Being a kid making games in the early 2000s

Being a kid making gamesin the early 2000s. or "how to replace your real friends with onlineacquaintances and never recover" an autobiographical essay by Jay Tholen, the lead developer and designer of Hypnospace Outlaw, Dropsy, and Slayers X Just want to see the funny games I made as a 13-year-old? That's a mistake but OK! Skip the backstory and get right to the nitty-gritty stuff by CLICKING HERE. it's 1996 or something. 10-year-old me is eating breakfast with the principal in an elementary school cafeteria. this extraordinarily hyped-up breakfast event is my reward for achieving a high score on the FCAT state writing test. i'm disappointed that the food is standard Florida elementary school breakfast fare and not something fancier. they'd played this thing up to be a big deal. it's fine though, i don't think i deserved the honor. they gave me an expository essay prompt to "explain what makes a Historical figure notable" (or something like that??) and I instead penned a comedy-fantasy with a shoehorned-in Lincoln cameo. my influences were narrow so it probably read like an unserious R.L. Stine short minus the horror. towards the end i threw in a cheeky joke about not following the rules hoping that my judges were amenable to snarky little scofflaws. i guess they were. Floral Avenue Elementary in Bartow, FL this was often a thing with me. starting at the age of 8 i simply would (could?) not start assignments i found too challenging (long division destroyed me. it snowballed into never passing pre-algebra by my senior year of highschool) or creative exercises i found pointless (persuasive essays. why would I try to persuade someone regarding a topic I had no interest in or knowledge of?) and instead opted to write short form fantasy and science fiction stories or draw detailed maps of made-up places. i was also bonkers about computers and the World Wide Web, though we couldn't afford a PC and i suspected we never would. didn't stop me from picking up the itch from TV, magazines (begging for PC Gamer and PC World mags at the supermarket was a thing i did a lot) and any middle-class acquaintances who'd let me spend the night at their cool houses. the 'information superhighway' metaphor was particularly exciting to me and my young mind took the early ads portraying people flying through cyberspace slightly too literally. i first used a computer myself at an unofficial before-school daycare program that this saintly special needs teacher ran. she was often busy so she'd let me use the classroom Mac (a Power Macintosh 5200 LC to be exact) and it was heavenly. i most often played Oregon Trail, The Incredible Machine 2, and whichever version of KidPix she had. in 1997, after like 4 years of incessant begging, my parents took out a bank loan and purchased a Packard Bell Multimedia PC from Best Buy. it looked like this: source: The Nostalgia Mall (YouTube) by that time i'd collected enough magazine demo discs and thrift store games (i'd read the manuals for fun) that i had a few things to play, though it would be another two years before i could convince the parents to go in for internet access. at 11 years old I was diagnosed with ADHD Primarily Inattentive, which in my case means that i don't do (or remember to do) things that i'm uninterested in without a disciplined routine or medication. i did take meds for a few months but stopped because i kept forgetting. my parents were too busy trying to make ends meet to push me on it. i was embarrassed about the diagnosis and wasn't sure if ADHD was real or if I was just being a lazy turd. my first year of middle school (i was 11-12?) was my academic downfall. i never did homework and rarely turned in classwork. i was bullied often and made sure to ~stand up for myself~ resulting in embarrassing fights i never won. plenty of detention too. we had parent-teacher meetings every quarter about "turning a new leaf" and getting caught up on assignments but it never took. i soon gave up on school completely. my focus shifted completely to a computer program I had recently discovered called The Games Factory. that and Dragonball Z, Pokemon cards, and Eminem or whatever. What is The Games Factory? The Games Factory is a "no programming required" 2D game development suite developed by Europress (later Clickteam) and released in 1996. It was the successor to Klik n Play and was followed by Multimedia Fusion. All three programs share the same lineage and core feature set. The software persists today, now known as Clickteam Fusion 2.5, and includes almost full backwards compatibility with Klik n Play and The Games Factory games. Some of the original KnP bugs even persist. (This is a good thing. Ask me about it in a YouTube comment or something if you're curious.)An overview of The Games Factory by GouldFish On Games. Notable games developed with Clickteam software: Destruction Carnival (1997) by Charles Tomino SIEGE!! (2001) by Fallen Angel Industries (Beau) Eternal