Machegav

Canon Powershot A720 IS.

CHECK!

When I was a kid I had a book of prebaked QBasic game programs you could enter and play. QBasic is a programming language like C++ that had an editor built-in to MS-DOS in the heydays. MAN I sound old. I kinda like that. Anyway, back then I was a decent little hacker for my age and I ended up heavily modifying several of these games. I eventually started on a hideously ambitious project of my own, almost completely from scratch (I borrowed some nifty graphical tomfoolery from some people since I had no idea how or inclination to do it myself), but a few thousand pain-staking lines in (read: just after completion of the character creation phase) I got terminally sidetracked. I may still have it around somewhere…

It occurs to me that I am today actually immensely jealous and deeply reverent of my eleven-year-old self.

Later on I cooked up a few games in Klik n Play which I can modestly say were immensely entertaining; a three-level platformer wherein the third level consisted of leaping from bouncing asteroid to bouncing asteroid, and a two-player deathmatch/eventually-cooperative spaceship game, again set across different levels, complete with powerups.

I later quickly made a couple games in RPG Maker 2000, the first of which being the actual RPG (one town, one boss), the other being a timed romp through a swampy landscape where you attempt to retreive all 100 of your cats while ten clones of your girlfriend cluster around you obstructing your movement and three evil robots move about attempting to slay you. If anyone here has ever played Chronotrigger, those are the sprites I used: Chronocats, Crono, Marle, and Dalton.

VERY long story short: you don’t need a highly educated squad of coders, artists, and writers armed to the teeth with the latest technology to make a video game. Sure, it helps, but you can do it on your own with some simple tools.

I went back to one of my previous plans, with some added resolution: BA in Applied Linguistics from UVic starting next year, then on the VCC for a TESOL degree, then abroad I go, to teach English.