Many years ago, my interest first came in the form of Warcraft III's editors, which I was terrible at using and uninterested in reading support documents to learn. The concept alone of creating something in a game engine fascinated me. That would lead to RPG Maker – to this day I have no idea how I managed to get that installed on our PC – and an entire new level of creativity fell into my hands. Stats, custom maps, dialogue – the engine was so content-forward and I didn't need to understand the mechanics operating everything.
After many terrible, terrible games in RPG Maker, I would find Game Maker. I lived and breathed that engine for years. At first relying on the drag and drop features to make something happen on screen, but also being willing to read the help documentation on the website. Following tutorials and being amazed when I created Clown Clicker, a simple game where random clown faces would bounce around the screen which could be clicked for 100 points. Mind blown.
Around the time Game Maker was being obtained by Yoyo Games, I was moving onto C# and XNA in a vague attempt to create a game for Xbox 360. I would never achieve that, but I can thank a small video series by a lone gentleman showing the basics of drawing to screen, controlling the player, and various other functions that got me invested in the idea of working with a "real" programming language. I've lost those videos to time now, but that was my first introduction to real development and version control. Being forced to navigate to Github and interact with the repository to get resources to follow along was frustrating at first. But I would learn skills that I use every time I write code today.
I became fascinated with software at that time. Much more than before. It had always been something I enjoyed as something to do outside of busy hours, but that little space shooter game absolutely unlocked something in me. I began buying books and studying programming not just as a language, but as a system and art form. How to write clean, self-descriptive code. Finding my affinity for typed languages. My career as a network engineer flourished under this excitement and consumption. I wanted to write scripts and automate tasks.
Though I would pursue a formal education in Software Development, eventually earning a Bachelor's in 2021, I never did break into the industry. It could be that career trends in that field were growing more and more unavailable to entry-level engineers, it could be that the skills I learned weren't sufficient on those few occasions I got far enough to do actual code writing during application processes. I never wound up with the feedback I needed to improve, so I continued to operate purely as a solo developer.
And today, I find I enjoy that more.
For personal reasons, I left the Microsoft sphere in late 2025 and finally left C# behind. While it isn't impossible to write in C# or set up a .NET framework to develop in on Linux, the migration gave me an opportunity to branch out and learn more. I had been using C# and Monogame framework as a hobbyist throughout the early 2020's, but built nothing fully of note outside a few small engines.
Though I had heard of Godot in the past, and dabbled with it somewhat using its C# version, I did not give it much thought when I first tried it out. About two months ago, however, I decided to pick it back up, as I had a little more time on my hands now and I wanted to program or script something – anything – in my off hours. The little bits of C I was attempting to learn was not enough to produce anything on screen yet.
I've felt that same spark in me that I did so long ago, when I first created Clown Clicker. I'm not sure what it is about now that was different from the last time I tried it out, though much of my life changed in the past 2-3 years, so any of that could have attributed to it. I've grown fond of the engine, though am still actively learning it. That spark, combined with the other small joys and hobbies I've found since settling here in Tokyo, have come together to produce the beginnings of my current project, Nori Tetsu!, a Gameboy-aesthetic platformer which I've been using to broaden my understanding of the engine and how to piece together a complete game. It took some time for me to get to Godot, but I'm glad that's where I am now. I have not felt this excited to get into the gritty of scripting and developing for quite some time.