Daughter (2002) by Blackeye Software Entrance Gate (2002) by Jannis Stoppe Hell Creatures Rotten Corpse (2003) by Dreams Illusions Fantasies Software The Spirit Engine (2003) by Mark Pay A Game With a Kitty (2005) by Fallen Angel Industries (origamihero) Lyle in Cube Sector (2006) by Bogosoft I'm O.K (2006) by "Thompsonsoft" (mostly Derek Yu) Noitu Love and the Army of Grinning Darns (2006) by Joakim Sandberg Knytt (2006) & Knytt Stories (2007) by Nifflas I Wanna Be The Guy: The Movie: The Game (2007) by Kayin Bonesaw: The Game (2008) by xerus The Spirit Engine 2 (2008) by Mark Pay The Sea Will Claim Everything (2013) by Jonas & Verena Kyratzes Freedom Planet (2014) by GalaxyTrail Five Nights at Freddy's (2014) by Scott Cawthon Baba Is You (2019) by Hempuli Most of these games are archived at Kliktopia and most of them still work on modern Windows machines! before figuring out how to use The Games Factory to make games, I used its Animation editor to create flipbook-esque animations. stick figures blowing up or shooting anime energy beams at one another, mostly. the Animation editor was my first real taste of frame-by-frame animation, textbook margin animations aside, and thus another grown-up art discipline was demystified.Gonna mostly call it TGF from now on. to my mind, making games was a highly technical thing that only large teams of grown-ups could accomplish, so The Games Factory was a reality-bending discovery. I was never not thinking about my next game project. I didn't want to do anything else. School notebooks were now for mocking up game concepts, enemy beastiaries, and level designs. I took my backpack to restaurants and other family outings and spent any downtime scribbling notes and sketches.The Games Factory's Library Graphics. Love 'em now, thought they were a bit cheeseball back then. though I now have an affinity for the charming library graphics that shipped with The Games Factory, I balked at the idea of using anyone else's art in my games. the appeal of the craft of games for me, even as a kid, was the filling of a virtual realm with minutiae for others to explore and enjoy. i don't think kid-me would've agreed, but the process was more akin to tending a garden or a building a diorama than anything to do with proper game design. or maybe it was closer to building a haunted house in a garage. or planning a theme park. i didn't care about challenge or progression or scoring systems. by the end of 1999 I had become a competent Microsoft Paint user and learned the fundamentals of pixel art just through messing around. there wasn't much else to do after i'd exhausted my shareware and demo collection, and we had no internet yet. by the way, I wouldn't have known the term pixel art back then. i'm not sure what people called it in 1999 but it wasn't that. i think most Pixel Art terminology was codified by the Pixelation forum, which is a topic for different essay. in late 1999, two years after buying our first computer, my parents caved again to my computer-related pleading. this time for dial-up internet access. i chose a cool username (Simdrone052) and signed up for the Clickteam forums. i spent most of 2000 learning how to design websites, making and abandoning said websites, downloading screensavers, and probably also downloading naughty Dragonball Z fan art. (actually I just remembered my friend Chris gave me a bunch of those on a floppy. thanks Chris.) it was early 2001. middle school was almost over. i continued not turning in classwork. i had no idea how to act around girls. i was convinced that i was the ugliest kid on the planet thanks to the pimple constellation dotting my pasty face. typical awkward tween puberty problems i'm sure, but hard nonetheless. the atmosphere at home was also an uneasy one. we moved to different houses so much that I wasn't able to maintain a real-life friend group and my social world became increasingly online. by the summer of 2001 i only had a single real life friend left. middle school was over. my 8th grade art teacher (Mrs. Long, she ruled) scored me an audition at a fancy arts-focused high school. it seemed like the perfect place but sadly i decided that the judges would rather see traced pictures of Goku and Starcraft Hydralisks and Gordon Freeman than my own original artwork (which was cool, I was pretty good for my age) and they rejected me. my grades were also likely a factor. THANKS JAPAN. THANKS COMPUTERS. i remember being convinced that i had already thrown my future away at 13. both my parents and teachers repeatedly emphasized risks of screwing up one's early education, and i was doing as poorly as any kid could while still technically passing. the only real option, to my kid mind, was to keep working on my art and games and hope that it would somday work itself out. and i did! by late 2001 i had a personal website up with downloads of my Games Factory games and graphics libraries. Site's Up! My "RPG Library" for The Games Factory. i was a regular in the