Where have I been?
What Now : concept
I promise this website will be devoted to game development and a inside look at my journey as an independent game developer.
However, before we start moving forward, I want to address where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to since that fateful July back in 2014. When I had to admit that my first game, Yogventures, was never going to be finished, it sent me into a state of depression I have never experienced. It was one of the most humbling and saddest moments in my life to have to admit in public that the promises I made on Kickstarter had proven to be outside my abilities to deliver on. Up until that point, I never for one moment thought we wouldn’t succeed, not until we actually failed.
To say that I was disillusioned as a developer would be an enormous understatement. I questioned my abilities to the point that I almost gave up on game dev entirely. The plain truth is, it takes a lot of effort and failures to develop the experience necessary to develop something as complex as a video game. As a matter of fact, now that I’ve been working as a professional developer for about 5 years, it’s more apparent then ever that I had nowhere near the skills I needed to develop such an ambitious project!
I didn’t give up! Despite being depressed and feeling like a failure, I eventually kicked myself in the butt and “got back on the horse” so to speak. I used the experience I had to secure a junior developer position with a small firm called Helios Interactive in San Francisco, and later moved up to their Oregon office in Portland. During this time, I worked on a wide variety of projects some more like interactive applications, others more like games, and some were AR and VR. Through all this, I was constantly learning, making mistakes, failing, correcting, learning getting better, and finally succeeding! etc … Unfortunately, the company was hit hard by the pandemic and a lot of the team were laid off, me included. I’ll remain forever grateful for the time I spent there and the education I received from the very generous and talented devs that work there.
Now, I’ve returned to Dreamworks Animation, coming full circle back to before I started Winterkewl Games to make Yogventures. I’m back in my long time roll as a Character Setup TD for feature animations, and I love it as a “main source of income”. Returning to Dreamworks affords me the last thing I needed to convince myself that I was prepared both mentally and financially to give indie development another shot.
Despite all the failures, the joy I’ve felt when developing will always propel me forward on this path. It’s all I have ever wanted to be and now, finally, I’m ready to dust myself off and do it right this time!
Glad you’re here too.
