About Me

The first game I ever created was when I was in elementary school, in the backyard of my friend’s house: a little Pokemon fighting game where we each got to be trainers who summon Pokemon to battle with. I wrote down all of the skills for each monster, how much damage they did, and how often they could be used. It played out like an advanced Rock-Paper-Scissors, and it jump-started my passion for making games. 

I discovered my love for programming in high school when I made a small text-based RPG using QBasic, which became my first computer game.

Thanks to my amazing high school programming teacher, I then jumped into college head-first with game development in mind as I took every class offered and was extremely excited about my career choice. Along with a few of my friends, I decided to bring together a large group of others passionate about building games and, with very little knowledge of the how, we got to work on a multi-perspective action RPG/Shooter. Scope quickly became a debilitating factor for a few teenagers as we realized exactly what was in store. A few months later, we began having different opinions on the direction of the game and decided to scrap the project and go our separate ways.

That didn’t discourage me though. My first years of college flew by as I thought nothing could stop me…unfortunately this was at the time when the game industry was just starting to take off and so many people, including my family and my school, had their doubts. With so much negativity surrounding me, and my college forcing me to give up on game development and pick a different degree alongside computer science, I ended up completely changing the direction of my studies. I moved into acting for a year as I had no idea what else I wanted to do with my career without game development, until eventually, I lost faith in my school and began working for a public school district. It was a job filled with incredibly wonderful people that I loved, but it never felt like it was what I was meant to do.

While working for many years at the Kirkwood School District, I decided to use my love for crafting games to help the students. I crafted nearly one hundred games during my time there, all from scratch and all beloved by the students to the point where I had them coming back day after day, begging to play my games. In my free time, I created multiple board games, tabletop games, and card games, learned countless technical systems from game engines to node-based programming systems, and continued crafting games, the thing I love, as a hobby.

For years I was satisfied with my job and my hobby, until my late 20’s when my life changed. I was diagnosed with bladder cancer at age 29. After the traumatic experience of dealing with doctors and hospitals, I finally came out on top and decided I wanted more from my life. No, I needed more. I decided I am going to do the thing I love and have always loved. I am going to build games.

Shortly after my cancer went into remission, Covid hit. This was both a blessing and a curse for me. On one hand, I had lots of time to begin working on game development… On the other, I lost my job and my home. It took me nearly a year to fight back to a stable point, bringing me to late 2022 when I really started picking up my pace when it came to learning skills. Ever since roughly November of 2022, I have been working tirelessly, spending all of my free time to make my dream become my reality. I have learned C# from the ground up, taken multiple courses for Unity, programming, algorithms and the like, read numerous books, watched (what seems like) every YouTube video available, began building up my portfolio and online presence, and crafted multiple game projects including Empyrean Swarm which will be released on Steam near the end of the year!

My name is Anthony Joseph Austwick, Game Developer.