Originally posted on the Gamedev subreddit on June 24, 2020. Images have been edited to more closely match original formatting.
Hello! My name is Nico Tuason and I'm an indie game developer from the Philippines. This year marks the 10th year of my game development journey. I'd like to share my entire story with you - my failures, triumphs, and major life events. I hope it will be worth your time.
2010 - A Leap of Faith
At the start of the decade, I was 23 years old and had just left my job at a local web development company. I had been working there for a year and was making about 22,000 PHP or 440 USD a month. The pay was not bad for a fresh grad, but I was unproductive and unhappy. Additionally, my girlfriend of 4 years was dropping plenty of hints of her desire to get married, and 20k pesos just wasn't going to cut it.
Being Asian (Filipinos are Asian too!) it was not acceptable for my parents that I was not either working or studying, so I applied for a post-grad Multimedia course in Singapore. Little did my parents know, shortly after applying I had received a rejection letter. I would keep telling them that "my application was pending", because I was secretly working on a passion project - my first game.
To me, video games were more than a fun past-time. They were my refuge during hard and lonely times growing up. I spent almost all my free time playing games on the family PC. One of the first video games I ever received was Star Wars Rebel Assault II, a short but cinematic game. I played through it on every difficulty multiple times. After that, my parents bought me Command and Conquer and my fate was sealed. Growing up, I spent all my money on upgrading the family PC and buying boxed copies of games.
Being in web development, I learned to use Flash to create banner ads and menu navigation for our clients. Out of necessity, I also had to learn how to create attractive UI and graphic design. While researching, I stumbled across a website called FGL.com (Flash Game License) that allowed anyone in the world to upload a Flash game and have sponsor websites bid on the right to put their logo on the game. They showed what some of the games were bidding for - 3000 USD, 5000 USD! To me this looked like an incredible amount of money. There were even some mythical games going for 10,000 - 20,000 USD! I devoured all the tutorials I could find. Before I had an idea for a game, I wanted to see if I could do a basic animation.
It looked good! But I knew I wanted to make a game in the isometric perspective. I had fallen in love with classic isometric RPGs like Baldur's Gate, and I was sure that any game I made had to be in isometric view. So, I repeated the animation but from different angles.
The next step was to see if it actually looked good moving around a surface.
I didn't know any game math, but I knew from tutorials that in an isometric perspective, a square is twice as wide as it is tall. So, any movement along the y-axis had to be halved. This made for a very simple isometric transform:
screen_x = x; screen_y = y*0.5;
Ok, after I got the basics down, It was time for a stress test.
By now I was waking up at 6am and jumping right into the computer to make more sprite sheets. It was intoxicating. Every day I felt a step closer to realizing my dream of making a game.
I did a bunch more tests and I found the fastest way to draw stuff on screen using Flash was to use a method called "copyPixels". The tutorials called it "bitmap blitting" but I only cared that it was super fast. Most flash games those days used Vector graphics - very sharp and smooth shapes. This was a huge burden on CPUs around the world (and eventually led to Flash's demise), but by using copyPixels my game could have way more stuff onscreen than other Flash games.
Ok, the tech looked good, so it was time to start thinking about what kind of game this was going to be. At the time, tower defense was a very popular genre, and I loved RTS games. I decided that the simplest route was to make a bunch of enemies walk in one direction while you try to stop them, with lasers. Taking heavy influence from Starship Troopers and Starcraft, I created a suitable enemy that you could have fun slaughtering by the hundreds.
I kept developing the game like this, working on one thing at a time and making sure it was acceptable before moving on to the next thing. If I don't stop myself, I could probably talk about every little detail that went into making the game, but we still have a long way to go.
7 months later...
I had a small but complete game on my hands. I called it "Desert Moon".
It was time to put the game up for bidding. I uploaded the game to FGL.com and proceeded to not sleep for the next few days. I wish I took more screenshots of this process. I think at the time the bidding period lasted 1 month. After many tens-of-thousands of "reload page" clicks later, there was finally a winning bid. It was 8500 USD! I don't know how to describe how I felt, but my head must have grown very large. I showed my girlfriend and my parents, the latter finally accepting that I wasn't going to grad school.
