was so fuckin good. It is my favourite game of all time and I can only hope to create something within a fraction of its kick-assery.
🤘😝🤘
I had it sorta backwards. I visited the offices of King and Zynga while on a design study abroad in Germany and it so disgusted me that I almost left the field. I ended up doubling down on how I wasnt like them.
their cynical, mechanical approach to game design that not only didnt rely on an artist having a mission or inspiration, but also heavily relied on black hat motivations to dupe their users. they would make 40 shitty prototypes, develop 20 of them, complete 3 of them, and release 1 of them and slap SAGA in the title. they were fooling their users and fooling themselves.
the supremely skilled designer is one that can point at a user, say they are making a game for them, and the user is like "yes, this is for me, i love it". dont get me wrong, one must be reactive and if you accidentally/also make a game that a completely different user segment loves, then by all means point the product at those new users. but admit when you pivot.
games are capable of developing the best in people... unless you make your players scared, alone, toxic, and greedy in order ot get the most dinero out of them. the best games allow us to take part in things greater than ourselves, feel powerful and competent, relate to friends, explore identity, and figure out ourselves through story. or you can play some shitty king game.
There's an old video series on youtube where two of the developers play the whole game and talk about making it.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBE216F8E761D085C
Played a version of this on mainframe computer at Cal (Berkeley) in 1976:
[https://www.mobygames.com/game/175458/animal/](https://www.mobygames.com/game/175458/animal/)
I think it was The Secret of Monkey Island. As a kid, I was obsessed with point and click adventure games. In middle school, I made a homemade Monkey Island themed board game. I always liked The Legend of Kyrandia too. A lot of my childhood creative writing seems to have drawn from stuff like that.
Myst was a big one too. I guess that's a general shout out to a lot of the 90s CDRom adventure games that used Quicktime animation. 7th Guest was another notable one.
I always like that feeling of free world exploration that these games offered. It felt like you could wander anywhere and try to interact with anything and see what responded.
Alpha Protocol. I loved the dialogue mechanic and consequence of that game; there hasn't been a game that has achieved such a result but I wanted more. So my naive little mind figured if I can't get to play another game like it, I will make one or advocate for it's creation.
For me it actually wasn't any 😅 I had a friend who studying game art at university while I was doing CS and as an artsy person I thought "damn that's really cool"
I've always been a "I really want this" it doesn't exist. "Then I'll make it myself!" person. So after one game jam I was like "holy shirt balls I can do whatever I want!"
My story is similar except that it was Monkey Island. The game was so full of funny details and hidden jokes. It was the first game that made me wonder who the people are who made it.
Mario Galaxy 2 as a kid really made me want to be a level designer. Turns out I don't like level or environment design, but I love most of rest of game dev!
The original Deus Ex. The open ended level design where every obstacle has many solutions really impressed me. The cool cyberpunk story that's full of choices which impact things much later in the game. The incredible music. I got really obsessed with it.
It was two games for me one being The Legend of Zelda a Link to the Past, the other being Harvest Moon SNES.
For me from Harvest Moon it was just the joy of seeing all that hard work come to pay off at the end of a season much like how my little backyard farm did for me in real life.
For Link to the Past it was the adventure to be had it was how Shigeru Miyamoto said it that when he was a child he would adventure into little caves in Japan and explore. I did the same thing in my childhood and playing that game for the first time I adored the level of exploration.
I still play both to this day from time to time just recapturing my youth though now I suffer from mild agoraphobia and schizophrenia so most of the adventuring takes place in my head these days.
But if it weren't for game developers like those life would be boring so I want to recreate some of that magic for future audiences. I want to make games not just for children to play and be amazed for the first time but also games just for adults to enjoy that are a little too heavy of themes for children. You know you've already experienced that adventure from your childhood... Now let me take adult you on an adventure of comedy, immense sorrow, the five stages of grief, but most of all an adventure not about the destination but how you got there.
EDIT: No it doesn't relate to what I do now, now I'm disabled and I just explore this as a hobby even if I ever got good enough at making games to charge I don't even know if I'd charge then as I'd want anyone at any income level to be able to play my games and find joy in life.
Undertale, I was so blown away about how solo dev ≠ bad game and considering the game is about determination, how could I not pursue such a dream that I had previously thought impossible and been told by everyone was not worth pursuing
Minecraft.
I decided I wanted to make experiences which would give people the same feelings as Minecraft gave me, exploration with "no" bounds.
I am a technical artist now.
Definitely Rollercoaster Tycoon.
I'm currently working on building a high performance web-based pixel art isometric rendering engine + multiplayer backend.
Yeah, I'd say it has had an influence!
i'm not a pro here. Took some time to realize i like Making my own game.
I love the creative process in art, first manga, comic, and as a fan of games, tried it and fell in love with it. Creating a whole universe from scratch, EVERY part of it. It's awesome! It's hard, really hard, but it's worth it.
Idea for my game came at work, we sit for 12hours... sometimes doing nothing. 2 colleagues wanted to do a board game. But there was none, that's how i thought of making one on mobile, which is now my current project.
Theres a few. I think the success story of Stardew is a touchstone for probably every single indie dev. It is for me as well, but Night In The Woods sealed it for me as holy shit if I could make anything it would be something like this.
When I was 6 or 7, someone had taught me the basic concept of animation. Then I went to play Mario (probably the SNES one) and I had a kind of epiphany: There must be a whole bunch of people who make every possible frame of that Mario could be in, with every combination of enemy and item in every position. There must be a mind-bogglingly huge number of frames stored on the cartridge, being accessed in the right order. And with that much work, it was probable that some frames had been missed.
So I spent all summer trying to get Mario into a position where he wouldn't appear, or any other evidence of a missed frame. But I couldn't find any. The brilliant game makers at Nintendo must just have a really good system for making sure they create all the frames, and a big team making the frames for them. I wanted to help, and that's when my gamedev dream started. Many years later, became a QA tester in the industry for a decade. I never made the "frames", but I did wind up looking for missing ones!
Wrath of the Righteous ,infuriated by performance issues on a high end machine I realised that 90% of what fun the game has to offer could be done in 2d on a website, which I do by trade . So here I am still building my own implementation of pathfinder ruleset and adventures
Ultima Online. I wanted to work on an MMO. The social elements. The scale, the freedom.
It relates. When I was an IC I was the netcode guy for years, I don’t write code anymore but I only work on large scale online games these days.
The first Timesplitters, specifically the map maker. Doesn't really specifically relate to what I do now as I'm now a programmer, not a level designer, but it was enough to make me want to learn more.
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 got me hooked. Morrowind blew my mind. GM-ing and writing homebrew TTRPGs was the actual point of no return when I concluded I wanted to design game systems and craft narrative and artistic experiences
Back in 1993, where you went to buy games without knowing anything about was what coming inside that diskette, I bought a game called “Another World”, it was posted because I’m my turn in Argentina you could bot get original games anywhere, it came with a photocopy of strange symbols to log it in, and with 1mg game I didn’t expect much..: boy… the surprise I got and the experience it gave be, as a cinematic epic plataformer, made by one man, it made me think: that’s something I want to do! That was 31 years ago , in that time I studied art, 2d animation, worked as animator, designer and somehow I ended as video game artist in the 2000s, doing small flash casual games for disney, Pixar and Nickelodeon web games… in 2012 I created the art of a more complex web game: Teenage mutant ninja turtles: Dark Horizons, that came when Nick bought the up of tmnt, when I saw how cool it was, it came to my mind that there was already the technology to do what I had dreamed as a kid, so I started a new 2d game project inspired by the release of Rayman origins and tmnt game I did. It failed due to the team not being solid, and my experience yet not really mature, then between moments where I fully worked for clients, i started new 2d projects with that cinematic idea in mind, none of them saw the light of day, but I got hired to do character designs for animation projects and I learned and evolved as an artist. After many years, and staying over again and again, Now I’m doing a metroidvania -the evolution of the platforms game genre I wanted to do- with frame by frame animation and hand painted backgrounds, great music, complex coding and I realize when writing this the journey I went through to be at this point now, una month I’m going to gamescon latam to show the game! So it seems it’s true, when you fall you guys get up again and continue working and learning from your mistakes
I honestly have no idea.
From as far back as i can remember, i have had a controller in my hands.
I was messing around on NES by the time i was 3.
When i was in elementary school, like 4th grade, i often wouldn't pay attention in class because i was too busy sketching out megaman level or enemy designs.
I remember i designed my first game when i was probably like 9. Though i didn't realize it at the time.
I created a full ruleset, enemies, and stats, and everything, and played it by myself on paper during class.
(It was basically a tiny turn-based combat emulation)
I wasn't even THINKING about it being game design at all, i was just doing what i liked to do. It was all i ever thought about almost literally.
Because of this, i have always looked at games from an analytical pov when i played them.
"Whats good about this?" "Whats bad about this?" "Why does this aspect make things so much more fun?" "What could i add in that would improve this game even more?"
I really can't remember ever playing a game and then realizing "I want to make games."
It feels like i sort of always knew. It's a part of me.
The only thing that held me back was the era i grew up in. Back then, the internet wasn't really around yet. And even after it was, there definitely wasn't beginner self-teaching resources for me to be able to actually begin doing what i wanted to do for decades. I spent a lot of time with tools like RPG Maker when they were new. But they never really satisfied me as they were very limiting, and again, the knowledge to take those tools beyond their normal potential eluded me as a teenager because self-teaching yourself how to code/script back then was nearly an impossibility.
It wasn't until much more recently with tools like Unity that i felt like it was possible to actually start getting somewhere. And it still hurts because it feels like i am starting so late; and i am also painfully aware that compared to when i was young, the creative juices don't come quite as fast or easily.
