KeRaBiN

Hi and welcome to my profile

Thank you for visiting. My nickname is KeRaBiN, as you might have noticed. I'm an indie game developer, or at least trying to be :P For now (2023), I'm 19. I love programming and playing games, so why not do both? Also, I enjoy creating things in Photoshop and other programs. If you want, you can check out my biography down below. I know there is a lot of text(more like an essay), but I just wanted to write it down.

My backstory, or how I started programming

From an early age, I really loved playing video games. It was something new and extremely satisfying for me. One day, my close friend and I decided to create a game when we were 13. As often happens, we lost inspiration despite having almost completed the concept of our game. The problem was that neither I nor my friend knew anything about programming at all. A year passed, and with renewed vigor, we decided to try again.

Since we already had an almost complete concept of the game, we began thinking about how to implement it. Unity and Unreal Engine were too complicated for us, so we chose RPG Maker. The second try went as the first. We tried to create something for a few days, and we even made art for main character and the walking animation for her, but our inspiration and knowledge weren't as good as we thought. 

After some time, I decided to learn programming so we could finally realize our dream. For the next few months, I practiced C++ coding, as I was told it was the best choice for game development. Looking back, I understand that learning programming basics from C++ may not be the best choice, but it was the only one for me, as I always had that kind of logical state of mind(I'm not saying that other languages not logical, it just for me that C++ has that structure that was easy to understand. And I had a great teacher, thank you SIMPLECODE). Four months passed, and I realized I needed to practice by, for example, making a platformer. So I started searching for how to create a game.

My first steps were pretty solid. I understood how games work (game loop, state machine, etc.), but I was doing it all in the console window. Then I found SFML, a perfect solution for me. After 3 or 4 days of trying to compile it via CMake so it would work on VS19, I finally did it. From then on, I started working on my first project.

At first, it was just a Mario game with a lot of bugs and troubles throughout development. But I managed to create something similar. Then I needed new ideas, some mechanic that hadn't been used or had not shown its full potential. Because I was bad at inventing something new (well, nothing has changed to this day),this was the point where I asked my friend for help and, of course, shared what I had been doing. After a discussion, we came up with the idea of a dimension game.

The idea was simple: after pressing a specific button, the player character could instantly teleport to a different dimension. There were four dimensions between which the player could move, and with that mechanic, the player would solve different puzzles. So I started coding. After almost a month of coding, patching, testing, and debugging the whole thing, I achieved what was planned. This was a feeling I had never experienced before. The pleasure and excitement filled me. All the small victories I achieved through debugging my game assembled into one big portion of true satisfaction. Even now, I remember what I felt after spending, I believe, a week making my own collision detection class work (even now that is the thing I am most proud of in the whole code of the game). So the game and its engine were done. What's next?

The game needed audio, textures and animation. And here where real problems begin. Even tho I was able to hande graphic side of the game, I didn't know how to work with sounds. I tried many times. But it was too bad to use in the game.