My journey into game development started when my father brought me to his friend’s place and since I was making a lot of noise, he decided to sit me in front of his friend’s PC and hoped that “Space Invaders” would keep me occupied and quiet for a few hours while my father chats with his friend in peace.
It was a BIGÂ MISTAKE on his part and I think he kind of regretted it since then. If he had sat me down in front of a fish tank, I would have decided to grow up and be a fishmonger instead. But such is fate.
So once it was time for me to leave the PC alone, I remember wailing and screaming and crying because I wanted to play 1 more round of “Space Invaders” and right there and then, my father realised what kind of monster he had brought into this world.
Then started my slippery step down into the world of games. But my first step into actual game development occurred when I was 6 years old and I happened to come across this book in my father’s room about programming using BASIC for the Commodore C64.
1 of the chapters was about programming a simple game which basically consists of
- PC generating a random number
- Player key in a number
- PC checks if the player input matches the random number
- If there is a match, then the player wins the game
- If there is no match, then the PC will tell you to guess a lower or higher number
The game wasn’t fanciful or graphically appealing like “Halflife 2″, but it provided a small pool for me to dip my programming toes into and I was instantly hooked.
My primary school and secondary school life was pretty uneventful as I spent most of my time doing games research (aka playing loads of games). But I did manage to spend time being the DM for my class RPG playing friends and we had a lot of fun taking turns to be DMs and using RPG systems from D&D, AD&D, GURPS and even our own RPG system. I even had time to create board games with playing cards and a playing board made out of cardboard. Then the unfortunate playtester would be my sister and she always had a knack of looking out for loopholes in my game and I always learn the importance of playtesting from her, although at that time I feel like strangling her for ‘breaking’ my game by pointing out the loopholes in it.
Fast forward to my days at Nanyang Polytechnic, there I started on my diploma in Information Technology and began my hardcore programming lessons. There I learn C, Cobol and other programming languages. But what I remember most was doing our end of semester project which involved creating a PC game from scratch using Borland C and the BGI (Borland Graphics Interface). The game my team chose was Tic Tac Toe and upon learning the magic of BGI, I was instantly hooked.
Then I had the insane notion that I could use BGI to create my own commercial RPG game and then sell it and make millions. So during the 3 month holiday, I holded up in my room and set to work. 1 month later, I emerged as a wiser and more tired teenager as I realised that no way I could be the programmer, artist, designer and level editor and complete the game within 3 months. So with that notion, I gave up the idea and went back to playing games. Below is a screenshot of what my completed game would have looked like if I has managed to finish it then back in 1994 although the picture below depicts Richard Garriot’s classic game titled “Akalabeth”.
After graduating from Nanyang Polytechnic, I joined the Republic of Singapore Navy and served for 6 years to pay for my university eduation and to buy a lot of game programming books (mostly books with Andre LaMothe’s name on it), game programming magazines and games.
Upon leaving the Republic of Singapore Navy, I joined a local insurance company to do web development using .NET and I started to get bored after a few months on the job. So after 1 year of boring .NET development, I joined Nexgen Studio as a game developer developing mobile, PC and Flash games and now that it has been almost 2 years. It is time for the next chapter.