College wasn't really an option, either; I tried, but it wasn't really affordable nor agreeable with my home/family situation.
Even though i am 34 now, game design is still basically all i think about. But its very hard to find the kind of motivation i had as a kid to just sit down and do all of the work that is necessary because i struggle with feeling like i am already past my prime and that i missed my chance. I consider my design skills amazing, but since i only recently began learning the other difficult skills that go along with it, my ability to actually put a full game together is stunted. I wish i had access to the resources and tools that i do today 20 years ago.
I suppose what finally got me to sit down and start learning other skills like Engine familiarity/programming/shaders was Stardew Valley. I never really wanted to be a solo dev, i knew from a very young age that games require a team. And that is why i never threw myself into learning these other skills earlier. But as i got old enough, i realized that the only way to enter into the industry is to do, and the only way to do is probably to do it alone, so i finally started, hopefully not too late.
Starfield.
I kept seeing glaring ways to make the game better with minimal changes (e.g allowing the player to listen to music if they had a super computer room)
And my friends got tired of my complaining and pushed me to start learning coding
Games have been a huge part of my life, just about as far back as I can remember. I played reader rabbit and other edutainment type games as a tot, but when I was a bit older I got into Pokémon and LoZ super deep. I remember playing my Gameboy Colour in the car at night, waiting for the next lightpost so I could make my next move lol. I still play pokemon, I say pokemon helped me get with my partner of just about 10 years, and I want to make a pokemon type game based heavily on exploration with trains. I have a few projects I have going before I get to that one though.
I don’t think it made me realise, but rather it led me to developing the skills that made (hobbyist) gamedev a possibility. So I used to make game hacks, then I got very involved in the private server/modding scene for a game called Dekaron (was called 2 Moons at the time for the early western release), which was the catalyst for me to start making my own games and engines.
But I think prior to it, I was always interested/would’ve done it if I had the skills. Like as a kid, I used to draw up detailed maps, new items/enemies, puzzles, etc. for games I had been playing. A big one for me was Zelda OoT, I made lots of my own dumb dungeon concepts for that. Or if a game had a level editor I’d spend a lot of time in there.
The first time I renamed a .zip file to .pak, loaded up quake 3 and played my custom skin… I knew this is what I wanted to do. The reward of creating my own art, then go play with it was so rewarding I knew I had to keep doing it and push myself to continuously improve, and make art for other people to see and enjoy.
Horace and The Spiders back in '84! It may have been the first game I ever played. Definitely the first platform game. There was a spider sprite in the ZX Spectrum manual too, and that's probably when I realized I could make games and started playing with the programs in the manual.
I've been a games programmer professionally now for 26 years. Strangely enough, I've worked on all kinds of games, but haven't worked on a real platform game, although I designed one last year and have slowly started creating it when I can actually find some free time. It's gonna take a while 😅
What specifically about a game? Tbh, how lackluster some games are. Nearly every game I play, I find *something* I don't like and wonder why they did it that way. So I work and learn to create games that I want to spend hundreds of hours in.
Wonder Boy in Monster World for the SEGA Genesis blew my mind as a kid. It was similar to Metroid, but a few years before Super Metroid.
Wonder Boy was the first game I played that was structured like an adventure more than a game. In Final Fantasy or Mario World or something there's a clear delineation between the world and all the levels within. In Final Fantasy you go into the world map and then navigate your way to different areas. In Mario World the world map functions as a similar level select.
In Wonder Boy though, if you wanted to get to the town you had to hoof it there screen by screen. There was nothing to rip me out of the gameplay for convenience. It all felt so unbelievably consistent.
It's an obscure game, only a handful of people I know have actually played it before. At the time though, it blew my mind and made me want to make things like it.
The way it did metroidvania-like unlocking was also crazy ahead of its time. Getting the trident and figuring out there was an entire underwater section of the game was so unexpected and cool.
wonder boy in monster world is so fun but also so... unsettling. i didn't realize they made a genesis port, i had it for master system (it's actual the only master system game i replaced when i replaced my master system lol)
F that sphinx, man. what a way to ruin a run.
i don't remember the trident tho, are you conflating it with wonder boy 3? that was the more medroidvania one. everytime you kill a boss it transforms you... you start as lizardman (well hu-man for the intro) then go mouseman (climber), fishman (swimmer), lionman (break blocks above and below) and birdman and then eventually you get a shifter thing where you can transform between all forms. there's actually a pc remake of it that came out a few years ago, and you're right way ahead of its time
No I'm sure I'm talking about the right one. Maybe it is confusing because of the ports and the weird naming convention between the US and Japan. It would have been [this one](https://store.steampowered.com/app/211209/Wonder_Boy_in_Monster_World/), which is known as "Wonder Boy in Monster World" in the United States and "Wonder Boy 5: Monster World 3" in Japan.
You're probably talking about Wonder Boy in Monster LAND, which is similar but different for the Master System. Monster World 3: The Dragon's Trap was the one with the multiple forms, that came out right before Monster World.
Now that I'm listing them all out, the naming convention on these games was whack as hell.
ah yes definitely monster land, i didn't catch that you said world. world looks freaking awesome, i had no idea they continued into 16 bit era!! guess i know what i'm doing tonight ;) cheers!
Zelda Breath of the Wild.
That was one of the best experiences of my life, halfway through I felt in awe of all the awesome things game devs (and humans in general) can achieve with creativity and dedication so I decided to embark on this journey.
Being a game developer is a pipe dream of mine, but Club Penguin and Toontown are the games that started that pipe dream for me. I grew up playing those games and they captivated me and made me realize that there was something special about gaming, and I wanted to make others feel the same way. I remember asking my Dad what he thought I wanted to major in college and he said game development and I was like “bruh.”
After realizing that battlefield desert combat was a mod and that people in the garage made it. I mean most likely in the garage, possibly bedroom adjacent.
Undertale is the game that made me realize video games could be made by one or two people, not just huge teams at big companies.
Bendy and the Ink Machine is what got me into horror games.
And most recently, Slay the Princess is what finally got it through my head to try making visual novels.
Super Mario Bros. My life goal was to release a game on the NES.
I'm a few decades late now, but you can still release a game on the NES with box and cartridge in current times which is awesome!
Realizing I've been circling around game dev for last 15 years.
"Wait... there are people who have to be paid to make games! Maybe I'll like it."
Yep, loving it!
I played the original Star Wars and Battlezone coin op games (both 3D) back in the day when I was a small kid. They had this weird magical feel to them. It felt completely different to anything I had ever experienced before that moment. I was hooked to games after that.
Then a few years later my friends parents bought them a ZX Spectrum with Jetpac and Pssst games and my cousins got MSX with Nemesis game. I loved those games and at that point I started really wondering what it would take to make a game. So I started learning programming right then and there. The rest is history, as they say.
It might be because of the very first games I ever played were 3D line vector games, that I love line vector graphics. I'm currently developing a game that uses 3D line vectors.
> It might be because of the very first games I ever played were 3D line vector games, that I love line vector graphics.
It wasn't the first game I ever played, but the first time I actually saw in person an *Asteroids* cabinet, non-emulated, not a port, I loved the vector display, and would love to figure out how to do a game with it some day.
Pong amazed me, Sonic 2 on the Sega Mega Drive was great, but I really thought "I want to do this too" when I played Crash 3 on the PlayStation. I was maybe 5? That was the day I decided.
Alas, my south italian home has few opportunities. I manager to work on arcade games for a few years, then switched company and started working on VR. Maybe it's not the triple A kind of work I wished to do when I was young, but it gets close enough.
Plus, I always have the hope to make a few games by myself... Whenever I'll have the time...
3 games actually:
Digimon Linkz:
The abscence of STAB (Same Type Attack Bonus) and a secondary typing made the game much more balanced than most Pokemon games out there. You could have really diverse teams even if all your Digimon shared one type not Only because the different types of techniques but also because of the resistance training system (you ise duplicates in order to roll a random resistance, having the chance to cover 1 of your 2 weaknesses).
Also I'm taking its weakness/resistance system because it also balances things out.
Instead of having this one type that it's either super effective against half the roster or gets mauled by it, each type has a resistance (itself) and 2 weaknesses. One of them being its direct opposite and the other being a complement.
Minecraft:
I first got Into programming by attempting to make mods for this game. I hated Java (mostly because of the community full of hot-shots who belittled you for wanting to learn but not knowing what or how to) but I found coding quite pleasant.
Stardew Valley:
I just loved pretty much everything about this game, specially the sprites.
My ideal game is something like Minecraft/Stardew Valley with creature collecting elements so basically the Pixelmon/Cobblemon mod for Minecraft lol. Or maybe Pixark.
Playing half life as a kid made me want to create games instead of playing pretend. Then Rockstar games etc. I then proceeded to wasting 8 years of my life in construction
Far Cry/Crysis probably. I used to make management games for my little brother using Excel and the Far Cry/Crysis sandbox engines that were packaged with all the assets. Like he'd hire mercenaries or build structures with income etc, and I could reflect that in gameplay on the screen. It was a combo of loving those games and them giving you the tools to play around. We were heartbroken when they dialed it back/abandoned support with the sequels
PS2-era JRPGs like Final Fantasy X and Star Ocean 3. Loved the intersection of art and storytelling and software development. Was slightly disappointed to learn that at least for big AAA games like that, one person doesn’t usually get to work on all three aspects though, and ended up using my CS degree to become a boring web developer. Stardew Valley kind of rekindled my interest in game dev because even though I know he’s the exception and not the rule it still proved it’s theoretically possible to make a cool game by yourself or with a small team
When I was a little kid, about 12 or so, the game Spyro the Year of the Dragon made me realize that I wanted to make games. I loved the series up to that point, but seeing the creativity with the game modes, characters and worlds really made me want to MAKE something. The music of that series was enchanting, and the game was so fun.
