Consoles games: like falling in love with video games turned into an interesting game dev
Hi, Habr!
Today we decided to share a few non-format stories for our blog. It will be about one developer, whose love for console video games in childhood gave rise to a rather unusual game project.
Christer Kaitila or McFunkypants, as his friends like to call, grew up at a time when the Atari and Tron prefixes prevailed. And, of course, the craze for video games has not bypassed him. However, if for most 8-bit battles left only pleasant memories, then for Chris they are pre-determining in the development of his career.
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Now, as a game developer with experience, he decided to pay tribute to the good old video games and game dev community ... Not so long ago, Chris introduced the open-source tools for creating games in the tower defense genre. In addition, he is the creator of the annual development initiative Charity Game Jam, which encourages developers to create games with the possibility of donating to children's charity foundations with the help of in-game purchases.
“ Someone like me, but I always wanted to create video games. This desire came to me since the era of the Atari 2600. Era, in which I was lucky to be a child. And in general to grow at the same time as the games grow and develop - well, it's just great, you can only dream about that. And it only inflamed my passion for game development, ”says Chris.
His first developer experience was the Snake, inspired by the motorcycles from the first Tron movie for the TRS-80 Coco computer console.
“ It was a time when there were no custom hard drives yet, and I recorded the sources on audio cassettes! ".
Watching how much money teenagers spend on video games, Chris began to realize that this could make a good career.
And it became his main goal.
The beginning of his self-development, as a developer, was laid back in elementary school, together with game projects, which he worked on in freelancing. Plunging deeper into game devs, he went through the training of new programming languages, many festivals and hackathons, and dozens of applications. However, as Chris himself notes, it was necessary to spend 10 years to create his portfolio of games, so that third-party companies began to hire him as a developer.
At the end of last year, Chris opened a new page in his developer biography. Working with Woot Studio, he released a rather non-standard project - Tower Game Starter Kit . It is a free cross-platform open source developer toolkit for creating your own tower defense-style games for Windows Phone, Windows 8, and HTML5-enabled browsers.
“ We wanted to create something simple that could work equally well on tablets and smartphones, and most importantly, that it did not require high performance for rendering. That's how this developer kit came out , Chris says. “ We wanted developers with any experience to learn how to develop HTML5 games for Windows Phone .”
“ When creating the Tower Game Starter Kit, we agreed with Woot Studio that it would be nice if the sample project was included, that is, MVP (product with minimal functionality) representing a fully functioning and certified project under Visual Studio, ready for compilation and placement in the App Store. "
Using this toolkit, anyone, even one who does not have special programming skills, can start developing games.
“ Anyone who has a brush can start painting. Also with the Tower Game Starter Kit: anyone can create games, even a beginner. Naturally, the more skills you have in creating applications, the easier it will be to create a game and the clearer for you everything that happens, ”Chris says.
“ In fact, you can change and create new levels, add new graphics and textures, edit soundtracks without even touching the code ,” he adds.
Tower Toolkit Kit Overview
So why is this project distributed for free?
" The main goal of this project is to attract as many people as possible to create games for Windows Phone using HTML5, " explains Krister. “ Especially, despite all the possibilities of the Tower Game Starter Kit, it’s still more a learning project and a kind of“ probe ”for most game developers .”
Before you start working with the toolkit, Chris recommends that you familiarize yourself with dozens of games created using the Tower Game Starter Kit. For example, Tiny Tidal Tower Defense for Windows 8.
It would seem that Chris and so there is something to do in life, but his tireless pursuit of everything connected with games led him to create another project - the competition “ One month, one game .” This is an interesting activity that motivates developers to create, or rather compete in creating games twelve times a year.
At the moment, the project site has about 8,000 profiles of game developers. At the same time register on the site is quite simple: all you need is a Twitter account.
“ This competition is more a competition with oneself than a competition for a better game, so I didn’t limit participants to any rules, ” Chris says. “The key idea of the project is to motivate developers to create their own applications, thereby improving their skills, just like regular exercises in the morning make you stronger .”
Of course, not everyone will be able to cope with the challenge of creating one game per month, but Chris believes that in any case it is worth taking part in the program. “ Even if you create one game, participation in the competition will still make sense. There is only one way to achieve success in your business - to practice. That's the whole point of “One month, one game.” ”
“ I am one of those few happy people who have the opportunity to return something to the community in gratitude for what it has done for me. Consider it my hobby, Chris says. - For me, being a game developer is like being a rock star. I live a dream. And you can too - become one of those developers whose ideas help people . ”
As we mentioned at the very beginning, Chris created the annual Charity Game Jam initiative, urging developers to add donate buttons and other mechanics to their applications that help them raise funds for children's charitable foundations.
The next time the event will be held in November of this year. All the information you can find already closer to the event from his Twitter account .
In addition, you can read about all the projects of Chris on his personal website .
By the way, if you are interested in the Tower Game Starter Kit, you can take part in one of the competitions and earn extra points in our DVLUP project .
