You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. – Plato
Pacman
My name is Eric Quesada and I’m an Indie Game Developer. I made my first Games with Turbo Pascal when I was 12.
The first one was a Pacman-like game composed of only one short intro cutscene and one level. The source code was ugly, the graphic was ugly… but I’ll never forget it.
I obtained my Scientific Baccalaureate and I decided to enter in the University Institute of Technology (IT Specialty).
After that, I didn’t want to stop my studies but I wished to begin my professional life so I chose a work/study training program at the E-CML (Project Management Degree).
To finish, I followed the engineer training through evening classes to complete my skills.
My initial skills were about Java/ J2EE. I worked on mobile and tablet applications development. Finally, I left my job in 2013 because I saw an opportunity to fulfill my childhood dream: creating games.
I officially opened my indie game studio: Ludonkey.
After that, I was hired by the Njin company in order to set up their own video game studio named Kaiho.
The real journey of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes
but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust
Since 2014 I have regularly used Unity to create personal and professional projects.
Now, I would like to create XR Experiences that’s why I followed a 6 months training focused on 3D modeling (VirtuArles: October 2018 – March 2019) completed with a 2 months internship contract (March 2019 – May 2019) in Virtual-Makers, a company specialized in VR.
Since then I’m practicing every time I can to improve my 3D skills (modeling, sculpting, lightning, etc). I already knew 3dsMax but I’m moving to Blender 2.8 due to its amazing new release.
Game design is the act of deciding what a game should be. – Jesse Schell
Designing a Game is really hard and it takes time. As Shigeru Miyamoto said “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”
I used to play many different kinds of game (boardgames, computer games, console games, mobile games, etc). When I’m playing I always try to analyse why they are good and more important why they are bad.
I think the better way to design a game is to start with Prototypes. Don’t hesitate to drop the prototype to make a new one when it’s not fun to play. When you’ve got one good concept the hard things begin.
Concentrate and remove the unfun elements during production, you should be left with the fun. Sure it seems simple, but often simplicity is all that is required for success.
As I never followed Game Design Courses, I read a lot of books about this topic. There is no magic recipe to make great games but all the tips I find from these book help me.