JAKUB "V VIX" KOGGA
My work on developing games began around the age of 12, even though I did not have much know how about game creation process at the time. I experimented with various engines and found most of them much complicated and demanding. I bounced off of professional engines such as Unity 3D or Unreal Engine and settled on something smaller, simpler and easier to use.
That's when I started making games in RPGMaker MV, an engine specialized for creation of top-down, turn based RPGs. What it lacked in complexity, it made up in ease of creation. Whether an original creation, a fangame for preexisting media or a silly project for me and my friends, I spent many good hours crafting stories out of 2D sprites and black-based programming.
"In the mind" which was my latest RPGMaker game project
Unfortunately, RPGMaker's simplicity was what ultimately forced me to switch to a more robust engine. Lack of prefabs or otherwise any parent-child system forced me to copy-paste code to each individual instance, which became more tiresome the bigger my projects got. 2D top-down tile system also started feeling like a limitation instead of a simplification.
I briefly experimented with different engines. Initially it was with GameMaker 2, but found it pretty confusing with too simplistic of a structure. Due to what I felt was a lack of options, I came back to the Source Engine, in which I briefly developed mods for Half-Life 2 and Portal.
Untitled Half-Life 2 based mod
Although, again, I found the simplicity of the engine alluring, I found the limitations annoying, as without modifying the engine's code substantially, I couldn't expand the 2004 engine in any meaningful way. This lead me to a brief pause in all game development.