I have spent a majority of my life behind the controls of nearly every game system ever made. It all started when I was around 5 years old living in Lakeland, Florida and my parents brought home pong. I can remember being fascinated by this little white square bouncing from one edge of the screen to the other. Over the years we owned a commodore 64 pc, intellevision, colecovision, nintendos, playstations, xboxs, multiple computers, handhelds, and more. I can remember days when we used get Byte magazine and had to manually type in pages of code to be able to play the game of the month. I can recall having to create batch files to load games in dos. I could go on and on with nostalgia about my love affair with games.
Things are a little different when you jump from being the consumer to being the producer of games. I find myself to be a different gamer than I once was. Now when I load up a game my eye grabs a whole different concept of what is going on around me. Instead of seeing a creature coming towards me in an rpg game, I see the art model and the detail and time that went into its creation. I see the animation and take note of what looks right and what does not quite work. I look at the design of the background, and at the trees and bushes. I take note of how things move and interact with other objects. I run code through my mind of what it might take to make certain actions happen. Most of all I have learned to appreciate those who have come before me. The time and effort that they have put into creating what is before me. I always heard the talk about how games were art, but have always been under the impression that they were really more for entertainment. Being on the creative side of the game has shown me that game creation is definitely an art form. Starting out being one person doing all of the creation steps from story creation, art concept and creation, coding, testing, ect, has allowed me to see a game from all of its angles. There is artistic ability going into each step of the process. I personally love the digital platform as it allows your artistic creation to come to life. Not only come to life, but allows you and others to become interactive with your artistic creation.
I look forward to the future of creating fascinating and exciting stories. My first full time project is Extravaganza which is primarily a space shooter with an engaging story for the player to follow as they blast their way through the enemies and bosses. Extravaganza is intended to be the prelude to a much more expansive vision in the future. Extravaganza is also where I hope to be able to generate enough funds to be able to continue to work full time at pursuing my ultimate vision. The next release of the Extravaganza franchise will be an arcade style role-playing game where you can level up your character as well as your spaceship. You will be able to land on planets and do quest, gather resources, trade, and more. The plan for the final extension of the Extravaganza franchise will be an MMORPG with a real world economy using Bitcoins as funds. The vision for Extravaganza MMO is to have an expansive universe to explore and battle in. There will be no classes to choose from as your abilities will increase the more you do certain actions. If you want to be a space pilot then you will need to acquire a ship and spend time behind the wheel learning how to use it and improving your abilities while using the ship. If you want to be a melee fighter you will be able to just go out and start beating stuff up and as your stats go up so do your fighting abilities. The list goes on and on. The vision is to create a world where you can be who and what you want to be, all you have to do is pursue it. There will be a living economy that includes trading between planets. All items within the game will be created by the players. There will also be an opportunity for players to own parts of the world and generate income by utilizing the area they own. The most exciting part is the utilization of Bitcoin as the in-game currency. To me this seems to be the obvious way to integrate a living, real world economy into the game world. Bitcoin is already a digital currency that anyone can get. It is as simple as downloading a Bitcoin wallet and getting your hands on some Bitcoins. Bitcoins are readily available to anyone who wants them. You can purchase them from an exchange or you can even earn them for free at numerous websites on the internet and you can also convert your Bitcoins back to Fiat (paper currency), so if you make a profit in the game you will be able to withdraw that profit out into your real world pocket. The intention is to create the Extravaganza virtual world so you can get started with a small amount of Satoshis (which is what the smaller units of a Bitcoin are called) that you can get for free.
