How a Game Making Website molded my Developer life
This story has a name, it’s called PlayCrafter. A flash-based website where users could create and share their games online.
I joined this fantastic world when I was around 11 years old back in 2009. Flash games were everywhere on the web, and a tool to easily create games using drag and drop suited fairly well for my age.
I was thrilled. By publishing my games and interacting with users on the website I would accumulate points and level up, have games appear on the front page and even develop my own game pieces. That’s where it all started.
I could simply edit this code and create awesome things that weren’t seen in every day’s games! Of course, I had no idea what was XML back then. But just like HTML, it is a markup language, which is probably one of the easiest types of programming languages to learn.
It got me curious so I tried changing some fields to see what would happen. I didn’t think for a second that I was programming, such a subject wasn’t (and still isn’t) taught in most schools, so it was my first ever contact.
Within some time I managed to make new player objects, swords that would always point to the mouse and kill enemies on hit, moving platforms, all with custom visuals that I made using Flash.
Later, I created a fan website for users to share their pieces for free with other users using Wix. It included my contributions and others from players who would email their codes to me. In fact, it’s still online!
Something curious regarding Wix: they now use ReactJS, which is the technology I’ve been working with for a while.
Besides being able to create awesome games that made me quite popular on the website, there was a chat on the first page to talk with other users. I owe a lot to this specific functionally and my fellow playcrafters. I was learning English at school (my primary language is Portuguese) and it was a game-changer for my skills, nowadays my professional life relies a lot on my English level.
Playcrafter shut down in May 2011.
Shocking, and heartbreaking for me. All of a sudden the community I interacted with daily and the games we were making, were all gone.
Fast forward to the future, I now work as a Software Developer, bringing solutions to the market using the latest tools and technologies. React has been my main skill for a while, and I feel challenged every day to use my creativity to build new applications.
I can proudly say I’m happy to be in the tech industry, not only have I encountered a profession I love, but it also ends up being my hobby. I'm really into fields like Web Development, Virtual Reality, Game Development, IoT, Science, Digital Painting, Language Learning, and also writing.
That’s pretty much how a game making website influenced me into studying Computer Engineering. It was not the only influence I had into picking the technology field as I’ve always been very great at exact sciences which is a plus, but it made a big impact on my personality.
Coding professionally resembles a lot the younger me messing around with the game editor and fearlessly trying out new things. Imagination and creativity are always present up to these days.
If you have kids or you know someone, I encourage you to introduce them to Scratch. It’s an online community and tool developed by MIT where anyone can easily program their games using a block-based logic. Check it out!
谢谢