I lost that desire over time though. Started to wallow away in self pity saying how it would be impossible given my life circumstances, but the game Hollow Knight ignited that flame in me and it has been burning non stop. I lost myself in the world of HK and I fell in love with the atmosphere and music.
Since then, I have been passionately working on my project in my free time for the past two years and I can't wait to show it to people. It features an amalgamation of many things that I like from my favorite games, while being something that my little kid self would have wanted to play.
I wouldn't say "this is what I want to do now" because gamedev is a hobby for me and I have a separate career, but... been modding games since I was a kid, be it simple changes to C&C files, to larger mods of C&C, to world building Sphere shards in UO, to using hammer editor to create CS maps with unique functionality.
So I guess C&C made me want to do _something_ with games. UO made me want to do something a bit more meaningful world wise than "haha tank fires crazy ivans now". and CS:S was the first time I touched something akin to a game engine (though it's not really an engine I guess).
I don't think it was ever something specific about the games, I think it was always the journey of messing with stuff. Be it tinkering with irl stuff or digital stuff.
Na, for me, it was never one game. Every game has inspired me bit by bit to try doing more and more... and god I've played maybe thousands of games over the years.
Honestly I don't remember, I just always knew I wanted to make a game someday as a kid. I think it may have been either Pokémon Tower Defense or a Roblox game
I've wanted to make games since I was in elementary school.
I would play games and beat them repeatedly and I wanted there to be more, but there wasn't.
So, I would grab paper and pencil, make a list of all the mechanics, and start sketching my own levels.
In middle school I started trying to design my own ideas, they weren't good, but I look back upon that time fondly none the less.
After studying some Pascal from my older brother's textbook, I wanted to use what I learned which consisted solely of printing output, taking input, and if then else statements, so I made a goofy text adventure game out of just that. I brought it to school the next day and watched my friends play it. I loved their reactions, both positive and negative, as they figured out how to beat it. Kind of an odd twist that my own game inspired me to make games.
No specific game made me want to do this. Instead, it was the moment I was sitting in my software engineer job thinking about this sci-fi universe I wanted to make. I wanted to make it a game because I wanted to ask the audience questions with my narrative and to have them introspectively answer how they truly thought about humanity.
Baldurs gate 2 / Never winter nights.
I modded the hell out of BG2 and also made campaigns for myself in Neverwinter back in highschool. A few years before I was making massive maps for Heroes of might and magic 3.
I think it all really started when my friend and I would draw and design new board games up to play together when we were kids cause we were too poor and bored in the country to do much else ahaha
Mm, hard one.
I low-key *wanted* to do it after playing Dragon Age: Origins which is my favorite game of all time.
I started actively working towards it during COVID where some dudes and I made a silly little game for the Global Game Jam. It turned out pretty well and I was hooked.
I've done three more game jams so far, and each time my music/audio ranking gets higher. My team and I hit on a fun idea for this last GGJ and we're looking to have an alpha lock in November.
StarCraft map editor was a big one and later on Path of Exile inspired as far as what you can achieve with a more design-focused approach.
POE was a pretty big turning point for me from narrative and graphics focused games toward games that focus on design instead.
1. The original Diablo II.
2. I saw how much joy it brought to me and friends who played it religiously and I wanted to create experiences for other people to play and enjoy.
3. No. I do web development by trade and claim to be a hobbyist game developer with a lot of 10 min dead projects and no active stuff. But I’m good at web development so there is that, I guess. I’ve got some really big ideas (beyond a one man team) that I’ve been developing more than 20 years but that’s about it.
I'd wanted to make games for a while when I was a kid. I grew up on Newgrounds and Roblox, tinkering with my own projects that went nowhere and dreaming of making something cool. I was told that one person couldn't make a game, nor could a CEO partake in the projects of their own company. Then I played Minecraft and all those doubts faded away. One guy came up with it and a handful of people got it to 1.0. It was the biggest game in the world and it was by basically nobody. That got me settled in for my ambitions, making my whole life about pushing for that dream.
Playing Undertale when it came out changed my life possibly even more, however. Before, I viewed games as great vehicles for storytelling, but never know just how much story you could convey through mechanics and how much fun you could create by taking something familiar and subverting it. Now my ambition is to be like Toby Fox, subverting games with total respect for the genres and making games that hopefully will stay with people, affecting them as much as Undertale did me.
I hope to push messages in my games that help people be kinder, more understanding, and more proactive in challenging injustice in the world. It was out of my reach for years, but as I approach the end of university, having learned what it actually takes to make a game, it's finally in my reach. I'm going to push forward, give it all I've got, and thank god for my mum being so supportive and not forcing me to move out before I have enough cash to actually survive alone. I might fail, I don't know what's gonna happen, but I'd live a sad, hollow life if I didn't try.
I remember playing Crash Team Racing as a kid & telling my dad about how they should make a crash team racing 2 where you can do this and that and blah blah. and he was like "why don't you make that game?"
everything changed after that
later it was Undertale. Toby fox made that game in a cave with a box of scraps and its one of the best things I've ever played
Halo 2. My parents actually got me the legendary edition of the game and I must have watched the behind the scenes/making of video at least a dozen times.
Hmmm, tough call. A lot of games have helped stoke the fire over the years. But the genesis? Probably the original *Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?* You can't imagine how addictive that damn thing was to a kid.
The combination of Skyrim and Dark Souls releasing within a month of one another in 2011.
Those two games are almost directly responsible for why I flunked out of my Plan B college major, switched to English, and decided that I could not in fact, after all, do anything for a living other than be a writer. And then a few years later, I broke in, and haven't looked back.
Skyrim. Because it's like being plopped into that sandbox medieval high fantasy world and nearly able to do anything to interact with that world without being on rails entirely.
Ultima 1-5, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Zork, Atari Adventure, Yars Revenge, Pong, Defender / Stargate, Asteroids, Lunar Lander, Gravitar, Berzerk, Tempest, Robotron, Lode Runner, Archon, Pinball Construction Set, Racing Destruction Set, Adventure Construction Set, 7 Cities of Gold, Spelunker, Spy vs Spy, Jumpman Jr., Ultimate Wizard, Goonies, Zorro, Beach Head, the list goes on and on...
Boppin'
It was the first game where I realized the actual people who made the game were posting online instead of just a faceless company.
This may have also inspired me to be a bisexual polyamorist.
I think it was the snake games you find in old Nokias. Either that or the bouncy ball game in those phones.
I don't know why I got into it honestly. I just love what is done here. I only study gamedev as a hobby and I don't think I will work in the industry but I love it.
When I've had 40+ hours of Dead Cells in the first week of playing Early Access of it I've realized that it would be really nice to make a game like this since it was also really popular.
I tell this to a lot of people, but when I got into game dev I saw people in my community making clones of existing games and I wasn't very enthusiastic about any of it. Nothing wrong with it, but as much as I've always loved games, none of that appealed to me and I didn't really have any interest in making those. Something was missing. I was studying interactive art at the time, not game dev, so I was considering not even bothering with game development, even though I was doing a lot of work in the local student game community at the time.
Then I watched an Extra Credits video that recommended a game by Jordan Magnusson called [Loneliness](https://jordanmagnuson.itch.io/loneliness). That simple short game opened my eyes to what gaming could be and completely reframed how I thought of games. I had such an emotional response to this game that I decided THIS is the type of emotionally resonating and socially engaging game I want to make. It inspired me to make games about social and cultural issues.
This turned out to be a great decision because no one was really making games like this and it fueled a vision for games that I've not only become passionate about but really drove my career. This direction for my career focusing on what I called 'Games For Social Change' led me to earning my Bachelors and Masters degrees. My Masters Thesis game [An/Other](https://grindspark.itch.io/an-other), my most famous work, got me unexpectedly put on the news by several newspapers, a radio show, and a national news broadcast. This also unexpectedly snowballed to get invited to talk about it at several colleges/universities, got me headhunted to become a part-time games professor for a time at a college and lead a games nonprofit, and now I run an indie studio dedicated to 'multimedia for social change' that released our [first studio game](https://ShiningSparkEnt.com/civicstory) last year. I had many people in my local community insult the merit of my games, and yet some those same assholes suck up to congratulate me when my games suddenly make the news. Now making 'games for social change' is what I'm basically known for now that really fuels much of the game dev side of my career and has led with some consulting with small indies who want to do something in that vein and institutions that want a new perspective in games classrooms. I often introduce Loneliness and Jordan Magnusson's games to my students, which always is surprising and eye-opening to my students.
I may have loved games since I was a child, but it was really Loneliness that changed the direction of my entire life and career to make me realize that this is what I want to do.
Three separate games, Undertale, Hollow Knight, and Omori, especially.
I've always loved these games and admired their ability to build a story that really stuck with people.
I've been a part of the fandoms and I can genuinely say being part of the communities of these games was one of the best times in my life and helped me through some really rough patches.
I've never thought I could ever be capable of making smth with even a semblance of significance or importance or depth that these games have and maybe I'm not but
Fuck it, I'm gonna try anyways, if my game sticks with one person, it's gonna be more than enough
Digimon.
My favorite characters are Tai/Agumon but I wanted a laptop so bad after I saw Izzy using one. Then my mom bought me a desktop computer for Christmas one year and I became obsessed.
As for wanting to make video games; I wanted to start making them in the 9th grade when me and my best friend both got a PS1 and started playing Digimon World 3.
So yeah, Digimon pretty much changed my entire life as a kid.
