Making Video Games

I have been making video games ever since I was a little bit kid. Making a video game used to be a pretty simple affair for me. At the time, I was programming in BASIC. Basically, all you do is structure out a storyline, come up with a flowchart, and type in commands. Although this is the basic process for making of a video game even today, it was a lot simpler when the games didn't involve any graphics, arcade action, or anything like that. I was just doing choose your own adventure style games with simple, text-based combat. Nonetheless, my friends thought I was amazing. Making video games definitely earned me the respect of my geekier peers.

No one was surprised when I went to get a video game design degree – no one but me anyway. Although I have been an expert in how to make a video game for years, I figured that it was just a fun and amusing hobby. I could not shake the feeling that I was supposed to do something important and serious, and making video games didn't seem like that. Then I had a long talk about it with a good friend of mine. She is the person I always go to for advice when something is wrong. She can listen and tell me the one or two things that I really need to hear. She told me something very simple – so simple that I should have realized it myself. She said that making video games was my primary passion in life, and that you can not do better for yourself than to follow your passion. I'm glad she told me that – she was right.

Right now, I am making a video game for an independent arcade game company. We make online games for the most part and make our money out of ad revenue. This is a lot of fun for me, because I have recently made video games that were more involved. After making some massive project that took years to complete, it is nice to be working on simple, user-friendly games that can be done in a month. This particular one is a new space war game, modeled after the old retro video game style.

You have lasers and rockets that you can shoot at enemies, and you get points for rescuing earthlings trapped on alien planets. It's always nice to make video games that I like to play, and this is definitely a game I could sit down and play for hours. I'm glad I decided on making video games as a career. I've been having a huge amount of fun, and it only seems to be getting better. It was fun to make video games as a hobby, but taking it to the next level makes it even better.