I started making video games as a teenager, and about ten years ago there was this golden age of Flash games where you could make a small video game, auction it off on a private website to various companies that ran Flash game arcades. You'd incorporate their branding, ads, links, and in exchange receive an upfront fee followed by a split of the ad revenue. Over the course of my three year degree I had five games published, which gave me a taste of the business side of game development. It was a weird, unique, fun time in game development! I don't think there's much like that now for hobbyists to transition into commercial work quite so naturally.

But I finished uni and went into the industry, writing Python/Django code for a startup. During this time I started work on the game that eventually let me go full-time, The Cat Machine (http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900). I'd work on it on Saturdays and towards the end of development I'd even get up early in the morning to get an hour or two in. I released it on Steam and a bunch of other places, where it did... better than a niche puzzle game about cats should do, I think! Other good things happened, it was featured for a number of months on the front page of the Apple Mac Store next to actually really good games like Braid and Mini Metro, so it turned out that cross-platform support was really worth it!

I've been working on my second downloadable title for the past two years (http://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zookee...), but that's the story so far!