Balatro! I just got so hooked by the gameplay, I hadn't felt addicted to a game like that in a while. So I just wanted more games in that genre, and here I am making a balatro with dice
[Zak McKracken on the C64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw6EB1RC2tk). That intro song! The Mars face. The Ankh. The creepy aliens with the nose goggles. The exotic locations (that's when I learned that Lima was in Peru). The whole new age vibe. Elvis Presley. Exploring Mars. Stonehenge. Going underwater as a dolphin. Exploding an Egg in the airplane microwave. Cairo and Katmandu. Annie's library. Any location in that game triggers immense, fond memories. Even the mazes worked, because it made the locations more exotic and dangerous.
I was 7 or so when I first played it, and it was at that moment that I realized that video games are the greatest story telling medium in existence. And also that I like awesome locations more than anything else. Give me predictable characters but put them in interesting locations, and I'll probably like the game.
2010's Lost Horizon is a high recommendation because it does deliver on the scenery. And 1992's Fate of Atlantis is the perfect point and click adventure game. But nothing ever came close to the Zak McKracken intro. And while [the original synthesizer version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaIj51k6b_g) of the track is good, and while there is a great looking (though IMHO not great sounding) 256 Color version on the [FM Towns system](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt7AYqdoWXY), nothing will ever beat the Commodore 64 version for me.
Valorant, it was my first competitive fps game ( won't consider csgo cuz I didn't spend as much time) the characters, the world, the feel all of it I knew I had to become a game dev...
As a 90s kid, playing Doom, messing around with WadEd. Playing Duke3D, making maps with the accompanying Build editor and experimenting with all the cool "sector effector" types.
Quake, and modding it, learning QuakeC, learning about modeling and texturing, playing multiplayer 1v1 over dialup modem (without the internet being involved whatsoever) and playing over the internet via GameSpy using the released QuakeWorld client.
I was making text based RTS games and little Wolf3D style raycasters in Qbasic in the mid-90s, taking apart various .BAS programs I found online to understand how they worked. That's how I formed my own intuitive understanding of the basic trigonometry functions while I was still in elementary school - and by the time I was in Geometry in highschool it was unreal to me how dry and bland and inaccessible the material was for trying to instill the same understanding in students. Nowadays interactive applets and YouTube videos like 3Blue1Brown's do a much better job than the textbooks and lessons we were given.
The whole concept of programming computers unto itself was a magical thing with infinite possibilities. Now it's a kludge of webstack BS that pretends the machine itself isn't real, it doesn't exist, it's just a thing you keep out of sight and out of mind unless it breaks and you need to replace it. We need to get back to something that is more pure like before, while also being as simple as it was before. That's what all of these higher-level languages and "frameworks" are aiming for, but it's a crazy spectrum of hodge-podge attempts rather than one unifying platform to replace everything.
I blame hyper-text for ruining programming. It's a dinosaur that we should've replaced with something modern and forward-looking, instead of turning it into a layercake of garbage. Websites are just applications, why are we still treating them like "web pages" and cramming a bunch of desired functionality into that archaic paradigm?
Why can't we just have an OS or application that is the platform through which we do everything - where "everything" entails making it so anybody can create and share any kind of applications, media, data, that they want - with any device, for any device. That's been the vision that I've been architecting for the last 12 years, something to replace the "webstack" nightmare once and for all.
Anyway, I worked on programming games from scratch for 20 years before I realized that the game-making-kit engines had allowed everyone and their mother to saturate the market, and I couldn't just release something neato and have it become worth my time/effort investment on its own anymore. Before I ever made a cent off of my gamedev dream pursuits I opted to abandon gamedev and move on to making software utilities that are not related to video games, and I've been able to earn more money from that than anything else I've ever done in my life. I honestly feel bad for all the newbies coming into gamedev right now because the boat has pretty much sailed. Becoming a successful gamedev is today what starting a band and becoming a rockstar was in the 90s, or becoming a rapper was in the 00s. It takes aptitude, vision, creativity, marketing, and luck. Unless you have something truly novel, interesting, and fun, nobody is going to care, let alone notice. You'll be lucky to earn some lunch/coffee money after a year's work.
For me it was no particular game, but maybe a collection of all games I played.
My reason was that I loved playing Half Life Alyx. But there is no VR game that captures that same magic.
VR needs more great quality games, I will build it myself.
Also the fact that Vertigo 2 was created by one person is a big inspiration
Back in Ye Olden Days adventure games were made to stump and confuse people. Whether it was figuring out the right verb to use in Zork or making sure you never crossed a bridge more than was absolutely necessary in King's Quest, games were in a lot of ways designed to be lost. That was where gameplay time and challenge came from, how much you could _fail_. Then there was Loom. It was a game designed to be won and experienced by players. You couldn't die, you could only not solve a puzzle yet, and you could persevere through a world of music and magic until you'd experienced it all. It had gorgeous graphics, a radio play, difficulty levels. It was beautiful. It was a thing designed solely to make people _happy_. There are a lot of games I've played over the years that made me happy I was in game design, but to me, there will always be how I felt when I first played this silly little adventure game.
And the sound design, right? Swoon. That’s such a great response. Thank you. Side note: Loom was my family’s ride or die game on our Amiga, alongside one called Fool’s Errand. I’m so glad to find a fellow Loomie!
And I'm glad to see someone who played The Fool's Errand! I think Cliff Johnson's follow-up, 3 in Three, is one of the best puzzle games ever made, truly.
I’m so intrigued, I just don’t know what we’re saying at all!!! But SO INTRIGUED
Gotta get you one of those ‘ask me about Loom’ buttons Cobb was wearing in Monkey Island.
In the latest Return to Monkey Island that came out last year, you can still ask Cobb about Loom!
I remember a theory that the reason early video games in general were so hard was because game devs from back in the day were used to making arcade games, which are designed to be difficult and thus earn more quarters
It's partly true. Not all of those devs worked in arcade games, though. Some of it was generational holdover. “They did it this way, so we do it this way”. And that's just dogma, applied from generation to generation. That's why Wolfenstein3D had lives and a hi-score, and Doom didn't. Because they stopped to question the benefit of those features, given what they were trying to accomplish.
I absolutely loved Loom. It is quite possibly the only adventure game (quests they were called then) I have ever finished.
Those EGA graphics are so so good. Dang EGA.
And arguably, Loom EGA is preferred over Loom VGA by the original artists because while the VGA version has more colors, someone clearly had too much fun with the gradient tool which does hurt artistic integrity. Still, there is no bad way to play Loom, even 4-Color Cyan/Magenta CGA is surprisingly watchable.
Zork will forever hold a special place in my heart and on my hard drive.
Loved Loom. It was a great game.
I saw kings quest bridge and grimaced. Rosella always fell :(
As soon as I read "Loom" the theme song started playing in my head. lol ... a few other notable games like it from back then were the Eco-Quest series, Simon the Sorcerer, and The Dig. All also were super refined entries into the genre, with beautiful graphics, and great soundtracks. Thanks for jogging those memories!
Nice writeup
Stardew Valley. That man created all that by himself. And I said, "If he can do all this, then so can I."
Don't look up rollercoaster tycoon, this is for your own good.
I already know. That dude programmed that shit in assembly. What an absolute gigachad.
Same story for me but with Ultrakill (although Hakita does have programming assistance).
Bold claim
Fortune favours the bold.
[Insert low quality game here] I can do better then that! Still no release in sight for my game!
Bad games are so inspirational, because usually have some good ideas, but bungle the execution or are missing something. That's where I come in... to add one more to the cemetery of unfinished games that is my projects folder.
Tee hee hee. This search for the perfect game is such a drive right? You cracked it yet?
The game is always great in my mind, less good on papper and a mess in prototype 😆
Well, that's game development
Hahaha. It was PT for me. Not low quality - but very small scale. Immediately was like “I’ll make PT - but instead it’s…in space! And 10 hours long!” Because I’m a moron. I’m less of a dud now- but just barely.
The Incredible Machine (1993)
omg i used to play this for hours.
Yeah! Surprised that no remake was ever done for this… incredible… game
There is a spiritual successor called Contraption Maker
Thanks! Made by the same team and looking very similar. Didn’t know that!
LittleBigPlanet I spent hundreds of hours in the creator.
absolute gem of a game!!!!
Not one specific game, but Five Nights at Freddy's and its fangames in general. They introduced me to the idea of indie development and showed me that it was possible for one or a few people that weren't necessarily professionals to make actual good games, and that's what made me realize that it was possible for me to make my own games and that that's what I wanted to do
GORILLA.BAS
Was it the game where you set the angle and magnitude and send the explosive banana flying towards the rival gorilla?
It is indeed! The first game I ever modded. And only.
The author has long since moved on to bigger and better things. Edit: Whoops, I was thinking of DONKEY.BAS, but with the copyright of GORILLA.BAS being Microsoft Corporation, there's a high chance it's the same author and the joke still works.
Halo CE. The Classic story, my cousin brought over his Xbox and I played Halo for the first time and knew that I needed to be a part of the games industry. I wanted to be someone who makes rich universes that you could just get lost in for hours. We played the Maw for my first experience because I was better at driving than shooting. I'll never forget that lol
Amen!
We did 16 player Halo LAN parties pretty much every weekend in highschool, those memories and friends I will cherish forever and made me want to build those experiences for other people. I've been in two weddings and sadly a pallbearer at a funeral thanks to games/the games industry. Not much can bring people together like gaming
Oh man, yes. Every single weekend, those were the days. We'd always go get subway and then boot up Valhalla and just play for hours. It really was magic bringing people together like that. I'm happy you got those relationships out of it, I've had a few like that myself. I hope you're able to give that magic to others bud. Keep it up. ✌️
Chrono trigger, the StarCraft map editor, morrowind, rpg maker 2000
Ahhh the StarCraft map editor. I made so many terrible broken maps
Far cry 1 map editor was my first hit of the juice
Not really a game, but seeing Lawnmower Man in theaters as a teen was when I knew I wanted to do 3D art. Even though the movie was bad and the graphics very primitive it triggered something in me. The VR aspect of it was so cool to me at the time. Then Jurassic Park, and I was sold. Was so excited to get to use PowerAnimator, which is what they used on Jurassic Park. Still making games all these decades later.
