At a certain point I had a lot of free time on my hands and I decided to develop my own toolkit. I wanted my games to be exactly the way I wanted. I also have to admit that I have an interest in understanding the technical aspects of making video games and that I mostly learn by doing. I know, it's not a very designer-like attitude, but with time I've learned that sometimes it's better to just let me be me.

The whole thing begun with "The Clock & The Chaos": I simply wrote a piece of code to draw images and spritesheets using HTML5 canvas. Then came "The Cursed Mirror": I went deeper and I implemented skeletal animation, so that I could procedurally animate the characters. At that point my geeky side was too hooked to stop: I was creating something aesthetically pleasing solely by writing code.

But editing images like that was messy and extremely time-consuming, so I wrote an editor to draw images by writing code, assemble them into skeletons and create animations: SkeleTool.

But then I wanted something with better performances that could leverage WebGL. I also wanted to add more features, so I rewrote it using AngularJS for the editing interface and PixiJS to handle rendering.

But then I realized that wasn't easy to persuade game engines to import that stuff. I was never happy with particle effects implementations after all, better write my own engine based on PixiJS for the rendering and p2.js for the physics simulation.

But then... well, you got the picture. I went in full frenzied developer mode and I wrote an awful lot of code.

I ended up reinventing the wheel, the brakes, the engine and the whole truck. Plus my free time drastically decreased at a certain point, so it started to feel really daunting.

No need to be said that it's not the ideal approach if your plan is to be a game developer. The amount of time spent on strictly technical work overweights the amount of time spent on developing the actual game. In retrospect, I can say that it was an interesting trip. If I had known that at a certain point I couldn't spend all that time on game development, probably I wouldn't do it. I feel that in some way I've been hiding again in my problem-solving comfort zone.

But, yeah, it has been interesting and I've learned a lot. It's bitter-sweet, but let's focus on the sweet. There have been some unespected outcomes too. For example, I've implemented a function in SkeleTool and in my game engine to quickly generate animated gifs, which sparked an interest for creating looping animated gifs. Also, working on audio context was pivotal to understand how it can be leveraged to create visuals synchronized with music.

So, maybe Mr. Romero was right.

I've read it a thousand times, but maybe only now I can understand what it really means. I've been working as a programmer for 15 years, for most of the time I've been writing code just to solve a problem that someone wanted me to solve. I've used to think that there was no trace of the mysterious charm of the artist in a programmer.

But everything changes if you remove customers, requirements and money.

That's another of the reasons why I don't want to depend on game development as my main source of income.