[Life] My Game Dev Life - 1 - Struggle and success

My name is Wilfre, and i am a French game developer. I started making games since i was 6 (I am 20 now), thanks to my father who works in a software dev studio. Actually, like every other kid of my age i was playing video games but i wanted to know how they worked inside. And as a creative child, i wanted to add more things in games. The only way to do that was to make my own with my ideas.

Well.. that was a LONG route!

I've spent my life working on projects, trying a lot of new things :  music, drawing, voice acting, sound design, 3D, but everything i do brings me back to making games. I mean.. all of these are used in game development, so i can work alone! :)

Every day i learn new thing, so i want to test new things, improve my games.. and every day i start a new project that i can't finish because i have more ideas and keep learning. So i decided to find a solution and bought game dev courses online. One of them was about making a Voxel terrain, by Dr.Penny De Byl (An awesome teacher who always helps students and explains perfectly what you need to understand). It inspired me so much that after following this course, i created a website for the course to help all of the students and add optimizations. People started to follow my guides and wait for it more and more. That's where i knew where to go : Make guides and courses online! If i can't finish anything because i am a self-taught developer, why don't i teach why i know to other people who needs it? And that's why i am here! I want it to be my life. And also why i have a course here, "Voxel terrain generation".

There are some other events that helped me a lot. There is this game .. "Five Nights at Freddy's". It helped a whole bunch of indie game Developers and i was one of them. The inspiration was huge and Scott Cawthon (Who made the game) lived the same things as i did. Critics, depression, leaving game development,... But when the game came out, a friend i had gave me an idea, a character inspired by this game, a wolf animatronic called Kana. I wanted to try the same kind of games just to learn and managed to make my first good 3D model and was extremely proud of myself. The game was never done, all i had was characters but no story. So i practiced more and more, and finally reached a good level of modeling which helps me a lot now. All thanks to Scott and his game!

What i've learned as a developer is : NEVER STOP! Even if you can't finish anything! Trust me, being a game dev is not hard, you just have to learn and practice a lot.

One more thing, here are the softwares i learned with : RPG Maker, FPS Creator, Construct 2, Unity. As you can see, RPG Maker and FPS Creator are not used to make big games but they give algorithmic and map creation basics, all you need to start. Then Construct 2 uses both in a 2D enviroment and is more advanced. Finally Unity has everything i needed to make games, all i need to use.

To end it all, here are a few images of my work :