Let the Games Begin

Blast to the Past

(skip to present day if you don't want to reminisce with me)

I started playing video games in elementary school, starting with Sonic the Hedgehog on the old GameCube at my grandparent’s house. All the games we had at my house growing up were educational games like WawaYaya, Jumpstart Games, and ClueFinders. I loved loading them up into the CD ROM, playing them for hours, solving all of the problems they gave me. WawaYaya was especially great since it was meant to help kids to learn Mandarin Chinese through interactive games. In late elementary school, I started playing tycoon games: Rollercoaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon. They were the last the games I played on CDs. Later, came the novel concept of buying stuffed animals which could be redeemed on the internet to bring to life in a browser game called Webkinz.

In middle school, browser games like Club Penguin, Poptropica, Roblox, and Neopets became increasingly popular. After school, I would go to my local Boys & Girls Club and play online with the other kids there. Then, my biggest video game obsession yet, Minecraft. I remember buying the game with my allowance and asking my dad to install it with his all-powerful admin password. My best friends and I pooled up our money to run our very own Minecraft server. What really made this game fun for me was being able to play it with my friends at school.

Screenshot from Minecraft gameplay

In high school, I continued playing Minecraft, but the game playing largely settled down so I could focus on my academics and other hobbies like playing the piano and French horn. I got a Steam account, but hardly purchased anything. My next biggest game obsession came senior year of high school when my little sister encouraged me to start playing Overwatch. My little sister bought a video game laptop so she could start playing video games with increased performance and graphics quality. She started calling my computer a “potato” with its little i3 CPU and onboard graphics. Suddenly, I started to care about what my games looked like. I saved all my money and bought a GTX 1060 graphics card.

Present Day

When I started college, I was surrounded by more like minds and many more video game lovers. I started playing Overwatch with friends in my college esports club and became interested in streaming. I started working at IT as a helpdesk technician and took Fundamentals of Computer Science, finally learning how to code! This all prompted me to rebuild my entire computer during my freshman year winter break; I bought all my parts on Black Friday and spent the evening building it with my dad. At this point, I knew I was in love with technology.

First time setting up my computer in my dorm room

The following semester, spring 2017, I attended my first hackathon (second and third too!), AthenaHacks, Southern California’s largest all female hackathon, hosted at University of Southern California. It was a wonderful introduction to Hackathons; I felt so comfortable surrounded by other empowering women in tech. This is where I first learned about Unity. I attended an hour-long game development workshop. Unfortunately, since I didn’t have Unity installed, I didn’t get to do much more than download Unity since the wifi was so slow, but it sparked my interest in game development.

After AthenaHacks

I’m not sure what exactly prompted me to click on a Unity tutorial and finally start to learn it, but by some fate, that’s what I ended up doing. Once I started creating the video game, I couldn’t stop. It was reading week (the week before finals) and I couldn’t focus on preparing for my exams. I sat myself down and 7 hours later, I was finished with my first game. Spring of 2017, I started and finished my first Unity tutorial. More on that in my next post.

One night, just last week, I happened to see the game design professor eating at my school's cafeteria. I had met him just once, last semester, when he did visited to do a lecture at my school to tell us about game design, virtual reality, and the classes he was going to teach in the fall. I was so excited to see him again, I asked my friend to help me go up there and talk to him. We ended up talking for at least a half an hour and he showed me many cool sites related to game development. One stood out in particular -MsMinotaur's site. MsMinotaur, an independent video game developer, made a game every week, 52 games a year, and documented her journey. Upon seeing this, I made myself a similar resolution - to make a game every month. Let's do this.

Edit (3/4/2019)

I didn't end up making a game every month, but I'll update you in later posts. I'm still making games and working hard to chase my passions in technology!