First Post (and an introduction)

Hello and welcome!
As this is the first post let me introduce myself and tell you a little about what you can expect to see on this blog!

First off my name is Jon Howard and video games have been a long time passion of mine. I first started playing games waaaaay back in the early 80's when the VIC-20 was king and the ZX-81 could be brought in kit form!

In those day's the only thing more fun than playing Jeff Minters bizarre creations was typing in the BASIC listings from the likes of Computer & Video Games magazine and making them my own.

A couple of years and several boxes of C90's later the Commodore C64 battled with the Sinclair Spectrum in the school yards of Britain for supremacy, these eventually gave way to the Atari ST and the legendary Amiga.

As the machines got more complex high level interpreted BASIC gave way to low level hardcoded Assembly language, which in turn succumbed once more to high compiled languages like C as the game programmers tool of choice.

Along the way the actual process of creating video games became more and complex, requiring more programmers, artists, musicians, testers, producers, publishers, distributors etc, the net result was that the power to create games was gradually taken away from the masses.

Throughout this time I continued to play and experiment with games, formulating my own ideas about what made a good game and also about what could make a good game better, this went hand-in-hand with my skills as a programmer and what ultimately lead me to making the career choices that got me to where I am today (a professional C/C++ programmer with 15+ years experience, and a couple of decent titles under my belt)...

I spent several years working for a number different video games studios but ultimately became jaded with the way development was going and decided when the right opportunity presented itself to take my programming skills and apply them in other fields.

However old habbits die hard and I've continued to tinker and experiement finding inspiration and enthusiasm in the endless possibilities that the internet presents to would-be entrepreneurs.

A couple of years ago I discovered a number of tools which I thought would be useful for prototyping game ideas the best of which Mark Overmars's GameMaker system stood head and shoulders above the rest.

Gamemaker is aimed squarely at the traditional 2D games market, the kind of things jaded hacks like me cut our teeth on in our youth, think Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pacman, Tetris, Scramble, Defender, Arkanoid (Breakout), using Gamemaker all of these games are possible (any many more besides), and more importantly the easy to learn object orientated system allows the users creations to grow in complexity with their level of experience.

Combine this with the extensive built it help system, excellent on-line tutorials, active community forums and Web 2.0 style community games showcase site and you've got a very powerful system. Oh and I almost forgot to mention that the latest version comes in both lite and pro the lite version is available for free! and the pro version for the measly upgrade price of $20 (USD).

So now what, apart from lot's of free advertising for GameMaker what can you expect from future blog entries? Well for starters I want to share all the tricks, tips and experience I've gained over the years, anyone who's interested in learning how to make games or improve their game designs are welcome to comment and share their views, thoughts etc.

I'm currently in the process of developing a couple of games using GameMaker so I think it will be a useful learning exercise to blog about the development, discuss the concepts behind the game and post some workable examples as we go along.

The last couple of years has seen a new phenomenon arise in the videogames industry, whats become known as the Casual Game market. It's not uncommon to see budgets for AAA titles to be in the six and seven figure range employing large teams of specialists and these games are marketed aggressively to hardcore games players, Casual Games on the other hand are often developed by a small team or even a single developer on a shoestring budget and are aimed at the person who wouldn't traditionally call themselves gamers.

The thing that has surprised a lot of people is just how successful this market has become and given the size of the budgets involved it's a lot easier for Casual Games to be commercially successful, for me the most attractive element of the Casual Game is that with the right idea, a professional approach and the leveraging power of the internet a single developer can compete on an equal footing and tools like GameMaker can make all the difference.

I'm also going to blog about my efforts in marketing and selling my games, hoping to both learn more and share what I've learnt. So stay tuned and let's ride this rollercoaster together.

Jon...