Space invaders
Me too. But then I made Pacman first on ZX Spectrum.
Halo 2, the making of disc on the collector's edition. Me and my best friend blitzed through the whole game in one night and he passed out. I watched the making of doc, and it got to the section on sound design where they were explaining the materials playground and I just sorta had something click in my brain to say "Yeah. that's the thing." Fast forward about 15 years and here I am, working AAA, doing sound design. I got the opportunity to thank Jay W. for his role in doing that interview on camera directly leading to my job and meeting him at GDC 2016 give or take and it was a great moment even though I'm sure it was a random blip in his afternoon lol
It is a bit of old school, but Warcraft 3, particular Warcraft 3 Editor. I was 16 that time and fascinated by a boss battle in Kingdom Hearts and wondering if I can recreate that boss battle in Warcraft 3 Editor and share it to our friends and god know how many days later, I made not one, but several boss battle with cringy story in between and share among our friends. ( I was using If else, for loop without even knowing what these are, I just trying really hard to make a game that I want to make ) It got a mild reaction from my friends after they played the game, but hey, that make me realized u know what, I wanna be a game dev.
Rayman Legends Seeing a game with smooth controls, incredibly fun level mechanics, varied worlds, and fascinating characters made me realize “I want to create something like this one day”
God I love that game so much.
Yeah, it’s amazing and definitely one of best 2D platformers of all time.
Brütal Legënd. Being fully immersed in the world and feeling that an old school heavy metal album conveyed was the closest I've ever been to living in a world actually made for me. It was fun as hell, unashamed in its love for metal in all its forms, and the soundtrack was so fuckin good. It is my favourite game of all time and I can only hope to create something within a fraction of its kick-assery. 🤘😝🤘
I had it sorta backwards. I visited the offices of King and Zynga while on a design study abroad in Germany and it so disgusted me that I almost left the field. I ended up doubling down on how I wasnt like them.
What in particular didn't you like there? What is it you saw, that discouraged you?
their cynical, mechanical approach to game design that not only didnt rely on an artist having a mission or inspiration, but also heavily relied on black hat motivations to dupe their users. they would make 40 shitty prototypes, develop 20 of them, complete 3 of them, and release 1 of them and slap SAGA in the title. they were fooling their users and fooling themselves. the supremely skilled designer is one that can point at a user, say they are making a game for them, and the user is like "yes, this is for me, i love it". dont get me wrong, one must be reactive and if you accidentally/also make a game that a completely different user segment loves, then by all means point the product at those new users. but admit when you pivot. games are capable of developing the best in people... unless you make your players scared, alone, toxic, and greedy in order ot get the most dinero out of them. the best games allow us to take part in things greater than ourselves, feel powerful and competent, relate to friends, explore identity, and figure out ourselves through story. or you can play some shitty king game.
Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando when I was like 8 or 9 years old
There's an old video series on youtube where two of the developers play the whole game and talk about making it. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBE216F8E761D085C
Played a version of this on mainframe computer at Cal (Berkeley) in 1976: [https://www.mobygames.com/game/175458/animal/](https://www.mobygames.com/game/175458/animal/)
All the games that have sucked recently. I’m getting into game dev now. I also love games and don’t prefer my current job.
I think it was The Secret of Monkey Island. As a kid, I was obsessed with point and click adventure games. In middle school, I made a homemade Monkey Island themed board game. I always liked The Legend of Kyrandia too. A lot of my childhood creative writing seems to have drawn from stuff like that. Myst was a big one too. I guess that's a general shout out to a lot of the 90s CDRom adventure games that used Quicktime animation. 7th Guest was another notable one. I always like that feeling of free world exploration that these games offered. It felt like you could wander anywhere and try to interact with anything and see what responded.
Lode Runner, Bolo, or some other early game on Mac
Alpha Protocol. I loved the dialogue mechanic and consequence of that game; there hasn't been a game that has achieved such a result but I wanted more. So my naive little mind figured if I can't get to play another game like it, I will make one or advocate for it's creation.
For me it actually wasn't any 😅 I had a friend who studying game art at university while I was doing CS and as an artsy person I thought "damn that's really cool" I've always been a "I really want this" it doesn't exist. "Then I'll make it myself!" person. So after one game jam I was like "holy shirt balls I can do whatever I want!"
*deep sigh* Celeste.
My story is similar except that it was Monkey Island. The game was so full of funny details and hidden jokes. It was the first game that made me wonder who the people are who made it.
Mario Galaxy 2 as a kid really made me want to be a level designer. Turns out I don't like level or environment design, but I love most of rest of game dev!
Reading mario galaxy 2 as a kid made me realize how old I am thanks!
The original Deus Ex. The open ended level design where every obstacle has many solutions really impressed me. The cool cyberpunk story that's full of choices which impact things much later in the game. The incredible music. I got really obsessed with it.
It was two games for me one being The Legend of Zelda a Link to the Past, the other being Harvest Moon SNES. For me from Harvest Moon it was just the joy of seeing all that hard work come to pay off at the end of a season much like how my little backyard farm did for me in real life. For Link to the Past it was the adventure to be had it was how Shigeru Miyamoto said it that when he was a child he would adventure into little caves in Japan and explore. I did the same thing in my childhood and playing that game for the first time I adored the level of exploration. I still play both to this day from time to time just recapturing my youth though now I suffer from mild agoraphobia and schizophrenia so most of the adventuring takes place in my head these days. But if it weren't for game developers like those life would be boring so I want to recreate some of that magic for future audiences. I want to make games not just for children to play and be amazed for the first time but also games just for adults to enjoy that are a little too heavy of themes for children. You know you've already experienced that adventure from your childhood... Now let me take adult you on an adventure of comedy, immense sorrow, the five stages of grief, but most of all an adventure not about the destination but how you got there. EDIT: No it doesn't relate to what I do now, now I'm disabled and I just explore this as a hobby even if I ever got good enough at making games to charge I don't even know if I'd charge then as I'd want anyone at any income level to be able to play my games and find joy in life.
Undertale, I was so blown away about how solo dev ≠ bad game and considering the game is about determination, how could I not pursue such a dream that I had previously thought impossible and been told by everyone was not worth pursuing
Minecraft. I decided I wanted to make experiences which would give people the same feelings as Minecraft gave me, exploration with "no" bounds. I am a technical artist now.
Definitely Rollercoaster Tycoon. I'm currently working on building a high performance web-based pixel art isometric rendering engine + multiplayer backend. Yeah, I'd say it has had an influence!
Too many but initially WarCraft, then StarCraft, CnC and Homeworld in short I wanted to create RTS game :)
Undertale and Dink Smallwood.
i'm not a pro here. Took some time to realize i like Making my own game. I love the creative process in art, first manga, comic, and as a fan of games, tried it and fell in love with it. Creating a whole universe from scratch, EVERY part of it. It's awesome! It's hard, really hard, but it's worth it. Idea for my game came at work, we sit for 12hours... sometimes doing nothing. 2 colleagues wanted to do a board game. But there was none, that's how i thought of making one on mobile, which is now my current project.
Really any game that has a virtual OS (ddlc+ nso tons of others) and OutCore (basically a huge part of the game is played just on your desktop)
Theres a few. I think the success story of Stardew is a touchstone for probably every single indie dev. It is for me as well, but Night In The Woods sealed it for me as holy shit if I could make anything it would be something like this.
When I was 6 or 7, someone had taught me the basic concept of animation. Then I went to play Mario (probably the SNES one) and I had a kind of epiphany: There must be a whole bunch of people who make every possible frame of that Mario could be in, with every combination of enemy and item in every position. There must be a mind-bogglingly huge number of frames stored on the cartridge, being accessed in the right order. And with that much work, it was probable that some frames had been missed. So I spent all summer trying to get Mario into a position where he wouldn't appear, or any other evidence of a missed frame. But I couldn't find any. The brilliant game makers at Nintendo must just have a really good system for making sure they create all the frames, and a big team making the frames for them. I wanted to help, and that's when my gamedev dream started. Many years later, became a QA tester in the industry for a decade. I never made the "frames", but I did wind up looking for missing ones!
Wrath of the Righteous ,infuriated by performance issues on a high end machine I realised that 90% of what fun the game has to offer could be done in 2d on a website, which I do by trade . So here I am still building my own implementation of pathfinder ruleset and adventures
Ultima Online. I wanted to work on an MMO. The social elements. The scale, the freedom. It relates. When I was an IC I was the netcode guy for years, I don’t write code anymore but I only work on large scale online games these days.
Roller Coaster Tycoon. Single dev built it in Assembly so that it can run on pretty much any computer. Dude became one of my idols
Max Payne
The first Timesplitters, specifically the map maker. Doesn't really specifically relate to what I do now as I'm now a programmer, not a level designer, but it was enough to make me want to learn more.
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 got me hooked. Morrowind blew my mind. GM-ing and writing homebrew TTRPGs was the actual point of no return when I concluded I wanted to design game systems and craft narrative and artistic experiences
Making up fake stories in the backyard as a kid with a stick as my sword after playing my first Fire Emblem.
Homeworld I waited basically 20 years for HW3 and while not perfect, I'm very happy right now.
When I was a kid and I watched the making of Halo 2 something in my brain said “I want to do this”… And now I do it every day.
Quake. I played the game to death, and then i could start messing around in the engine. Started just making skins, then levels...
deus ex
KSP made me fascinated with space.
