Hi my name is Jordan Thompson and I run indiegamesstudio.com. I started programming in elementary school creating text role playing games in BASIC using a Commodore 128 and then vertical shooters on the Amiga 1000 in middle school. Later I released my first published game, a top view vertical shooter called “Graveyard Hunter” at age 15 on Amiga through the Amiga Addicts Anonymous club’s “Disk o’ da Month”, a disk containing the best Amiga apps and games for that month (June 1992).
After making several small games on the Amiga I began creating MODs for Duke Nukem 3D on PC and released them through Kali, an online gaming service for DOS & Windows. The MODs were well received and after creating mods for a few other games (Unreal, Quake, Doom, Descent), I eventually moved on and got into Game Maker (v3) and then 3D Gamestudio (A5). I made a couple of physic tutorials for 3D Gamestudio that were being used over 5+ years after creating them and received lots of emails of appreciation and compliments.
I returned to creating MODs for a while specifically for a game called NeverWinter Nights. I made a campaign from a story I spent a month writing. A while later after releasing it to the NWN community, there was an expansion that had a very, very close story line to my campaign.
The next engine I worked with was Torque, and with it I created a few multiplayer games which were also cross-platform (Windows, Apple, Linux). One of the games was the first to my knowledge that had a cloaking device in a “Capture the Flag” FPS game. In addition to this, I wrote a couple of games in Java; my first was a text RPG.
After using all this software I wanted to write my own game engine and started with a graphics library called Allegro. Allegro was mostly geared for 2D games and with that in mind I built my first 2D engine called, “Psychotic Engine“. Psychotic used Lua as it’s scripting language and at it’s core was written in C. Megaman Red was created using it and is my tech demo for the engine.
I then started using DirectX and with the first game which took only 1 month, Project: Black Saturday, won first place in a competition by Jonathan Harbour, a game developer book author. Although I was having my fill with 2D games I wanted to venture onward and make a 3D engine. And so I did. Again using DirectX and the help of several books was able to create my very own 3D engine. It even had basic occlusion culling. Since I didn’t have a level editor I used 3D Studio Max to make levels.
After attending GDC in 2010 I stumbled across a small company called Unity Technologies, makers of Unity3D (v2.6), and was pleasantly surprised to hear that a free version was available. Unreal also had released a free version of their engine and Garage Games was about to release a major upgrade to their Torque engine. After using each one of these engines, I chose to go with Unity because of it’s ease of use, simple compilation process, cross-platform capabilities, and price.
In collaboration with some friends, we created The Missing and The Missing 2. The Missing was my very first game with Unity3D and was completed in a month. The Missing 2 took a couple of months to make but was a major improvement over the first one. Demolitious is available on PC, iOS, & Android and is free. The initial game took only 24 hours and after it’s released for the mobile platforms, I spent a few weeks improving on the initial design. There was about ~10,000 downloads in the first month and thousands of plays from this website and other web portals. Escape from Caprica and Block Out were also a couple of titles I made in 24 hours. From time to time I check out other engines like Scirra’s Construct, Adventure Game Studio, and RPG Maker, but I mostly focus on Unity3D.
As you can probably guess, coding and game developing have always been my biggest passions however I also enjoy every other form of technology as well. Recently I’ve started to broadcast my game plays on twitch where I get to interact with like minded people while playing video games.
Questions or comments? Shoot me an email!
Thanks for stopping by!
- Jordan
