I’m Adam, a father and husband in my early 30s. I consider myself a musician, artist and (obviously) aspiring game developer.
I’ve been interested in making video games for almost 20 years, when I first filled up spiral note books with my naive and wondrous game designs.
A few years later, my brother Arden and I began attempting our own game development. Through about a decade of projects, we had a few playable games that were far from complete; many of which lacked the content to really even call them games. A couple of these left me something to want to return to finish down the road sometime.
After the most recent development hiatus for one such game (Skylands of Darmanis), in 2013, I decided to focus on learning some of the skills my brother brought to the table; namely, programming, as I continued to utilize my typical skill-sets in the arts. I wanted to see if I could make a game on my own.
After I bounced around a few projects for a few months, which I went into knowing were “programming-learning projects”, I realized that developing my own game wasn’t too far out of reach; just that it would take a lot of work. In early 2014, I picked apart my favorite ideas and mechanics out of the learning projects, and set in on a game design I was most excited with. Nectira was born (around the same time as my son Zale).
I’ve been working diligently on Nectira since then. Using my “nights and weekends”, free time while watching my son, and any chance I get to hit a coffee shop to chip away at Nectira’s development progress.
Credits:
My brother Arden has been a reliable source for design, play-testing and programming expertise, throughout this project. He’s been helping me hammer out some of the more complex system functions.
For most of the game’s pixel art graphics, I use GraphicsGale, in addition to Pyxel Edit (new addition).
Illustrations are achieved through one or more of: Paper by FiftyThree, Adobe Photoshop, and good ole pencil/pen and paper.
I compose using Propellerhead’s Reason, in addition to some help with ProTools effects and mixing tools.
I create most of my sound effects using Bfxr, before taking them into ProTools to thicken them up with plugins, tweak frequencies, and so on.
The game itself comes together within GameMaker: Studio. Rather than relying their drag-and-drop tools much, I really enjoy working with their scripting language GML.