Hello gamedev.net!
I am an active user in here for some time now, I love this community and today for some reason I decided to show my face a little more.. hope it is okay for you guys! I am usually very insecure in public spaces like this, even though I am not such in my daily life, the responsability I feel towards my own image over the internet overwhelms me. Probably due to the fact I am putting all my soul and energy into becoming an indie developer and don't want to risk that..
Anyway, enough small talk, and here's a little about my path so far. I always loved games and computers as you may imagine, and at age 15 I slowly started learning programming and other computer science related disciplines. As the years passed, my interest and seriousness about the topic has grown exponentially until colliding at where I am today, making games full-time and hoping to thrive in this business.
At around age 18, I started taking computer science classes at the university and I went through the first year reasonably well, but unfortunately I had to quit and find a job completely unrelated to what I want to do, because I come from a poor background and can't really cope with the costs of education, not even close.
So, until November 2012, I remained working in that awful place until I was laid off by the end of my contract. Since I always worked well as a self-taught lone wolf, I decided this would be my break to try and achieve something on my own. I had very little money but I decided to save as much as possible to last as much as I could until I started getting some income from my work.
Therefore, the first semester of 2013 was focused on the tech for my upcoming games, the Nephilim SDK, which I made specifically to publish easily to Android, iOS and all major desktop platforms. Unfortunately, I have to work with almost zero budget. There is no money for gear or investment in the software or anything else than basic survival needs, but I don't think about surrender just yet.
During that same semester, I had the pleasure to also write the "SFML Game Development" book along with my colleagues Jan Haller and Henrik Hansson, which was a very rewarding experience in many ways. I knew it wouldn't be about the money, and I was right, but it was still nice to receive feedback from all the people reading it!
After that, around June, I had those two things off my head, and I knew it was time to start really seriously. I took the best idea for a game I could think of at the time, prototyped it and wrote a minimal GDD for it and started working right away. Since it is my first commercial game being made specifically my startup business, it was a long and bumpy road. The game has seen tons of changes along the way, and I learned a lot with it. I will write more about all the process and whatnot whenever I find money to host the company website and developer blog, or just start a free wordpress blog and then move all the stuff.
Right now, I have an almost completed game, still lacking some graphical tuning as well as gameplay calibration, and I have no idea how people will receive it. I am still young and new to the business (I am 21 years old now). So, as you might imagine, the anxiety is in a big measure inside me, but I try to deal with it in a healthy way.
Luckily, I had a childhood friend join me as a game designer. He is very talented in that role and without him the game wouldn't have turned out as it did. Also, an incredible person and artist later joined us as well, and a special thanks is due to him. It is good to have found someone to walk this road alongside with.
I feel like I am stepping slowly into a minefield, trying to make all the right moves, from design and development to marketing and business, but since its my first time in this path, I am always afraid to take the next step as I don't know where the mines are, excuse the metaphor :)
I know I can't have my hopes too high for a first appearance with my game, but all I can do is to do the best I can with it, learn from it, and then kick in with my next (amazing, hopefully) projects!
Hope I didn't bore you to death, in the meanwhile, it would be cool to have some help building contacts and a community. I still know very little about this, but I guess it is a good start to ask you to follow me on Twitter? I might follow you back!
https://twitter.com/ArturMoreira14
The official facebook page for this game is at: (A like would also be nice!)
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Terra-Rise-of-Mankind/251863691637763?ref=hl
Any tips and comments are appreciated! I'm hoping for your honesty and encouragement in my adventure! I am ready for the hard work and patience needed to get to the top, but I guess its nice to get a "cookie" sometimes :)
Thanks for your time!
