Journey of Jay as a Game Dev

This is a follow up of my post on Unity Forums which I talked about being on the verge of giving up on my game Shark-A-Boom: https://forum.unity.com/threads/android-shark-a-boom-making-money-as-an-indie-dev-is-just-a-dream.1060169/

How did it all start?
I didn’t ever think I would be a game developer. The younger me only loved playing games and I still do if I can make out time for it. My dream was actually to become an actor but not everyone gets their dream, do they? (Favourite actors: Johhny Depp and Robert Downer Jr.)

So one fine day I came across Don’t Starve Together (DST). The game that I clocked almost 800 hours of playtime (Mind you, this excluded the countless hours spent on modding! More on that later.)

But before that, I actively played Dota2 for 3000 hours. That’s 125 full days of my life!
I was a Dota player even before that. Sad to say I didn’t get the chance to play WOW but I was still intrigued by the lore of the characters.

So when I got sucked into DST (I’m glad I did), I came to realise that you could actually add your own contents into the game and share it with your friends to play together with called modding. That gave birth to an interest in coding. My love of Dota2 and DST made me create some Dota2 weapons which I play together with my girlfriend.

All my other public mods are here: http://www.jayondope.com/my-dst-mods (I do have some private mods that are only for my girlfriend and me. Too bad!)

So from a small interest, it grew bigger. I wanted to create my own game! Create something from scratch. Create something that I would be proud of and treat it like my baby. I created Frankrit Eats Meat and published it on the Play Store. More on it here: http://www.jayondope.com/jgamesentertainment/frankrit-eats-meat.
As you can see, Frankrit is… Pudge from Dota. Why Pudge? Because I could never land a successful hook in the game so I made a game that was all about hooking. Lol.

As years went by, I changed my job from a Motion Graphics & VFX Artist to Personal Fitness Trainer to Insurance Agent and I got busy and slowly stopped updating Frankrit Eats Meat. Also, it was built on GameMaker Studio (GMS), a game engine that was not so flexible back in the days as it was built on version 1.4. Version 2+ is much better now though.

When Covid happened… I needed to find a way I could earn income through something I love doing. So I went back into making games. I didn’t want to use GMS now because I wanted to build on an engine that was flexible and modular. Articles mentioned Unreal was harder and I didn’t have a team so I stuck with Unity. So I jumped into learning Unity in late August 2019 and learnt everything I could as fast as I can in 3 months. On 5 Dec 2019, that was the start of Shark Pew Pew, now Shark-A-Boom! The name change was just random because I wanted to come up with something more catchy and I got reminded of a childhood Hindi song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxywyrDKbyg. Lmao.

Why I didn’t think of porting Frankrit Eats Meat over to Unity and instead create a new game?
Because I wanted to challenge myself and add everything that was lacking in it to a new game. Like playing real-time with friends, etc. Personally to me, the way I looked at it was the same as after you have 1 child, why do some want to have another despite knowing that it’s going to be very tough? Shark-A-Boom is my baby too so I didn’t want my idea to go to waste and I acted on it.

So continuing from the Unity Forums link from above, why I have not completely given up hope on this is because I still believe Shark-A-Boom will become something. It’s not just a game nor a business. It’s my baby. It’s still young now so I just have to add more content and make it better with love until it is fully grown. Till that day….