How did you get into games, V?

Well, that's a funny story. I was at university, up in Edinburgh, studying Cognitive Science - you probably don't know what that is, but for me it was kind of a mix of psychology and AI. After school I'd gone onto university - I'd got good grades and I don't think I had seriously considered not going. Just the thing you did. I'd applied for mainly psychology courses, but the two I'd picked as my main choice and my backup were both Cognitive Science - I was basically thinking of it as "psychology, but with computers". And when I got there, it turns out I liked it a lot - it started with a lot of required courses to give a grounding in all the different fields, but by the end you could pick what to focus on pretty freely. I got to make robots and experiment on crickets and learn about a whole bunch of different stuff. I even snuck in an architecture course, just because I could.

Anyway, there was this summer programme I'd heard about, called Dare To Be Digital. Basically what it was was that you applied as a team, and if you get in they'd put you up in Dundee for 6 weeks and you'd make a game together. Some friends I knew from my computer science courses asked me if I wanted to apply with them, so I said yes. Not a huge fan of group projects, but getting to make a videogame sounded pretty nice, so. And I didn't have any pressing plans for my summer.

Anyway, the day rolled round where we heard back and ... we were rejected. Bummer. I felt pretty bitter about the whole thing - I remember going to the showcase and thinking I could have done better than them. But time went on and I started to get over myself. The rules of it were that you could apply between any two years of university, or you could apply to do it immediately after you'd graduated. I was now in my final year, so I had one last change. I got together with the same group of friends, and we applied again.

And we were rejected again!

And so that summer, I remember thinking - screw you, I don't need to get into a special programme to make a game, I can do this myself. I was staying with my friend Stephen Kyle that summer, and I remember showering at his flat when I got an idea for a game - like, what about a bullet hell game where all the enemies you were fighting were people who had played the game before.

So I started building it - this was in the early days of Unity, and they had this special web player plugin, trying to compete with Flash. I remember scripting it in Boo, their now long deprecated Python-like language, and making a little PHP backend to receive and send files containing path data. They just got saved as little XML files in a folder, nothing complicated. I remember tuning it was interestingly tricky because after each tweak I'd need to play it a bunch of times to get enemies that moved in the way that the tuning implied. I added trails to emphasise the paths that the ships took, I set it to have a kind of muted colourscheme, I draw some little pixel ships and weapons. I added extra powerups, sequenced throughout each run - this meant that you generally got the new weapon just before your enemies did, which felt good. I made a little website for it, I managed to figure out how to take payments with PayPal if people wanted a downloadable copy. Oh! and I gave it a too-clever name, I called it Hell Is Other People*.

And: I was proud of my work on it. It turns out that making a self directed creative project, finishing it and releasing it and having people say good things about it – it turns out that that's a thing that I really enjoy doing. Or, enjoyment isn't even necessarily the word. Something I derive meaning from. Who knew that working on creative projects feels meaningful! But I felt a way about this that I hadn't done about hardly any of my degree.

So, then when I came down to London, still feeling kind of aimless about what I was doing with my life, I started going to the local indie games meetup. It was an exciting time for indie games! I met a load of people there who were doing really cool stuff that I wanted to get involved with. Eventually I was at one when my friend Alice O'Connor tapped me on the arm and said - hey, you've been moaning about how you want a job in games forever - go talk to that man there, he's setting up a studio. And so I did, we had a conversation there and another one at his member's club a week later, and then I handed in my notice at my current job (in telecoms), and a few weeks later I was working in the games industry.

The story obviously continues from there, but – that's my origin story. I got bitter, made a game out of spite, and then accidentally found the reward that lurks within making something you believe in. And that's what I've been chasing ever since.

[* not linking because reading writing from myself from fifteen years ago makes me cringe. But you can find stuff on it if look hard enough.]