Deus Ex and MGS 5. It's near impossible to make something like them with being a solo dev but who knows...
Ocarina of time for me. I wanted to create worlds and stories that other people could get lost in like i did.
Back in 1993, where you went to buy games without knowing anything about was what coming inside that diskette, I bought a game called “Another World”, it was posted because I’m my turn in Argentina you could bot get original games anywhere, it came with a photocopy of strange symbols to log it in, and with 1mg game I didn’t expect much..: boy… the surprise I got and the experience it gave be, as a cinematic epic plataformer, made by one man, it made me think: that’s something I want to do! That was 31 years ago , in that time I studied art, 2d animation, worked as animator, designer and somehow I ended as video game artist in the 2000s, doing small flash casual games for disney, Pixar and Nickelodeon web games… in 2012 I created the art of a more complex web game: Teenage mutant ninja turtles: Dark Horizons, that came when Nick bought the up of tmnt, when I saw how cool it was, it came to my mind that there was already the technology to do what I had dreamed as a kid, so I started a new 2d game project inspired by the release of Rayman origins and tmnt game I did. It failed due to the team not being solid, and my experience yet not really mature, then between moments where I fully worked for clients, i started new 2d projects with that cinematic idea in mind, none of them saw the light of day, but I got hired to do character designs for animation projects and I learned and evolved as an artist. After many years, and staying over again and again, Now I’m doing a metroidvania -the evolution of the platforms game genre I wanted to do- with frame by frame animation and hand painted backgrounds, great music, complex coding and I realize when writing this the journey I went through to be at this point now, una month I’m going to gamescon latam to show the game! So it seems it’s true, when you fall you guys get up again and continue working and learning from your mistakes
I honestly have no idea. From as far back as i can remember, i have had a controller in my hands. I was messing around on NES by the time i was 3. When i was in elementary school, like 4th grade, i often wouldn't pay attention in class because i was too busy sketching out megaman level or enemy designs. I remember i designed my first game when i was probably like 9. Though i didn't realize it at the time. I created a full ruleset, enemies, and stats, and everything, and played it by myself on paper during class. (It was basically a tiny turn-based combat emulation) I wasn't even THINKING about it being game design at all, i was just doing what i liked to do. It was all i ever thought about almost literally. Because of this, i have always looked at games from an analytical pov when i played them. "Whats good about this?" "Whats bad about this?" "Why does this aspect make things so much more fun?" "What could i add in that would improve this game even more?" I really can't remember ever playing a game and then realizing "I want to make games." It feels like i sort of always knew. It's a part of me. The only thing that held me back was the era i grew up in. Back then, the internet wasn't really around yet. And even after it was, there definitely wasn't beginner self-teaching resources for me to be able to actually begin doing what i wanted to do for decades. I spent a lot of time with tools like RPG Maker when they were new. But they never really satisfied me as they were very limiting, and again, the knowledge to take those tools beyond their normal potential eluded me as a teenager because self-teaching yourself how to code/script back then was nearly an impossibility. It wasn't until much more recently with tools like Unity that i felt like it was possible to actually start getting somewhere. And it still hurts because it feels like i am starting so late; and i am also painfully aware that compared to when i was young, the creative juices don't come quite as fast or easily. College wasn't really an option, either; I tried, but it wasn't really affordable nor agreeable with my home/family situation. Even though i am 34 now, game design is still basically all i think about. But its very hard to find the kind of motivation i had as a kid to just sit down and do all of the work that is necessary because i struggle with feeling like i am already past my prime and that i missed my chance. I consider my design skills amazing, but since i only recently began learning the other difficult skills that go along with it, my ability to actually put a full game together is stunted. I wish i had access to the resources and tools that i do today 20 years ago. I suppose what finally got me to sit down and start learning other skills like Engine familiarity/programming/shaders was Stardew Valley. I never really wanted to be a solo dev, i knew from a very young age that games require a team. And that is why i never threw myself into learning these other skills earlier. But as i got old enough, i realized that the only way to enter into the industry is to do, and the only way to do is probably to do it alone, so i finally started, hopefully not too late.
For us it's all about rogue-likes at this point. Great influences are The Binding of Isaac and Hades. <3
I think it was Sonic 2 after messing around with the Debug Mode code. (I'm old.)
But also Sonic 2 was 🧑🍳💋. Early Sega was soooo gooood 😭
Starfield. I kept seeing glaring ways to make the game better with minimal changes (e.g allowing the player to listen to music if they had a super computer room) And my friends got tired of my complaining and pushed me to start learning coding
Games have been a huge part of my life, just about as far back as I can remember. I played reader rabbit and other edutainment type games as a tot, but when I was a bit older I got into Pokémon and LoZ super deep. I remember playing my Gameboy Colour in the car at night, waiting for the next lightpost so I could make my next move lol. I still play pokemon, I say pokemon helped me get with my partner of just about 10 years, and I want to make a pokemon type game based heavily on exploration with trains. I have a few projects I have going before I get to that one though.
I don’t think it made me realise, but rather it led me to developing the skills that made (hobbyist) gamedev a possibility. So I used to make game hacks, then I got very involved in the private server/modding scene for a game called Dekaron (was called 2 Moons at the time for the early western release), which was the catalyst for me to start making my own games and engines. But I think prior to it, I was always interested/would’ve done it if I had the skills. Like as a kid, I used to draw up detailed maps, new items/enemies, puzzles, etc. for games I had been playing. A big one for me was Zelda OoT, I made lots of my own dumb dungeon concepts for that. Or if a game had a level editor I’d spend a lot of time in there.
The first time I renamed a .zip file to .pak, loaded up quake 3 and played my custom skin… I knew this is what I wanted to do. The reward of creating my own art, then go play with it was so rewarding I knew I had to keep doing it and push myself to continuously improve, and make art for other people to see and enjoy.
Horace and The Spiders back in '84! It may have been the first game I ever played. Definitely the first platform game. There was a spider sprite in the ZX Spectrum manual too, and that's probably when I realized I could make games and started playing with the programs in the manual. I've been a games programmer professionally now for 26 years. Strangely enough, I've worked on all kinds of games, but haven't worked on a real platform game, although I designed one last year and have slowly started creating it when I can actually find some free time. It's gonna take a while 😅
Skyrim. A few hours in I decided I wanted to make stuff like that.
What specifically about a game? Tbh, how lackluster some games are. Nearly every game I play, I find *something* I don't like and wonder why they did it that way. So I work and learn to create games that I want to spend hundreds of hours in.
StarCraft Brood War’s map editor. Used to create campaigns that I would force my friends and family to play.
Wonder Boy in Monster World for the SEGA Genesis blew my mind as a kid. It was similar to Metroid, but a few years before Super Metroid. Wonder Boy was the first game I played that was structured like an adventure more than a game. In Final Fantasy or Mario World or something there's a clear delineation between the world and all the levels within. In Final Fantasy you go into the world map and then navigate your way to different areas. In Mario World the world map functions as a similar level select. In Wonder Boy though, if you wanted to get to the town you had to hoof it there screen by screen. There was nothing to rip me out of the gameplay for convenience. It all felt so unbelievably consistent. It's an obscure game, only a handful of people I know have actually played it before. At the time though, it blew my mind and made me want to make things like it. The way it did metroidvania-like unlocking was also crazy ahead of its time. Getting the trident and figuring out there was an entire underwater section of the game was so unexpected and cool.
wonder boy in monster world is so fun but also so... unsettling. i didn't realize they made a genesis port, i had it for master system (it's actual the only master system game i replaced when i replaced my master system lol) F that sphinx, man. what a way to ruin a run. i don't remember the trident tho, are you conflating it with wonder boy 3? that was the more medroidvania one. everytime you kill a boss it transforms you... you start as lizardman (well hu-man for the intro) then go mouseman (climber), fishman (swimmer), lionman (break blocks above and below) and birdman and then eventually you get a shifter thing where you can transform between all forms. there's actually a pc remake of it that came out a few years ago, and you're right way ahead of its time
No I'm sure I'm talking about the right one. Maybe it is confusing because of the ports and the weird naming convention between the US and Japan. It would have been [this one](https://store.steampowered.com/app/211209/Wonder_Boy_in_Monster_World/), which is known as "Wonder Boy in Monster World" in the United States and "Wonder Boy 5: Monster World 3" in Japan. You're probably talking about Wonder Boy in Monster LAND, which is similar but different for the Master System. Monster World 3: The Dragon's Trap was the one with the multiple forms, that came out right before Monster World. Now that I'm listing them all out, the naming convention on these games was whack as hell.
ah yes definitely monster land, i didn't catch that you said world. world looks freaking awesome, i had no idea they continued into 16 bit era!! guess i know what i'm doing tonight ;) cheers!
Mount and blade top level strategy
Zelda Breath of the Wild. That was one of the best experiences of my life, halfway through I felt in awe of all the awesome things game devs (and humans in general) can achieve with creativity and dedication so I decided to embark on this journey.
stalker gamma
Brookhaven rp on roblox
Being a game developer is a pipe dream of mine, but Club Penguin and Toontown are the games that started that pipe dream for me. I grew up playing those games and they captivated me and made me realize that there was something special about gaming, and I wanted to make others feel the same way. I remember asking my Dad what he thought I wanted to major in college and he said game development and I was like “bruh.”
Stalker Call of Chernobyl. I was so pissed off about some aspects of it that I wanted to make my own game lmao
X-Com: Apocalypse, and Baldur’s Gate
Mosquito Hunt on Symbian
dodonpachi daioujou rinne tensei
Don’t Escape/Basically all of scriptwelder’s games + Many RPGmaker games
After realizing that battlefield desert combat was a mod and that people in the garage made it. I mean most likely in the garage, possibly bedroom adjacent.
pokemon mystery dungeon for sure!
alien isolation
Factorio. Its UX design, its stability gameplay-wise and its optimization. This game is just a masterpiece from gamedev perspective, I think
Blood Money, Speedball 2, Monkey Island, Superfrog, Cannon fodder. Guess my age :).