My girlfriend, Terry, also loved Tower Defense games and she was the main play-tester during development. This was a very happy time for us.
All I had to do was slap the Sponsor's logo onto the game and we could release it to the world.
The game launched on the major Flash game portals (Kongregate, Newgrounds, Armorgames, etc.) on December 11, 2010, and thus began my gamedev career.
2011 - Indie to Employee
Flash games are free, so once a game is out there's not much you can do to make more money besides make another game. It takes a while before securing a sponsor and the game finally being released so I immediately started on another game called "Solarmax".
One of my favorite games of all time is Homeworld. There's just nothing like the epic feeling of the fate of your entire race, your entire history, resting on your shoulders. I couldn't do anything near a 3D RTS like Homeworld, but there was a popular genre of Flash game called "Swarm" defense / strategy. I think Phage Wars was the most popular of these. I thought it would work well translated into epic space battles.
I spent some time learning 3D modeling software for this game. I was quite tired of pixel art after doing all the spritesheets for Desert Moon and exporting 3D models as a png sequence seemed like a good way to get all the angles needed for an isometric perspective without having to manually draw every frame.
The game was completed in 3 months, much faster than my first project! I was able to get it sponsored for 6000 USD. A bit less than before, but it was a "non-exclusive" sponsorship meaning I could still sell "sitelocked" versions of the game. This was a common practice back then of having 1 version that would spread to all the portals, and many "sitelocked" versions that had a different site's branding but could only be played on their site.
I planned to keep building small games like this as my skills grew, but then something unexpected happened. I got a job!
I got an email from the CEO of a tech company in the U.S. who had seen my games and was looking for a flash programmer for a game they were making. Who knew CEOs were randomly playing flash games and emailing the developer?
My first response was actually to decline the offer, because number 1 - I'm a dunce, and number 2 - I thought I could just make small flash games forever. Luckily this guy was persistent and I would still get to work on Flash games, but with more team members! And and... they were going to fly me out to the States to attend GDC!!!
I'm so grateful to the people who made this happen! As a young game dev, going to GDC is like going to see the Vatican if you're ultra-Catholic. I was over the moon.
Plus, the salary... it was 3000 USD a month! A U.S.-based salary for someone living in the Philippines! I have to tell you, I really thought I was hot shit at the time.
After I got my first paycheck, I proposed to my girlfriend Terry, who I was sure would say yes because the year before her lawyer-auntie cornered me and demanded a deposition on why I had not married her niece yet.
Things were going great!
2012 - Life... finds a way
In January, Terry and I got married! I was imagining that the next few years would be just the two of us, traveling together to different countries... making up for all the times we weren't allowed to travel together because the Philippines is a conservative country and it would be scandalous.
Instead, 9 months later we had our first child! Which is great too I guess haha... ha.
Becoming a dad mostly just means that a full-night's sleep is a thing of the past, at least in the beginning. I was working from home anyway so the arrangement was very doable.
Meanwhile, work as an employee started out great and we produced lots of small games in a short time frame. Over the months though things started to drag. I felt myself becoming less and less productive. I missed the feeling of always learning something new and putting what I learned into a game. Maybe I'm just a bad employee?
To prove how bad of an employee I was, here are some prototypes I made mostly during my free time.
An isometric aerial dogfighting game in a fantasy WW1 setting:
A pixel-ly survival game where you explore a procedurally generated dark forest:
A pixel art zombie defense game:
An early prototype for a 4X space game:
A procedural house generator?
omg I don't even remember what this is, it's freaking me out:
I was having fun making small prototypes but I never fleshed out any of them into a full game.
Regular work was different... You have to be on the same page as everybody else so introducing something new creates a bit of disruption. Working from home and barely seeing the team also takes its toll... you don't get to see the team's reaction to your work and you start to feel like your work doesn't really matter.
By the end of the year things had hit a low point for me and I decided to leave the company. I thought that I could start again right where I left off and keep making Flash games. I had a good amount of savings by now and was feeling confident.
Little did I know that the Flash Game marke
