Keith Garry: Origin

I was about 7 years old, my friend rushes over and tells me he has an idea.  He told me about a game called Warhammer and how it’s awesome but it’s really expensive so “we are going to make our own”.  



We headed out to a field, hauling all of our army men and started creating a rule system for how units would move (we seriously used a ruler) and what kind of units we would use.  At the time I was hooked on creating mazes and this was incredibly mind blowing to my 7 year old self.

Not much came of it, but that experience altered how I saw games.  Instead of mearly playing games, I was curious what would happen if I could change them. 

When MegaMan X came out I was developing my own levels and drawing new weapons and was dying to actually use them in the game.  I’m convinced that this is the reason why I want to make games, because I couldn’t for so long.

Many years went by until my mom finally bought us a computer.  Eventually I found a free Warcraft 2 demo and stumbled upon the editor.  I wasn’t even able to save or play the levels but I was obsessed.  Weeks went by and finally I owned it: the moment my map loaded on the screen and the units I placed were moving around, I had at least three aneurysms from excitement.  I get chills thinking about that to this day.

Warcraft 2 Editor

This went on for many more years.  Starcraft, Warcraft 3, Starcraft 2…  I learned a lot.  I learned Starcraft's scripting system, my first ever scripting language.  Between each game, the units and rules may have changed, but the core principles were always the same.  It’s a shame that none of my work was saved over the years.  A lot of it wasn’t even finished, actually. 

I went on to develop levels for 3D games such as Half Life and Team Fortress 2. Eventually I found a mentor Alex Galuzin who I learned a lot from.  For a couple years I helped run World of Level Design, a website in which we setup level building contests.    

Hammer Editor (Half Life, Half Life 2, Team Fortress)

While designing, I kept facing the same roadblock: I was limited by the editor.  I eventually worked up the nerve to learn programming, C++ actually.  I spent about a year learning it until I switched to C#.

I gave a serious thought to developing a fighting game, I wasn’t terrible at them, but the moment I got into any kind of rule system I quickly realized I didn’t understand them at all.  I decided to go into the competitive Soul Calibur scene and for the next three years I trained against the best, and eventually took 2^nd place in a local tournament.  I learned a lot of technical fighting skills, but the big pearl of wisdom I took from it, ironically, was that the fighting genre was over saturated and it didn’t need a new game.  I’ll probably write up an article on what I mean some day.

I returned my focus back to work, and really put strong effort into using VBA to build applications for my team to use.  This skill building payed off.  I was able to negotiate with the owner of the company and invent a new position.  I am now a full time C# Asp.net software developer thanks to my passion and desire to keep learning.   However this isn’t the end, it’s the beginning. 

In order to build games from scratch1,  you need to learn a lot.  The process is very painstaking and requires an immeasurable amount of patience and tenacity to keep going.  It is self discovery.  If someone asked me why I like making games, I might hesitate and try to explain it, but the answer is far simpler: I do it just to do it.

Albert and I were friends of friends back when we first met.  It was the first time I actually met someone who was a game designer outside of the internet.  It only took us about two years or so to realize we should probably join forces.  It’s great to team up with someone who is equally obsessed with game development and I’m excited build high quality games at Ion Pixel. 

 1 By "build games from scratch" I mean building the core features of your game instead of building off of someone else's. I don’t recommend building anything from scratch.