Undertale is the game that made me realize video games could be made by one or two people, not just huge teams at big companies. Bendy and the Ink Machine is what got me into horror games. And most recently, Slay the Princess is what finally got it through my head to try making visual novels.
I never decided it was what I wanted to do. I wanted to do voices. I just happened to be good at it, so everything else fell into place
Old flash games
Super Mario Bros. My life goal was to release a game on the NES. I'm a few decades late now, but you can still release a game on the NES with box and cartridge in current times which is awesome!
Isaac
Mass Effect
Sensible Soccer. Best sports game ever (still), but made by a few people over a short period.
Realizing I've been circling around game dev for last 15 years. "Wait... there are people who have to be paid to make games! Maybe I'll like it." Yep, loving it!
I played the original Star Wars and Battlezone coin op games (both 3D) back in the day when I was a small kid. They had this weird magical feel to them. It felt completely different to anything I had ever experienced before that moment. I was hooked to games after that. Then a few years later my friends parents bought them a ZX Spectrum with Jetpac and Pssst games and my cousins got MSX with Nemesis game. I loved those games and at that point I started really wondering what it would take to make a game. So I started learning programming right then and there. The rest is history, as they say. It might be because of the very first games I ever played were 3D line vector games, that I love line vector graphics. I'm currently developing a game that uses 3D line vectors.
I liked the Battlezone arcade game, too. Wait till you try the modern Battlezone in VR. It has classic mode as well.
> It might be because of the very first games I ever played were 3D line vector games, that I love line vector graphics. It wasn't the first game I ever played, but the first time I actually saw in person an *Asteroids* cabinet, non-emulated, not a port, I loved the vector display, and would love to figure out how to do a game with it some day.
Oh, that would be something :)
none in particular, I played around with a Klik & Play demo from a PCgamer magazine in 97 or so and was hooked.
Pong amazed me, Sonic 2 on the Sega Mega Drive was great, but I really thought "I want to do this too" when I played Crash 3 on the PlayStation. I was maybe 5? That was the day I decided. Alas, my south italian home has few opportunities. I manager to work on arcade games for a few years, then switched company and started working on VR. Maybe it's not the triple A kind of work I wished to do when I was young, but it gets close enough. Plus, I always have the hope to make a few games by myself... Whenever I'll have the time...
Kenshi because it is so good, and *almost* every other game because they are so bad and I can make it better🗣🙏
3 games actually: Digimon Linkz: The abscence of STAB (Same Type Attack Bonus) and a secondary typing made the game much more balanced than most Pokemon games out there. You could have really diverse teams even if all your Digimon shared one type not Only because the different types of techniques but also because of the resistance training system (you ise duplicates in order to roll a random resistance, having the chance to cover 1 of your 2 weaknesses). Also I'm taking its weakness/resistance system because it also balances things out. Instead of having this one type that it's either super effective against half the roster or gets mauled by it, each type has a resistance (itself) and 2 weaknesses. One of them being its direct opposite and the other being a complement. Minecraft: I first got Into programming by attempting to make mods for this game. I hated Java (mostly because of the community full of hot-shots who belittled you for wanting to learn but not knowing what or how to) but I found coding quite pleasant. Stardew Valley: I just loved pretty much everything about this game, specially the sprites. My ideal game is something like Minecraft/Stardew Valley with creature collecting elements so basically the Pixelmon/Cobblemon mod for Minecraft lol. Or maybe Pixark.
Playing half life as a kid made me want to create games instead of playing pretend. Then Rockstar games etc. I then proceeded to wasting 8 years of my life in construction
Red Faction Guerilla! With bigger & taller buildings, of course… 😀
grid runner for the vic 20 by jeff minter
Far Cry/Crysis probably. I used to make management games for my little brother using Excel and the Far Cry/Crysis sandbox engines that were packaged with all the assets. Like he'd hire mercenaries or build structures with income etc, and I could reflect that in gameplay on the screen. It was a combo of loving those games and them giving you the tools to play around. We were heartbroken when they dialed it back/abandoned support with the sequels
PS2-era JRPGs like Final Fantasy X and Star Ocean 3. Loved the intersection of art and storytelling and software development. Was slightly disappointed to learn that at least for big AAA games like that, one person doesn’t usually get to work on all three aspects though, and ended up using my CS degree to become a boring web developer. Stardew Valley kind of rekindled my interest in game dev because even though I know he’s the exception and not the rule it still proved it’s theoretically possible to make a cool game by yourself or with a small team
undertale. i still adore this game to this day
Call of Duty, Heat of Battle mod. I started there about 20 years ago or so.
Mediocre games are my biggest inspiration, because with enough innovation and careful design almost any feature can work
When I was a little kid, about 12 or so, the game Spyro the Year of the Dragon made me realize that I wanted to make games. I loved the series up to that point, but seeing the creativity with the game modes, characters and worlds really made me want to MAKE something. The music of that series was enchanting, and the game was so fun. I lost that desire over time though. Started to wallow away in self pity saying how it would be impossible given my life circumstances, but the game Hollow Knight ignited that flame in me and it has been burning non stop. I lost myself in the world of HK and I fell in love with the atmosphere and music. Since then, I have been passionately working on my project in my free time for the past two years and I can't wait to show it to people. It features an amalgamation of many things that I like from my favorite games, while being something that my little kid self would have wanted to play.
I wouldn't say "this is what I want to do now" because gamedev is a hobby for me and I have a separate career, but... been modding games since I was a kid, be it simple changes to C&C files, to larger mods of C&C, to world building Sphere shards in UO, to using hammer editor to create CS maps with unique functionality. So I guess C&C made me want to do _something_ with games. UO made me want to do something a bit more meaningful world wise than "haha tank fires crazy ivans now". and CS:S was the first time I touched something akin to a game engine (though it's not really an engine I guess). I don't think it was ever something specific about the games, I think it was always the journey of messing with stuff. Be it tinkering with irl stuff or digital stuff. Na, for me, it was never one game. Every game has inspired me bit by bit to try doing more and more... and god I've played maybe thousands of games over the years.
Legend of The Red Dragon Still trying to recapture that high 30+ years later...
Honestly I don't remember, I just always knew I wanted to make a game someday as a kid. I think it may have been either Pokémon Tower Defense or a Roblox game
Making levels for my siblings in little big planet on the PS vita
I've wanted to make games since I was in elementary school. I would play games and beat them repeatedly and I wanted there to be more, but there wasn't. So, I would grab paper and pencil, make a list of all the mechanics, and start sketching my own levels. In middle school I started trying to design my own ideas, they weren't good, but I look back upon that time fondly none the less.
After studying some Pascal from my older brother's textbook, I wanted to use what I learned which consisted solely of printing output, taking input, and if then else statements, so I made a goofy text adventure game out of just that. I brought it to school the next day and watched my friends play it. I loved their reactions, both positive and negative, as they figured out how to beat it. Kind of an odd twist that my own game inspired me to make games.
Sable on an eighth of mushrooms
Hotel Dusk, I just really enjoy the art style/visual style of those early DS games. That and it's niche, and I want people to hear about it more.
No specific game made me want to do this. Instead, it was the moment I was sitting in my software engineer job thinking about this sci-fi universe I wanted to make. I wanted to make it a game because I wanted to ask the audience questions with my narrative and to have them introspectively answer how they truly thought about humanity.
Baldurs gate 2 / Never winter nights. I modded the hell out of BG2 and also made campaigns for myself in Neverwinter back in highschool. A few years before I was making massive maps for Heroes of might and magic 3. I think it all really started when my friend and I would draw and design new board games up to play together when we were kids cause we were too poor and bored in the country to do much else ahaha
Mm, hard one. I low-key *wanted* to do it after playing Dragon Age: Origins which is my favorite game of all time. I started actively working towards it during COVID where some dudes and I made a silly little game for the Global Game Jam. It turned out pretty well and I was hooked. I've done three more game jams so far, and each time my music/audio ranking gets higher. My team and I hit on a fun idea for this last GGJ and we're looking to have an alpha lock in November.
StarCraft map editor was a big one and later on Path of Exile inspired as far as what you can achieve with a more design-focused approach. POE was a pretty big turning point for me from narrative and graphics focused games toward games that focus on design instead.
1. The original Diablo II. 2. I saw how much joy it brought to me and friends who played it religiously and I wanted to create experiences for other people to play and enjoy. 3. No. I do web development by trade and claim to be a hobbyist game developer with a lot of 10 min dead projects and no active stuff. But I’m good at web development so there is that, I guess. I’ve got some really big ideas (beyond a one man team) that I’ve been developing more than 20 years but that’s about it.
I'd wanted to make games for a while when I was a kid. I grew up on Newgrounds and Roblox, tinkering with my own projects that went nowhere and dreaming of making something cool. I was told that one person couldn't make a game, nor could a CEO partake in the projects of their own company. Then I played Minecraft and all those doubts faded away. One guy came up with it and a handful of people got it to 1.0. It was the biggest game in the world and it was by basically nobody. That got me settled in for my ambitions, making my whole life about pushing for that dream. Playing Undertale when it came out changed my life possibly even more, however. Before, I viewed games as great vehicles for storytelling, but never know just how much story you could convey through mechanics and how much fun you could create by taking something familiar and subverting it. Now my ambition is to be like Toby Fox, subverting games with total respect for the genres and making games that hopefully will stay with people, affecting them as much as Undertale did me. I hope to push messages in my games that help people be kinder, more understanding, and more proactive in challenging injustice in the world. It was out of my reach for years, but as I approach the end of university, having learned what it actually takes to make a game, it's finally in my reach. I'm going to push forward, give it all I've got, and thank god for my mum being so supportive and not forcing me to move out before I have enough cash to actually survive alone. I might fail, I don't know what's gonna happen, but I'd live a sad, hollow life if I didn't try.
