What got you interested in game making?

I got interested when I tried out starcrafts map editor years back for the first time it's whole trigger system was cool. I created a few maps and grew out of starcraft and then 1-2 years later saw game maker back in 6.0 and thought it was pretty interesting but I didn't like how they really limited the free version. I think its better now though. This year about a month and half after stencyl launched I joined because I saw it on kongregate.

I don't remember which n64 game it was but I thought it would be awesome to create my own world and see what people would do with it.
Then I realize what coding was so I dropped down to a 3d artist and I'm great at 3d but I can't use it to get a job because I'm stupid in societies eyes.
I think it was legend of zelda ocarina of time and I would set with my friend and we came up with ways to make a part 2 of games and it evolved from there.
And now I have notebooks of crazy ideas that don't seem that great and some does but the some does pile is randomly hidden through out the house and on the moon.

Nice story grim, as for what got me interested...nothing in particular I don't think, I just wanted to make some great games, I'm a big game fan so having played 100's of them I started to wonder what I could come up with, I still have a plan for my dream game, but I'm not sure if flash/as3/stencyl can be used to create it.

Sonic

I played video games and then wanted to make video games.

~ Blob

When I was but a wee llama playing on my crappy for that time period Compaq Windows 98, my dad had gotten me a 3D snowboarding game. I never knew the point of it, but I loved the game. That got me into it. Along with the Croc series.

It's always been a neat concept to me, although I haven't really done anything with it yet, it... intrigues me.

I've always loved games. I think my first one was Super Mario World on the SNES. Since then, I would just come up with game ideas in my head and rush home to the computer and write them down. I loved planning how it'd play, what you could do, who did you play as... it was absolute fun creating this 'world' and its 'rules'.

I just love creating and art in general. And what other medium allows me to combine music, art, and writing all into one package?

I just love creating and art in general. And what other medium allows me to combine music, art, and writing all into one package?

A movie?

I just love creating and art in general. And what other medium allows me to combine music, art, writing  and user interaction all into one package?

A movie?

Better?

I played video games and then wanted to make video games.

~ Blob

This.

I saw the original Mario Bros arcade game once when I was like 4 or 5, and it inspired me to make my own game, so I drew a "level" on a piece of paper, drew some characters on another and cut them out, then a friend and I slid them around on the page and played the game (rules were enforced of course, such as a limit to speed and jump height, and no going through walls). Soon after I made a sidescroller by using a roll of freezer paper (the character for this game still exists in my list of games to make) and it was awesome.

Throughout the rest of my childhood I became the default "dungeon master" for all our neighborhood games: dungeon crawls through raked leaf mazes, epic sword (stick) fights, dueling a giant snake monster (extension cord), DBZ style energy-beam battles (throwing basket balls at each other and screaming at the top of our lungs), strategy games where we would summon monsters and construct traps to slowly whittle down the enemy hordes advancing upon our fortresses (a birdbath, an old bathtub, a tree, and slide; and yes, this means I invented the tower defense genre). I made up most of the scenarios, kept track of everyones stats, designed the monsters, and made sure they didn't cheat to much (I think I also probably had the most fun).

Somewhere along the line I realized I found designing games more fun than playing them, and decided that was what I was going to do with my life. Unfortunately I soon found out that I am a terrible programmer, and so was stuck with no way to really make any of the many games I had designed over the years (I tried many game making programs, but most of them either limited you far to much in what you could do, or required too much programming ability to use them well). Then Stencyl came along and so far it seems to be working beautifully.

Nintendo was my favorite to play as a child, but it didn't make me want to make my own. I started wanting to make my own around age 8, when I discovered an online text based MUD on AOL called Darkness Falls.

This was back in.... 1997 or 98. Darkness Falls was in beta for a long time and it was free. It was a text online game, sort of the grandfather of MMO's like World of Warcraft. All of the rooms were typed out, like:

"You are standing in a dank dungeon. The walls are covered with slime and the bones of rats are scattered across the floor. The stench is choking, and you feel compelled to find an escape."

"Obvious Exits: North, South"

and you would type "North" or just "N", and that would slap you in another room.

What attracted me to it was how I could understand how to make one of these games. You just had to be good at writing and construct believable environments. It wasn't as alien to me as making sprite graphics.

So I started learning QBASIC programming and making my own little single player text games like the one I had played. They reminded me a lot of playing Dungeons and Dragons, but with the world already built and hard rules established. But the idea that you could play some of these games with other people across the internet was fascinating to me.

Later, I started playing hobbyist MUDs where you could actually talk to the people who made the game. They weren't much older than me, and I became obsessed with figuring out how to make my own.

In high school, I learned how to code and made my own MUD. After that, knowing that they weren't profitable, I started focusing on design and art, and partnered with friends who were better coders to make flash games.

Then I got stencyl, and made my own flash game...

Then Gameloft hired me as a designer

Ha! My whole game dev life story in one post!

I loved MUDs and text adventures. I even coded/scripted a few small ones using TADS. Great stuff to learn by, but I sadly never had anyone to share them with outside of my family. I love the Internet age now!

I got interested when I tried out starcrafts map editor years back for the first time it's whole trigger system was cool

This and Warcraft 3's editor.

After that, I got into the fan game scene and really wanted to remake Mario, so I made a remake of Super Mario World and started planning out remakes for similar games. Then, I found more fun creating editors for making games than making the games themselves, and that was how Stencyl was born.