StarcatStoriesAndGames
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First contact
🕑 Added 2021-03-10 12:36:07 +0000 UTC
I was four years old when I got my first computer, a Commodore 64 that was previously owned by my brother. It was a magical machine to me. Like any first computer would have been.
Playing games was fun, but most games were too difficult and couldn’t grab my attention for long. I think the idea of playing games was more fun to me than the activity itself. Of course there were some games I enjoyed when I got a little better at it.
I was more fasciated with the possibilities. I used to look at pictures in computer magazines that showed the circuit board, imagining how it worked.
We had a cartridge that would explain how to use the computer. That probably got more »playtime« than games for a while. Looking at the crude color character-based art, reading some of the words and entering commands to display different pages of the tutorial. Really just interacting with the computer.
Somewhere on a tape I discovered a program that would display a face in simple character-art and would let you type text to talk to it. I was so thrilled.
I learned how to write simple BASIC programs, starting with »Hello World« being printed all over the screen. Then I learned how to read keyboard input. I was so flashed when my father or brother or both showed me how I could create the equivalent of ASCII art and use different colors on it.
When I first wanted to make games, I was probably in elementary school.
I created simple maze-like screens with dragons and other monsters and the player could navigate through them. It was a bit like an adventure game long before I knew about genres. I sometimes wrote little stories, too.
As I kid I remember watching saturday morning cartoons and seeing a commercial for the Cluedo board game. I wanted to play that so badly. But there was no way to get it anytime soon and I couldn’t play it alone either. So I thought about how such a detective game could work on the computer. I had no idea how the board game actually worked, I just knew the commercial and it looked fun. I tried to come up with rules, artwork and built that game. Eventually I stopped working on the idea. What I created just was no fun and I didn’t know how to fix it. Little did I know, how close I came. The board game had similar problems.
When we got a PC, I toyed with programming a bit. Some QBASIC, some Turbo Pascal even. But for the time being, playing games was more exciting.
I tried to learn C, but the problem was I didn’t know what to do with it. There was no project idea in my mind, nothing to fuel my passion. Doing some pixel art in Deluxe Paint was more fun.
It wasn’t until I was fourteen when said passion came. I had just gotten a Playstation, but when I read in an old magazine about the Atari Jaguar, I wanted one badly.
Everything about it sounded so cool. The fact that nobody knew it and it seemed impossible to get added to that.
When I first got access to the internet, the Jaguar was all I cared about. I discovered my first online community of Atari fans and I managed to get a Jaguar.
I was so thrilled to get games for it. Often it was a disappointment, but I always believed, the next one would be better.
If only there was a way to make games for it myself.
As it turned out there was. But again it seemed impossible to me. There were hardly any resources online. There were no tools available and only a very rough technical documentation put together by underground hackers. Being just a kid my english was nowhere near as good enough to make sense of it. But I tried. I was passionate. I wanted nothing else, but to make games for the Jaguar.
I picked up a book on 68000 assembly language, written for university students.
I didn’t understand most of it, but some I did. I could look up commands and experiment. That was good enough.
Let’s jump ahead. Somehow I managed to aquire everything I needed to program for the Jaguar. There was a small community of underground developers through which I got access to tools.
A collector from the US offered me an official dev kit for roughly 500 dollars, which was a fortune to me and I had never sent money overseas to someone. Paypal didn’t exist back then.
Somehow I managed to track down the official developer documentation and picked it up on a computer show. That christmas I asked my parents for a scanner. Maybe they thought it was for school. But I really wanted it so I could scan the documentation page by page, hundreds of it, to make it available to the community. (It's still available on my website to this day.)
I looked at Jaguar programming examples and started to modify them.
A year later a friend and I organized the first European Jaguar festival (ejagfest). A meeting of fans and a few developers. I didn’t come empty handed, but was able to show my first Jaguar demo.
I was just sixteen, but I soaked up everything about game development I could get my hands on. Which wasn’t much at the time, but it was enough to keep me excited and experimenting.
There were a whole bunch of projects I worked on. A few actually got finished. But a lot didn’t.
On being legitimate and on perfectionism
The Jaguar project I was most passionate about was an Adventure game called Eerievale. When I presented a first demo on ejagfest in 2003 I knew, I wanted to makes games for a living. Especially adventure games. Games that told a story.
But I was raised in an environment where work didn’t mean fun. All I had done so far, was playing around in a darkened room in front of a screen. There was no monetary value to it, so I was never »allowed« to persue it other than in my spare time.
I didn’t know how to officially become a game developer.
So I had to take a different route and make a living doing what exactly?
Whatever I tried, nothing was fun. It was just different shades of terrible.
Fortunately in 2004 I heard of a new game design university study program.
But my prototype game was just a technical demo. Most of my energy went into creating a game engine and artwork. To get a clearer understanding of what the game was about, I wrote a novel to base the game upon. I also wanted to bring it to modern platforms in addition to the Jaguar.
For many months I put all my energy into the project, because it would serve as a work sample to get into that study. I figured I had to give it my very best. This was my one chance. I couldn’t blow it. I was pretty much burned out (without knowing what that was), when I submitted my work and took the test the same day. I was accepted.
The more I learned about game development, the more my focus shifted towards writing and storytelling. I created several small adventure games as study projects.
It was during this study program that I could participate in an author scholarship of the Academy for Children’s Media (https://www.akademie-kindermedien.de). I got to connect with professional writers of novels, TV series, film and games and learned invaluable lessons on the creative process. It also sparked an even deeper love for writing in me.
Up to this point I saw myself as a perfectionist. I started game projects that were way over my head, learned a lot, but was never satisfied, because nothing was ever good enough. For months I would go over existing code, story or artwork to improve it.
I didn’t know the term »procrastination« yet. On those big passion projects somehow there always was a certain project stage I just couldn’t get past.
I learned to complete passion projects when I started writing novels during the National Novel Writing Month in 2009 (https://nanowrimo.org).
I’ve written novels during the Nanowrimo ever since.
In 2018 I had completed a novel of supernatrual detective cases set in an alternative steampunk world. (Building upon the ideas behind Eerievale.)
To get it out there I thought I had to work with a publisher to be »legitimate«, even if it was a very small one. But the process was very stressful and cumbersome. Most decisions were a compromise I didn’t really want to make. It just didn’t feel right.
In 2020 I published the novel myself and have not regretted it since.
What I learned
You become a creative by doing creative work and putting finished work out there.
Don’t wait for anybody to give you permission or to tell you that you’re ready. It will probably never happen.
Creative things don’t have to be big and amazing. Any small idea that you can hold on to for yourself is good. You can build on that.
Creativity is a way of life. It’s best to live it one day at a time. It’s not a race to a mountaintop. It’s not a race at all. Take your time, but do one creative thing that you love every day.
Doing creative work always has value. It’s fun, it’s healthy. If you’re anything like me, being creative means a whole different quality of life. And if you like it and put your work out there, chances are others will like it, too.
Perfectionism is a trap. It never leads to better results. It’s just dressed up insecurity and procrastination. It just blocks you. Perfection doesn’t exist.
It’s always better to do your best work for the moment and to put it out there.
That way, at least you create something. It’s there, it exists. And it didn't before.
You will always grow as a creative, but only by finishing your work and by putting it out there. When you have done that, you’re ready for the next idea.
