It's really nice to get some insight in the life of an indie developer. I'm starting off game development classes starting this summer on a secondary school and I will be telling your story as an example. I do have a question, and sorry if it's already been asked but how did you learn using stencyl yourself? Did you use online courses? The book? Only stencylpedia?
Also, do you sketch out your games before creating them? Or do you just start in Stencyl?
Thanks!
Hi, thanks for the response. If your students have questions for me, feel free to send a list or post them here. I was a teacher before becoming a game developer. I would love to help them out
Good luck over the summer!
I did not use any of those for learning Stencyl. Back in version 2.x, while I was still teaching, I went through a quick tutorial about placing actors in a scene. I use stencylpedia for specific instances - such as ios certificates. Everything else, I have learned by playing around with the system. I usually have draw text blocks covering the entire screen. If I am not sure how an equation should be, I have multiple iterations displaying at the same time. This allows me to pick which one gives the correct output. Is this the right way to program? Probably not. Would anybody else be able to look at my program and understand what is going on? Also, probably not. However, I think this is one of my best advantages as a developer, I do not know or understand code so I am not limited by what it is "supposed to do".
Another good question. Most of my published games were made for contract clients. It would be nice if they all gave me drawn out sketches/mockups/ideas. However, they usually do not. In most cases, it begins with me spending 1-2 hours creating a prototype. You can see that my arcade is chock full of demos:
http://www.stencyl.com/users/index/221939. That does not even display all of them. I have at least 25 more listed as WIP and not shown. I am a huge advocate of prototyping. It is a big accomplishment to publish a game, but I think that you can learn a lot by making a quick prototype of game mechanics. Each time I push myself to create a new mechanic, I have a chance of discovering a new technique.
When I first started as a game developer around 2 years ago (not including the actor placement tutorial a year prior), I was expecting to make these huge RPG's. I eventually figured out that you do not make money during development (unless you get lucky with a grant or kickstarter). I wasted almost a year trying to make big games while my bank account was slowly draining away. To make matters worse, I did not have a portfolio to show for it. Now I am happy making small games and building up a nice portfolio.
