Wednesday, 25 January 2012

Brief History of Mitch Media

Hey, I felt like I should write up a little background on myself or this blog, so prepare for a bunch of text without any pictures or fun, at all. I've been playing around with digital media for a while now, I started using Flash when I was ~12. My computer at the time couldn't really run any games and I didn't really have any friends to hang out with, so I started hanging out on the internet. My first stop was Newgrounds.com, from there I picked up Flash and started drawing and animating. As you might as guess I wasn't all that great, raw drawing isn't my perticular talent. I had fun and eventually moved into flash game design. Being very young, I had no programming knowledge so all of my games were so crudely coding, looking back I wonder how I even got by and why I didn't pick up on what a variable was. For example instead of using a variable to log an enemies hp, I would create a hidden object that was told to "nextFrame" every time the enemies hp was to decrease, and on the fifth frame, it would go to a dieing animation or something. If this sounds overly complicated, it was. The simple way would be: hp--.

So after a couple amateur games (mostly shooters because then all the enemies could just be button (far less coding then anything else)), I got out of the world of Flash. Around this time I got hooked on Photoshop, I started making forum signatures for random people on the web, opened up places where I would take requests and try to fill them as quickly as possible. It eventually hit a point where I had some 20+ requests and eventually had to close shop because it was becoming far too time consuming for me to keep up with.

After taking a break for a bit I started trying to create more wall-paper orientated projects, and although I didn't make a whole lot, I'm pretty proud of what I was able to churn out.

Last summer, prior to moving (more on that in another post) I started work on Flood Commander, a game for Android. The demo is out on the market, but I'm not sure of the compatibility with most phones (developping for every kind of android phone is hell, I envy iPhone developers). The basic game mechanics are similar to FloodIt!, you have a grid of colors and every selection you make allows you to take over adjacent blocks. Thats the normal game, I aimed to take it a step further, and to add more strategy into the game, the demo features different terrain (bridges, walls) and also different weapons to allow you to hit not just adjacent blocks but also the ones behind them, and in other directs.
Sadly the development of my game has been put on hold until I can find the time, school takes a huge chunk of my spare time, and I thought that maybe on my work term I'd have more time to do stuff, but I'm barely home for 4 hours before I have to goto bed again.

Phew long post, if you bothered, thanks for reading.

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