The Beginning: The inspiration that led to me becoming a Game Designer
When my classmates in university would talk about their childhood and video games, I noticed that there was a lot being mentioned of the PS1 and PS2, great games like Tomb Raider, Halo 3, and the good COD and FIFA games. It struck me that I did not have this experience when I was growing up. My parents were cautious about video games and video game consoles, so my memories of childhood video games come mostly from playing at a friend’s house. I did have a handheld Tetris game for a time and then a Nintendo DSi, but nothing that really inspired me like my classmates’ experiences did.
The main games I played growing up were a decent mix, but most of them didn’t really light a spark that made me want to create them. At the time, I was more interested in becoming an author. So when I played games like Minecraft, Call of Duty: Ghosts, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, or some weird How to Train Your Dragon game, it was for fun and brought no source of inspiration.
The thing that did inspire me and eventually led me to creating video games was, in fact, not a video game. It was a game, but I wasn’t even playing it. I was around 10 years old and coming back from an overnight school trip on the bus when a classmate brought a card game version of Monopoly and began playing it with a few people, including my friend sitting next to me. For whatever reason, I didn’t play, but at some point, my attention was captured. It blew my mind that someone had made Monopoly into a card game, and I suddenly wanted to make my own Monopoly card game.
When I got home, I got straight to work. Taking inspiration from the Percy Jackson books I was reading, I used paper from my school books to create “Drachmonopoly”, an Ancient Greek-inspired version of card Monopoly. I brought it over to school, and my friends and I enjoyed it to some extent, so I made different variations of the game. This consumed my life for a short while. I’d be making cards in class, tearing notebook pages into cards, writing on them, counting how many cards I had, etc. There was no rulebook; I just made the cards I thought would fit. This led me to neglect some classes, particularly math (which would come back to bite me).
Eventually, I’d make “Drachmonopoly 2.0”, and then take a break from my work as a card game designer. My friends and I had a fully imagination-based role-playing game instead to take up our time, so we didn’t actually play my card games all that much. And since I didn’t write down a good ruleset, I had to be there to play. And there were only three of us, so we didn’t interact much with everyone else, and never bothered to try and bring them in to play.
Making card games was always an underlying desire I had. I made several more attempts at making card games, but as school got progressively harder, I tried less and less. Eventually, I found something that fulfilled my creative soul more than card games, something that I never imagined I’d be good at — programming.
