For those of you who don’t know, my name is Yuoaman, and I’ll hopefully be writing blog posts somewhat regularly for Calis. The topics for these blog posts will be fairly varied as I’m, unlike many of my fellow Calis team members, not an expert in any of the jobs I do. I do however hope that the readers might find something interesting in my limited experience. Without any further adieu, let’s get onto the blog post proper, which I hope you enjoy reading somewhat.
The topic that this blog post will attempt to address will be my own reasons for becoming involved in the PC – and later, Calis – game development communities, and just random thoughts I happen to have along the way. I know it will sound odd, but I originally found the community completely by accident. I just stumbled across a random project posted on the PokeCommunity Game Development forum – Pokemon Jade Conference, for those who care – while doing a Google search and was amazed that somebody could create their own games. I joined pretty much immediately and for several months… I failed horribly at everything I attempted.
The one thing I can honestly say I did right is that I kept trying, despite the many setbacks I experienced. I’ve seen far too many people waste their potential by giving up after a single failed project. This is because EVERYONE has failures, and the sign of a great game developer isn’t one who never fails, it’s one who fails but is able to learn from these failures and become a better developer because of it. Seriously though, it was two or three years before I was able to crank out anything that I would consider today to be ‘worthy’ of showcasing, so don’t be discouraged if you feel like your first project doesn’t quite measure up to what you had hoped to produce. If you just keep moving forward knowing that each day you’ll improve more until you eventually surpass what you had hoped to become.
Now I guess I’d better, at least briefly, discuss my experiences with Calis, as that is where this will be posted. Calis has existed, at least in one form or another, throughout my entire five year game development life. It was quite some time before I knew exactly what Calis was, originally it was just a word I would associate with the games developed by the ‘veteran developer’ Neo and his team, not realizing that it was the name of the team itself. These were games created by people in the community that I looked up to immensely during my early years in the community, and the words “Calis Projects” eventually became synonymous with quality projects for me. During this time Calis was one of those fixtures in the community that was reserved for those with amazing talent, and I could have never imagined that someday I would be a part of it, even during its rapid expansion over the last couple of years… The fact that I am a part of the team today is still a little surreal, and I hope that someday I’ll be able to prove to myself that I actually deserve the position, since I am often my own greatest critic.
Alright guys, that’s all I have to say this time around. I hope that the post doesn’t read as horribly disjointedly as it feels from my end…
-Yuoaman
