Quest of a Lifetime
A journey through two decades of game design
Games have been the cornerstone of my life for as long as I can remember. You might think that means I can’t put down the controller, and have incredible skills, thousands of wins and a catalogue of 100% completions.
Quite the opposite. I am terrible at playing most games, and I hardly ever get a chance to actually sit and play for any length of time. I have a tiny handful of games which I play on a kind-of poor quality laptop that loves to overheat. I have a PS3 that never get’s played, and a Switch that sits uninterrupted in it’s dock. Not exactly a “gamer” by any means.
And yet, I’ve always been obsessed with games, and their ability to be works of art, contain rich worlds and unique experiences, or to feel like an escape.
Games have always fascinated me, not because of the high scores or any competitiveness (though I have been known to get quite heated), but because to me, they represent something far bigger. A game is a place where the story can come alive.
Where it all began
Potentially my earliest memories of games were the PlayStation 1 and the Gameboy Advance. I remember the five games we had on these consoles : Disney’s Tarzan (with it’s brutal “Rocking the Ship” level), Donald Duck: Quack Attack, some Winnie the Pooh game, and on GBA, Mario Kart: Super Circuit, and Sonic Advance.
I remember when I was really young, I went into town with my dad and we went into (what I think must have been) a Gamestation. Why we were there eludes me - it might have been when we got the PS2. I do remember seeing a GameCube there and thinking that giant block looked pretty awesome.
I know my parents were no strangers to games, playing classics like Tomb Raider and the Sega Megadrive. Perhaps I was a bit of a console hog in my younger years, because like many “adults”, gaming stopped being even a part of their leisure. It was only because us children liked games so much, that the grown ups gave them a chance. My Grandad’s ability to always beat my high scores on SSX Tricky, while moving the controller around like a lunatic, never ceased to amaze me.
While the PS1 and GBA were the starting point, most of my memories come from the PS2, Wii, DS and later on, PC gaming. Sometimes the consoles were in my room, sometimes in the living room - I think it was a constant battle between me wanting to play, and the family wanting their TV back.
In many ways, I can map out the phases of my life through the games I played - where I was, who I was with, and how much of my life revolved around them. Handing the controls to my mother so she could do the button-mashing boss fights in Tarzan Freeride; having my friend round to help beat Uncharted; or playing Buzz: The Hollywood Quiz with the family when we had a get-together.
Looking back, I know how trivial these things might seem to some. But for me, these experiences were far from insignificant. Remembering how much these moments mattered is almost therapeutic. I am incredibly grateful that my parents allowed games to be such a big part of my life. They weren’t just a way to pass the time; they gave me the foundation for a lifelong passion.
Grand Designs
I’ve always had an active imagination. As a kid, I could easily be found with a notepad, sketching out stories and concepts - mostly inspired by the games I was playing at the time. In the primary school playground, my friends and I played the same make-believe games as everyone else, but when the day ended, I would go home and build on those games, creating ideas to bring back and share.
Do you remember when all your discs had Bonus Features? Hidden within were often secrets, minigames, and they always had a “Making Of” video. One in particular had a big impact on my life, tucked away in the Bonus Features of Ty the Tasmanian Tiger.
That game was one of my favourites growing up, and the “Making Of” video, filmed in Krome Studios in Brisbane, Australia, changed everything for me. Not only was it an interesting glimpse at the game design process, and what it’s like to work in what looked like a friendly, creative environment, but I had never actually considered that someone made the games I enjoyed.
I watched as character designers modelled the characters in 3D, and animated them. I saw the concept artists creating beautiful ideas and the design of the world I’d explored. The level designers built the environments, and from their designs, I could see how the game could be mapped. There were programmers, sound designers, voice actors, cutscene engineers, whiteboards… they even had a huge pizza delivery!
Seeing the professionals at work transformed how I saw my own ideas - how they took all those crazy concepts and put together a quality game, and really seemed to care about making an experience. The concepts were inventive, the dedication was obvious, and from my time enjoying the world, game and story, I’d say it paid off.
Now, everything had changed. All those ideas I’d had and the sketches I’d made became games I could make. Someone had made the games I loved, and I wanted to be that someone. I realised that I could build experiences as engaging and meaningful as the ones I loved.
Getting into it
My early game designs were not anything special. I had a few ideas for cool characters, locations and overarching plots, and a lot of level maps, but these were the works of a child, not really coherent or useable. From the age of eight, I began working on my first project, which was a simple 3D platformer set in the time of the dinosaurs, mimicking the PS2 styles I had come to love. I had a large leather binder full of scraps of paper containing all my ideas, which sadly was lost over the years.
Before long though, primary school was over. The playground games were over, and I could so easily have let these ideas become relics of my youth that I never explored. Cue the Game Builder’s Club!
In secondary school, there were a plethora of clubs to join to offer a place to socialise during breaks and after school, and a way to try something new. While most of the clubs available had been announced to us within our first few weeks at the school, it would be a while later before I found out about Game Builder’s Club. One of our classes took us into the IT rooms, and I got into a conversation with the teachers about game design and they mentioned that me and my friends should join the Game Builder’s Club.
Game Builder’s Club, ran by the incredibly talented Mr. Black (our IT Technician), introduced me to what game design is actually like - that it is actually possible. Our first project, Hypertank, was a cannibalisation of a game made by another student, but using our own assets and coding our own features. We used Macromedia Flash and Fireworks for all our games, and coded everything in ActionScript with a lot of guidance from Mr. Black. A rolling smiley face was replaced by a tank, with a turret that could be pointed with the cursor and shot projectiles at various robot/zombie enemies. It was a really fun ten-level flash game and pretty good for a first project.
After the first year, while my friend continued working on Hypertank, I wanted to move on to my personal designs. I’d spent a good few years at this point designing a world of my own - a top-down fantasy RPG, taking loads of inspiration from games like Runescape. Through Year 8, what came to be called Game 32 was my focus in the club.
With a fair amount of work and mentorship, I made tilemaps, animated characters and planned a world which I would keep working on for years to come. My peers often showed concern for what they assumed was a serious paper addiction, because I would usually be carrying around loads of extra sheets of notes, plans and especially maps. Sometimes, I would divide my focus between boring lessons and writing down my latest designs.
In the last week of Year 8, I got Type 1 Diabetes and had to stay at home. One day that week, my friend knocked on my door after school and handed me a memory stick - the files for Game 32, so I could keep designing through the summer holidays. I really appreciated that.
A Game Builders Life for me
From the games of my youth, to the designs of my teens, to the business of now - I’ve been deep in the game building mire for most of my life, at least twenty years. I’ve spent a bit of time lately reminiscing about my old projects, thinking about how I would design those games now and still capture the thoughts that made the project special in the first place.
Over the years, my game dev journey has taken so many twists and turns. I kept designing games through school, and took my skills to the next level wherever I could. In a future post, maybe I’ll talk about the many, many things I’ve tried in my path to learn game development, or maybe I’ll talk about why after so much time and effort I never finished my childhood projects.
For now, I’ll leave you with this. Twenty years of hopes and dreams, and a dedication to a craft and passion that I still wish would pay off, just so I could finally make it my trade. It all started with the sacrifices of my family for the sake of my childhood enjoyment. It started with affordable consoles that accommodated the family: siblings crowded around a TV to compete, having friends over for a day of gaming, or giving the grown-ups a chance to prove their skills. It started with games that were designed with genuine love and thought, and with the experience at the forefront.
I hope that games can regain that place in peoples lives and in our hearts. No matter what I do with my time, if I get to release games, I hope that they can be as inspiring as the games that shaped me.