Today we decided to share a few non-format stories for our blog. It will be about one developer, whose love for console video games in childhood gave rise to a rather unusual game project.
Christer Kaitila or McFunkypants, as his friends like to call, grew up at a time when the Atari and Tron prefixes prevailed. And, of course, the craze for video games has not bypassed him. However, if for most 8-bit battles left only pleasant memories, then for Chris they are pre-determining in the development of his career.
')
Now, as a game developer with experience, he decided to pay tribute to the good old video games and game dev community ... Not so long ago, Chris introduced the open-source tools for creating games in the tower defense genre. In addition, he is the creator of the annual development initiative Charity Game Jam, which encourages developers to create games with the possibility of donating to children's charity foundations with the help of in-game purchases.
The dream becomes reality
“ Someone like me, but I always wanted to create video games. This desire came to me since the era of the Atari 2600. Era, in which I was lucky to be a child. And in general to grow at the same time as the games grow and develop - well, it's just great, you can only dream about that. And it only inflamed my passion for game development, ”says Chris.
His first developer experience was the Snake, inspired by the motorcycles from the first Tron movie for the TRS-80 Coco computer console.
“ It was a time when there were no custom hard drives yet, and I recorded the sources on audio cassettes! ".
Watching how much money teenagers spend on video games, Chris began to realize that this could make a good career.
And it became his main goal.
The beginning of his self-development, as a developer, was laid back in elementary school, together with game projects, which he worked on in freelancing. Plunging deeper into game devs, he went through the training of new programming languages, many festivals and hackathons, and dozens of applications. However, as Chris himself notes, it was necessary to spend 10 years to create his portfolio of games, so that third-party companies began to hire him as a developer.
Tower game starter kit
At the end of last year, Chris opened a new page in his developer biography. Working with Woot Studio, he released a rather non-standard project - Tower Game Starter Kit . It is a free cross-platform open source developer toolkit for creating your own tower defense-style games for Windows Phone, Windows 8, and HTML5-enabled browsers.
“ We wanted to create something simple that could work equally well on tablets and smartphones, and most importantly, that it did not require high performance for rendering. That's how this developer kit came out , Chris says. “ We wanted developers with any experience to learn how to develop HTML5 games for Windows Phone .”
“ When creating the Tower Game Starter Kit, we agreed with Woot Studio that it would be nice if the sample project was included, that is, MVP (product with minimal functionality) representing a fully functioning and certified project under Visual Studio, ready for compilation and placement in the App Store. "
Using this toolkit, anyone, even one who does not have special programming skills, can start developing games.
“ Anyone who has a brush can start painting. Also with the Tower Game Starter Kit: anyone can create games, even a beginner. Naturally, the more skills you have in creating applications, the easier it will be to create a game and the clearer for you everything that happens, ”Chris says.
“ In fact, you can change and create new levels, add new graphics and textures, edit soundtracks without even touching the code ,” he adds.
Tower Toolkit Kit Overview
So why is this project distributed for free?
" The main goal of this project is to attract as many people as possible to create games for Windows Phone using HTML5, " explains Krister. “ Especially, despite all the possibilities of the Tower Game Starter Kit, it’s still more a learning project and a kind of“ probe ”for most game developers .”
Before you start working with the toolkit, Chris recommends that you familiarize yourself with dozens of games created using the Tower Game Starter Kit. For example, Tiny Tidal Tower Defense for Windows 8.
Competition "One month, one game"
It would seem that Chris and so there is something to do in life, but his tireless pursuit of everything connected with games led him to create another project - the competition “ One month, one game .” This is an interesting activity that motivates developers to create, or rather compete in creating games twelve times a year.
At the moment, the project site has about 8,000 profiles of game developers. At the same time register on the site is quite simple: all you need is a Twitter account.
“ This competition is more a competition with oneself than a competition for a better game, so I didn’t limit participants to any rules, ” Chris says. “The key idea of the project is to motivate developers to create their own applications, thereby improving their skills, just like regular exercises in the morning make you stronger .”
Of course, not everyone will be able to cope with the challenge of creating one game per month, but Chris believes that in any case it is worth taking part in the program. “ Even if you create one game, participation in the competition will still make sense. There is only one way to achieve success in your business - to practice. That's the whole point of “One month, one game.” ”
Returning to the community due
“ I am one of those few happy people who have the opportunity to return something to the community in gratitude for what it has done for me. Consider it my hobby, Chris says. - For me, being a game developer is like being a rock star. I live a dream. And you can too - become one of those developers whose ideas help people . ”
As we mentioned at the very beginning, Chris created the annual Charity Game Jam initiative, urging developers to add donate buttons and other mechanics to their applications that help them raise funds for children's charitable foundations.
The next time the event will be held in November of this year. All the information you can find already closer to the event from his Twitter account .
In addition, you can read about all the projects of Chris on his personal website .
By the way, if you are interested in the Tower Game Starter Kit, you can take part in one of the competitions and earn extra points in our DVLUP project .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/220911/
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