One day, a guy does something. This ends up affecting someone else's life, and many years later, comes back to affect his life for no apparent reason.
Heads up, this post is me rambling about random stuff again 😅...
I recently got fascinated by life and the bits of lore it randomly decides to throw my way late at night. There are two concurrent stories I want to tell.
The year is 2014, I learned about an engine named FRoG Creator through a friend, and I got into the very niche community of making ORPG games using premade engines. FRoG Creator was not the only software that allowed this, another engine was Eclipse Origins.
This was at a time in my life when I was pretty much convinced I wanted to do game development for a living, and was still trying out engines, and figuring out what I liked or not. I was already using Multimedia Fusion to make games, but I wanted to try other things as well. I tried RPG Maker, Game Maker, Unity, Unreal Development Kit, Superpowers, RPG Creator, Craft Studio, and a few other engines I can't remember.
So, I started using Eclipse to make games. I never managed to make anything playable. Let's just say that Eclipse made me realize the amount of work that went behind making games, and especially online games. This has played a big part in how I do games today: With a whole lot of single player in them.
That led me to, a year later, settle for Construct as my engine of choice. Fast forward some time and I have a project, a game I want to make, with a friend of mine. A role playing game we named Sooth and are still working on today. For that RPG, I needed a good text engine though, and at the time, Construct had none available.
However, Tokinsom tweeted this on September 2016. twitter.com/Tokinsom/status/774121334288683008
I had been trying to make something like this for about 6 months when I found out about it.
However, as you may know, this never came out. I was kinda tired of waiting so I decided to learn JS and make it myself. A year later, Spritefont Deluxe was released.
Since lots of people started using the plugin, I started working on a C3 version.
Ok, pause there. Let's go back a few months and introduce a new character: Rory.
He joined the Construct Community discord server last february.
He started posting about his cool looking game.
It felt like these Eclipse games from back in the day, and so I started asking questions about some of the stuff in there, especially the lighting system, because I needed one for Sooth.
We talked a bit, and I eventually managed to take his advices, improve a bit on them and that's how this system was born:
construct.net/en/tutorials/making-advanced-lighting-2232
Turns out that the reason why the game felt so much like Eclipse was because Rory was one of the developers behind Eclipse Origins.
On the same day I discovered this, Tokinsom asked on the server for help with issues he was having with the spritefont plugin
construct.net/forum/construct-3/how-do-i-8/custom-typewriter-behavior-144892
So I told him about the new in development Spritefont Deluxe addon for Construct 3, an addon that probably wouldn't exist if not for his work.
Now that I think about it Rory has yet to get any kind of return on investment for helping me become who I am today. Even though it's incredibly fascinating that we met twice in different situations at different times, I'm the one who's been profiting from him both times 🤔.
Welp, at least that's a cool story, and that was only their impact on my life. What I find incredibly fascinating in this is when I imagine what happens when considering this on a large scale.
How many lives has Ashley influenced and helped shape by deciding to make Construct?
You might one day get help from someone, or meet someone that would not be there if not because of that thing you did years ago. Best thing is that you might never realize it.
Life is fascinating.