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My GameDev Journey : 2011 - present

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TL;DR

2012 - First game using GameMaker
2020 - Rewind 2020 
           Trapped

First steps

I remember when I developed my first game. I barely knew any coding and was looking for options that would help me make a game without using any technical skills. That's when I stumbled upon GameMaker and realized it was pretty easy to use. It must have been, considering I made a game on it without consulting any in-depth tutorials. I was a really impatient kid back then, and deeply hated going through large tutorials.

Having overcome the first hurdle, I now needed an idea for the game, which continued to evade me until I went to a funfair organized in my friend's school. There, two of my friends and I did something that I thought could make for a nice game - we searched for a friend's girlfriend among the crowd. It felt like a quest of sorts. And there was my idea.

I made a fairly basic game, which had only a couple of levels. The first was a maze of roads through which we three friends had to navigate to reach the fair, and the next level was the fair itself where we had to search for our friend's girlfriend. That's about as much as I can remember about it, as I seemed to have lost the actual game itself. It was a simple game but it introduced me to the tip of the iceberg that game development is.

Visual Novels

Going forward two years, I was introduced to a new genre of games called Visual Novels. I found them highly interesting and would spend hours reading and making choices. And then I discovered Renpy, an engine based on Python used to make visual novels. I made three visual novels in quick succession:

    1. The first was based on a folk tale from my Hindi textbook. This tale was called "Tatara Vamiro Katha" or "The Tatara Vamiro Story" and was penned by Shri Leeladhar Mandloi. It was a folk tale from The Andaman and Nicobar Islands and was kind of an origin story of the two islands. I immensely enjoyed this experience of converting the text into a visual story.

    2. My second visual novel was a step ahead of the first one in that it was based on a psychological story of my own, but I had to borrow the art and music from the web, which is why I couldn't publish it online.

    3. Finally, with my third VN, I created something that was entirely original - Repercussions. The story, the art, even the music - I created everything from scratch and was really proud of this product. I published it online with a feeling of extreme joy and satisfaction. 

    It can be found here - Repercussions - A Visual Novel.


Jumping Back In

After I developed Repercussions, game development took a back seat as I got involved with studies and internships, and career. After a long stupor, I considered learning Unity. The idea of developing a game using code was less overwhelming and formidable this time as I had had plenty of experience with programming in the later years of my school and all through college. 
Soon, I recently released two games on itch.io, one of which is an official entry to the Brackeys Game Jam 2020.2.
    1. Rewind 2020 - An endless runner about going back in 2020 and trying to revert some things to improve the year.
    2. Trapped - A first-person stealth game where the player is a lizard trapped inside a classroom and looking to get out without being spotted. A YouTuber called AprilPandaPlays even made a Let's Play video of it.
Here's the link to my profile on itch.io: Avnish's Itch

I am trying to learn more as I go forward, though it's difficult with my job. Nonetheless, I'll keep posting updates on this space.

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