#17 | Indievelopment

I live in Denver now, but not too long ago, I was in Dallas, working in a very different line of...well, work. Back then, I had a "career" in transportation — which mostly meant directing truck drivers, mapping out their refueling stops, and enduring daily screaming sessions from grizzled forty-something boomers who seemed to think yelling at a twenty-something was some kind of Olympic sport. The office wasn’t much better — rat-infested, and I do not say that hyperbolically.

But even in that macho-drenched environment, my mind was somewhere else. I’d jot down game ideas in a Majora's Mask branded notebook every spare moment. After work, no matter how exhausted I was, I’d tinker away on Game Boy Studio projects on my laptop, chasing game development without even knowing what I was chasing.

The shift came when I met my partner — now my wife — Valentina. She was working in marketing at a studio called Playful in McKinney, TX, the folks behind Super Lucky’s Tale, a charming, Banjo-Kazooie-style platformer. She invited me to the studio's Christmas party. I was just an awkward plus-one, standing on the sidelines of conversation, but something clicked as I was getting a tour of their office for the first time. Listening to actual game developers talking about making a video game, I realized that it wasn’t just something people did as a passion project — it was a real, tangible career. The mental map I’d been drawing in my head finally connected. "I could do this," I thought. And from that point on, I started figuring out how.

How long it would take! Seriously, I knew, but didn't know that making even small games is a year-long commitment. You start with the concept of a game, an idea, but slowly as it starts to change, and grow, it becomes something completely different -- much larger in scope than you ever thought possible, and next thing you know the budget has quadrupled and you've been working with the same people on a single creative project for two or more years. It's crazy.

It's two things.

I’m kind of a crazy person — I track every single game I play and every single game I beat. It’s a science. Games-as-a-service don’t count as “beatable” in my system, so they’re filed away as “abandoned,” but any game with credits to roll? That’s fair game. My goal is to beat 1,000 games — and as of now, I’m sitting at 890. But I’m saving something special for number 1,000: Atomic Owl. My own game!

The next goal is way more personal, but what drives me even more is the feeling I’m chasing — a feeling I first experienced as a kid. I still remember it: a cold as shit December morning (not Christmas — I grew up in a Muslim household, so my family didn’t celebrate it). My dad came home from an early shift at work, he stopped by a Pawn Shop on the way home, carrying a cardboard box with something inside that looked like a VCR, but it wasn’t a VCR. And there was something like a tape, but it wasn’t a tape. It was the Sega Genesis and Sonic the Hedgehog. Magic. Pure magic.

When people play Atomic Owl, I want them to feel something like that. I want them to feel the edge, the attitude, and the energy of those classic 90s platformers — a rush -- like spin dashing through Green Hill Zone, but this time, it’s Bladewing City. I hope they get that same electric charge I felt back then.