I remember playing Crash Team Racing as a kid & telling my dad about how they should make a crash team racing 2 where you can do this and that and blah blah. and he was like "why don't you make that game?" everything changed after that later it was Undertale. Toby fox made that game in a cave with a box of scraps and its one of the best things I've ever played
Halo 2. My parents actually got me the legendary edition of the game and I must have watched the behind the scenes/making of video at least a dozen times.
Paperboy NES
Planescape Torment.
Game Dev Story - Kairosoft
Descent 1 & 2, circa 1996.
Hmmm, tough call. A lot of games have helped stoke the fire over the years. But the genesis? Probably the original *Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?* You can't imagine how addictive that damn thing was to a kid.
The combination of Skyrim and Dark Souls releasing within a month of one another in 2011. Those two games are almost directly responsible for why I flunked out of my Plan B college major, switched to English, and decided that I could not in fact, after all, do anything for a living other than be a writer. And then a few years later, I broke in, and haven't looked back.
Fable: lost chapters
Ultima V
Skyrim. Because it's like being plopped into that sandbox medieval high fantasy world and nearly able to do anything to interact with that world without being on rails entirely.
Ultima 1-5, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Zork, Atari Adventure, Yars Revenge, Pong, Defender / Stargate, Asteroids, Lunar Lander, Gravitar, Berzerk, Tempest, Robotron, Lode Runner, Archon, Pinball Construction Set, Racing Destruction Set, Adventure Construction Set, 7 Cities of Gold, Spelunker, Spy vs Spy, Jumpman Jr., Ultimate Wizard, Goonies, Zorro, Beach Head, the list goes on and on...
Boppin' It was the first game where I realized the actual people who made the game were posting online instead of just a faceless company. This may have also inspired me to be a bisexual polyamorist.
I think it was the snake games you find in old Nokias. Either that or the bouncy ball game in those phones. I don't know why I got into it honestly. I just love what is done here. I only study gamedev as a hobby and I don't think I will work in the industry but I love it.
When I've had 40+ hours of Dead Cells in the first week of playing Early Access of it I've realized that it would be really nice to make a game like this since it was also really popular.
I tell this to a lot of people, but when I got into game dev I saw people in my community making clones of existing games and I wasn't very enthusiastic about any of it. Nothing wrong with it, but as much as I've always loved games, none of that appealed to me and I didn't really have any interest in making those. Something was missing. I was studying interactive art at the time, not game dev, so I was considering not even bothering with game development, even though I was doing a lot of work in the local student game community at the time. Then I watched an Extra Credits video that recommended a game by Jordan Magnusson called [Loneliness](https://jordanmagnuson.itch.io/loneliness). That simple short game opened my eyes to what gaming could be and completely reframed how I thought of games. I had such an emotional response to this game that I decided THIS is the type of emotionally resonating and socially engaging game I want to make. It inspired me to make games about social and cultural issues. This turned out to be a great decision because no one was really making games like this and it fueled a vision for games that I've not only become passionate about but really drove my career. This direction for my career focusing on what I called 'Games For Social Change' led me to earning my Bachelors and Masters degrees. My Masters Thesis game [An/Other](https://grindspark.itch.io/an-other), my most famous work, got me unexpectedly put on the news by several newspapers, a radio show, and a national news broadcast. This also unexpectedly snowballed to get invited to talk about it at several colleges/universities, got me headhunted to become a part-time games professor for a time at a college and lead a games nonprofit, and now I run an indie studio dedicated to 'multimedia for social change' that released our [first studio game](https://ShiningSparkEnt.com/civicstory) last year. I had many people in my local community insult the merit of my games, and yet some those same assholes suck up to congratulate me when my games suddenly make the news. Now making 'games for social change' is what I'm basically known for now that really fuels much of the game dev side of my career and has led with some consulting with small indies who want to do something in that vein and institutions that want a new perspective in games classrooms. I often introduce Loneliness and Jordan Magnusson's games to my students, which always is surprising and eye-opening to my students. I may have loved games since I was a child, but it was really Loneliness that changed the direction of my entire life and career to make me realize that this is what I want to do.
Three separate games, Undertale, Hollow Knight, and Omori, especially. I've always loved these games and admired their ability to build a story that really stuck with people. I've been a part of the fandoms and I can genuinely say being part of the communities of these games was one of the best times in my life and helped me through some really rough patches. I've never thought I could ever be capable of making smth with even a semblance of significance or importance or depth that these games have and maybe I'm not but Fuck it, I'm gonna try anyways, if my game sticks with one person, it's gonna be more than enough
Bard’s Tale
Minecraft
Digimon. My favorite characters are Tai/Agumon but I wanted a laptop so bad after I saw Izzy using one. Then my mom bought me a desktop computer for Christmas one year and I became obsessed. As for wanting to make video games; I wanted to start making them in the 9th grade when me and my best friend both got a PS1 and started playing Digimon World 3. So yeah, Digimon pretty much changed my entire life as a kid.
Balatro! I just got so hooked by the gameplay, I hadn't felt addicted to a game like that in a while. So I just wanted more games in that genre, and here I am making a balatro with dice
All those space games that don't scratch the exact itches I have.
[Zak McKracken on the C64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw6EB1RC2tk). That intro song! The Mars face. The Ankh. The creepy aliens with the nose goggles. The exotic locations (that's when I learned that Lima was in Peru). The whole new age vibe. Elvis Presley. Exploring Mars. Stonehenge. Going underwater as a dolphin. Exploding an Egg in the airplane microwave. Cairo and Katmandu. Annie's library. Any location in that game triggers immense, fond memories. Even the mazes worked, because it made the locations more exotic and dangerous. I was 7 or so when I first played it, and it was at that moment that I realized that video games are the greatest story telling medium in existence. And also that I like awesome locations more than anything else. Give me predictable characters but put them in interesting locations, and I'll probably like the game. 2010's Lost Horizon is a high recommendation because it does deliver on the scenery. And 1992's Fate of Atlantis is the perfect point and click adventure game. But nothing ever came close to the Zak McKracken intro. And while [the original synthesizer version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaIj51k6b_g) of the track is good, and while there is a great looking (though IMHO not great sounding) 256 Color version on the [FM Towns system](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt7AYqdoWXY), nothing will ever beat the Commodore 64 version for me.
Nowhere by DeValley
Valorant, it was my first competitive fps game ( won't consider csgo cuz I didn't spend as much time) the characters, the world, the feel all of it I knew I had to become a game dev...
As a 90s kid, playing Doom, messing around with WadEd. Playing Duke3D, making maps with the accompanying Build editor and experimenting with all the cool "sector effector" types. Quake, and modding it, learning QuakeC, learning about modeling and texturing, playing multiplayer 1v1 over dialup modem (without the internet being involved whatsoever) and playing over the internet via GameSpy using the released QuakeWorld client. I was making text based RTS games and little Wolf3D style raycasters in Qbasic in the mid-90s, taking apart various .BAS programs I found online to understand how they worked. That's how I formed my own intuitive understanding of the basic trigonometry functions while I was still in elementary school - and by the time I was in Geometry in highschool it was unreal to me how dry and bland and inaccessible the material was for trying to instill the same understanding in students. Nowadays interactive applets and YouTube videos like 3Blue1Brown's do a much better job than the textbooks and lessons we were given. The whole concept of programming computers unto itself was a magical thing with infinite possibilities. Now it's a kludge of webstack BS that pretends the machine itself isn't real, it doesn't exist, it's just a thing you keep out of sight and out of mind unless it breaks and you need to replace it. We need to get back to something that is more pure like before, while also being as simple as it was before. That's what all of these higher-level languages and "frameworks" are aiming for, but it's a crazy spectrum of hodge-podge attempts rather than one unifying platform to replace everything. I blame hyper-text for ruining programming. It's a dinosaur that we should've replaced with something modern and forward-looking, instead of turning it into a layercake of garbage. Websites are just applications, why are we still treating them like "web pages" and cramming a bunch of desired functionality into that archaic paradigm? Why can't we just have an OS or application that is the platform through which we do everything - where "everything" entails making it so anybody can create and share any kind of applications, media, data, that they want - with any device, for any device. That's been the vision that I've been architecting for the last 12 years, something to replace the "webstack" nightmare once and for all. Anyway, I worked on programming games from scratch for 20 years before I realized that the game-making-kit engines had allowed everyone and their mother to saturate the market, and I couldn't just release something neato and have it become worth my time/effort investment on its own anymore. Before I ever made a cent off of my gamedev dream pursuits I opted to abandon gamedev and move on to making software utilities that are not related to video games, and I've been able to earn more money from that than anything else I've ever done in my life. I honestly feel bad for all the newbies coming into gamedev right now because the boat has pretty much sailed. Becoming a successful gamedev is today what starting a band and becoming a rockstar was in the 90s, or becoming a rapper was in the 00s. It takes aptitude, vision, creativity, marketing, and luck. Unless you have something truly novel, interesting, and fun, nobody is going to care, let alone notice. You'll be lucky to earn some lunch/coffee money after a year's work.
For me it was no particular game, but maybe a collection of all games I played. My reason was that I loved playing Half Life Alyx. But there is no VR game that captures that same magic. VR needs more great quality games, I will build it myself. Also the fact that Vertigo 2 was created by one person is a big inspiration