I don’t think I’m special. I’m just another 20 something year old guy trying to make his first game. I’ve learned some things along the way so I figured I’ll share it. Maybe it’ll help you skip one or two mistakes. Or maybe you’ll just have fun watching my journey. Either way, I’ll start out with a little bit more about myself. 

I am a passionate gamer. The games I have the most hours in are:

League of Legends

Factorio

Slay the Spire

Fire Emblem

But I don’t just love video games, I love all games. That includes board games and sports (although I’m pretty bad at that last one ><). To me, games are different from TV, reading or other forms of entertainment because of the interactivity. Games at their core is a mapping of inputs to rewards (obliquely related to the concept of Flow Channel). Games have 4 key pillars to me: Skill, Progress, Story and Social (I later found out that it is very similar to the Bartle taxonomy of player types but I came up with my theory independently!). If people are interested I’ll explain more in depth later but the short version is:

Skill - Reward is correlated to how skilled you are

Progress - Reward is correlated to how much time/effort you put in

Story - Reward is correlated to being invested in the characters/world/plot

Social - Reward is correlated to who you are playing with/community

Personally, I find all four of these categories rewarding so I like almost every kind of game. In general I love talking about all game theories. My favorite youtube channels are:

Game Makers Toolkit

Extra Credits

If you have other youtube or theory recommendations, post it in a comment below! I’d love to hear what y’all have to share. 

Entertainment wise, I love watching anime and I love doing small group activities from 4-8 people. TV wise, I particularly love comedy. I love laughing and I love laughing with my friends. For small group activities, I prefer something more social, like social deduction board games and party games. 

My other small productive hobby is video editing. I love creating content that will make people laugh. So that’s it for hobbies. Now for my professional life:

I am a professional software developer. My company uses the Agile Manifesto for our day to day and I think the concepts you can learn from professional software development helps a lot with developing a hobby game. I’ll write another post about skills I learned in my work that apply to hobby dev, (tl;dr watch this playlist of videos). But I will go more in detail in another blog post. At work I’m personally more interested in the technical side of my work rather than the product side because I feel like I can only relate to “customers” like myself. So I prefer to work on internal tools that directly help my coworkers rather than help the company. 

That’s a long enough post about myself. I’d love for y’all to get to know me and I’m looking forward for all of y’all to try out the game!

Don't forget to checkout our homepage! https://betakyros.github.io/Meexarps/