Hello everyone,
I am LaMar a retired professional educator struggling with some health issues and I restarted designing games as a way to take my mind off my health issues and as an outlet to teach and enjoy the creation process of designing games.
I am old- so old I started writing games on the Vic 20:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20
The Vic 20 had 5KB of ram and all coding was done in BASIC. Believe it or not you can write games in that small of ram which today would not even be enough for one good sprite. We used dots and dashes to make characters but mostly text based games.
That got me hooked on game design and I graduated to the Commodore 32 and 64 and I thought that was heaven having 64 KB of ram. I designed one of the first typing tutors that included a speed game on the 64.
When I became a teacher in treatment centers I designed a lot of educational games for my students and as the tech improved I took classes in any computer language that came available. Fortran, Cobol, etc. but none of them were good for designing games which was my primary interest.
I started looking at the game designer programs a few years back and I liked the simplicity and power of using ready made scripts instead of designing scripts from scratch and I produced several games using GameMaker and 001 engines and Unity.
They still took more time and dealing with sprites and game functions was a hassle and I was still looking when I found Construct2.
What I like about C2 is they are constantly striving to improve it and take feedback from game designers seriously and there are many designers creating their own addons and effects to share. The Arcade is a good place for feedback and the tutorials and forum are great help.
So here I am retired with lots of time on my hands and I decided to try game design again and I have created over a 100 games most of which were never finished but I have about 20 finished under my belt and I am getting better and faster at creating games now that I have some experience I think.
I am not pursuing a career as a game designer as money is not the driving force for me and I am more interested in creating sandbox games that non-programmers can use to create their own games and that will encourage them to expand their skills and maybe become a game designer or pursue a creative field.
My current projects are a Pinball Sandbox editor that allows the user to design their own pinball games and a Platform Sandbox editor that allows the user to create platform games with all the traps and tricks.
When these are finished (time permitting) I will make them available free as a demo version and have the open source available for more advanced users that will carry on where I left off.
I also use my games to educate and encourage my kids to enjoy gaming but also to understand how games work and how to create their own games.
Anyway, that is my background and story and just enjoying the creativity of game design and sharing ideas with other creative people.