Time to get off my ass!

    The idea of making video games can be an exciting one, it can also be extremely daunting at first glance.  I have been trying to get my shit together for years now and start making games but for one reason or another I just keep pushing it off.  I don't want to push this off anymore! I know that making games is what I want to do, where my passion lies and where I want to be professionally. So it's time I put my big boy pants on and do what I need to do to make that dream a reality!

    In the fall of 09 I moved from Lorain, Ohio to Tempe, Arizona to pursue a degree in video game art.  At the time I thought I was following my dream, but in fact I now see I was just trying to take what I thought to be the easy way out. It wasn't until I was done partying, wasting all my time playing games and already graduated that I realized I was more interested in game programming.

Ludum Dare 39 (LINK)

    I think a lot of the reason that I haven't done much outside of some game jams here and there is due to my inexperience with programming and my over all frustration that comes with those short comings.  Its taken me quite a while to realize that this is something that is not going to fix itself and in order to overcome this hurdle I am going to need to just do it!

   So now that I have caught you up with my back story lets move on to the present. My wife is about to start a coding boot camp and I am currently going through a Cisco scholarship program to receive my CCNA in cyber security. All the excitement of learning coupled with the over whelming feeling that I was meant to do something more creative with my career lead me to revisit games a little more seriously.

    The past few months I have been watching the videos by fellow game maker Mark Brown who runs this amazing YouTube channel called Game Makers Toolkit. In his videos he tackles game design theory by taking a very deep look into specific design ideas and implementations. Seriously, do yourself a favor and go watch everything on his page! Really though, go watch them all! If games are your thing at all, you'll thank me later. While watching his videos I got to thinking; why is it that some games pull me in while others just don't? It was that question that lead me to this very blog and what lit the fire under my ass to get back into the swing of things.

Copyright Nintendo Company Ltd (IMG)

    I started by thinking about what makes one of my favorite games of all time, the NES classing, The Legend of Zelda so enticing. What about that game still grabs my attention and pulls me in every time I play it? Is it pure nostalgia due to it being a game my mother and I used to play together when I was a toddler? Or is it the games ability to embody a sense of wonder and awe into the player while exploring Hyrule that really tugs on my heart strings?

    These, along with others, are some of the questions that I finally want answers to! These are the answers that are going to help fuel the design for my own games. These are the questions that will not only provide me with more knowledge into the industry, but also continue to make me a better game designer and brings me one step closer to reaching my goal with every answer. My goal of being able to create games that I want to make, share the stories that I want to share and explore new and innovative ways to push the video game industry forward as a profession and not just a hobby!