Hello. I''m an indie game developer. I''d like to post some information about how my game programming career has gone thus far, my plans for the future, and I''d like to know what my chances are after high school getting a real job as a real game developer, and what my salary would probably be. What college should I go to? Should I go to college right away?
Ok, so here''s my little testimony.
When I was 7 years old, my grandpa brought home a game. It was called King''s Quest V. When I played it, I was amazed. It was an adventure game, but what was amazing about it was it was completely hand-painted, and, beautiful! I said to my grandpa "This is obviously the 5th game, are there more?"
He said there was, but they weren''t anything like this and I wouldn''t like them. He was wrong! When I saw them, he was right, they weren''t anything like them. They were 16 colors, and had yellow characters, etc. But I still liked them! I decided, that I liked the newer kind of King''s Quest better, I would become a game programmer and make games like this, or even better, remake King''s Quest games. So, I picked up Qbasic and Visual Basic. I liked making menus and neat little programs with it. I continued working. I learned Java. I made my first graphical game, SGTBM, with java. It was a space fighting game. I was really proud of it. Then, I learned the language I still use today, C. I made a game, Elk Hunter, with it. It was my first fun game, I guess you could say. It was like Street Fighter, except there were only two moves, but hey, it was cool. My friend, at this point, had just finished making a game called Mafia, which was basically a tile-based adventure game. You had to rally the troups of KBAR to combat against school. I didn''t like how this game was only 16 colors. So, I made my friend a QB engine( that''s the language he knows) to handle 256 color sprites that would be saved to a file. This began Arean''s Wish. However, QBasic''s limitations hit us so hard, we had to stop working on it. After a while, I got fed up with Andre'' Lamothe''s graphic engine. Not that it was bad, it just wasn''t designed for someone like me. I made my own graphics engine in a day or two. No offense to LaMothe, but I think it improved upon his code immensly. It took ~250 lines to do what LaMothe''s took over 1000 I think. So, I felt smart making an engine like what I did. I decided to revisit the world of SGTBM and made SGTBM II. This game was a lot smarter. I used "paths" which would make the aliens have more life-like movement. I had powerups, levels, it was a GAME. It was complete. However, I lacked the motivation to sell the game. Even though I''m only working on the project after this, the difference in quality is sooo much, that i would be embarrassed to sell it now. (I sell locally) Finally, Arean''s Wish''s time came. After finishing SGTBM II, I was completely fed up with it. The reason was, I figured out so many things to do differently! This is what happens after every game for me
. After a huge facelift to Arean''s Wish, the engine is near-complete, and we''re waiting for writers to progress through the story. Even now, I can tell a bunch of things to improve on my next project. My next project is going to be to make an adventure game engine. I am going to call it Sponge Factory Adventure Game Maker. Or something like that. It will make screen based adventure games like the newer King''s Quest. It will have a scripting language farm more advanced than Arean''s Wish. It will be SO customizeable you can make non-adventure games with it. Now, with this engine, I am going to remake King''s Quest IV. This game was one of the funnest for me, and I want to remake it like the newer ones. King''s Quest IV will be released for free so that I won''t get sued
. There are two games we have for plans in the future following this one. The first, will be our own original adventure game, that will be sold, like our other original games. After that, I plan on making an online MUD, that will be graphical. That''s all I have for details for those two projects, because we haven''t planned that much about them! Now I''m 16 years old, and I have been programming games for 9 years.
Now that you know my game programming life story, what do you think? I have 3 more years of school, then I''m out on my own. I live in Washington. Which college should I go to? Do I even have a chance of getting a game programmer job or should I do freelance programming or web development instead? If you haven''t seen Arean''s Wish, there''s a 2 month old copy in the GDS, or, at www.games-source.net, there''s a download there also, it''s newer. (I''m borrowing music from other games until I have music from the musicians (that way I won''t get bored while testing)). My last question, will the work I have done this far mean ANYTHING on a resume, or do I have to have proffessional work (as a real employee) to mean anything? Thanks alot for reading. If you''re not a game programmer and want to be, I hope my story is encouraging to you, because, you can never start too young
