Before I go into my epic two paragraph story about how I got into "game dev" as a hobby recently, I will do a shameless plug for my Ludum Dare 41 game. "Ammo Bear and the Wrath of Dr. Goo.." You play as Ammo Bear, he is a bear, he has a gun, you kill mutated creatures. It's a platform, it's a shoot em up, and it's educational because sprinkled throughout the game are fun "Facts" about bears.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/ammo-bear-and-the-wrath-of-dr-goo

The past three weeks have been a blur for me. It all started with a 48 hour jam hosted by Tim Ruswick of Game Development Underground(creator of an amazing gamed for LD41 called Gnome Man's Land) on itch.io(JimJam), where I made a terrible platform game using Construct 2. I was hooked after that, I knew that I really wanted to keep doing this and get better at it. The following weekend I got into another jam(pun intended), this one was Retro 8-16 bit, and the theme was "speed running", pretty simple, once again, another platform using Construct, and not much better than the last.

Then Ludum Dare 41, at this point I was somewhat exhausted from the last two jams, but I was nonetheless determined to do this. To make matter worse, I made a crazy decision to use GameMaker Studio, a program I was barely familiar with, to make my game for Ludum Dare. I ran into a lot of problems, and didn't make the game near as big as I wanted it, among many other things I didn't have time for, but in the end, it still felt and played way better than the last two games.

I'm seeing improvement. At 33 years old, I'm finally doing something I attempted to do with QuickBasic nearly two decades ago, but I just wasn't confident or determined enough to do it back then. Between then and now, I tried getting back into it, but I would just fizzle out every time. I'm hooked now, and making games is only half the fun as I also get to play all these amazing games that other people like me(but mostly more experienced and competent), come out with in 48-72 hours. Glad to be here!!