Now let’s try to start this the right way and not let die this one (old one is here: http://over00.blogspot.com/). This will be my about page as well so if you know me just pretend you don’t.

My name is Dave Toulouse and I’m now officially a game developer (without a license to kill)! No, I haven’t been employed by a game studio I’m indie. So why saying I’m now “officially” a game developer? Well because I finally consider myself one. Golemizer was released over a year ago (September 2008) and back then I wasn’t sure I was really a game developer. Somehow I thought one day I’d receive a certificate telling me I was or something. What have changed? Well… experience I guess.

Without a license to kill? Well I guess I’m still not 100% convinced. You remember when James Bond got his license to kill revoked? He’s still doing the job of a secret agent but something’s missing. Something doesn’t feel quite how it should be. For me I guess it’s because I still have that day job you know.

My passion is to create. Games yes but create first. From 2003 to 2006 I mostly focused on writing poetry which ended up with the publication of 2 books: (Rêve Mécanique and Funambules which I co-wrote with my wife (here’s the back of Funambules, upper left we were 16 at the time and lower right is when we published the book, we were 26). Yes I’m french canadian so it’s in french.

In 2005 I built my first game, Ereptoria. It was a strategy text game that was horribly coded and had horrible bugs. It didn’t last very long. You can take a peak at what the website was looking like here. The best thing about the game was probably the name. I didn’t renew the domain name at first but I’ve been able to take it back later so here’s the current web page of Ereptoria. I’m still planning to do something with it but I don’t know when.

Shortly after closing Ereptoria I started working on my second game, Chasing Tortoise. Again it wasn’t really a succes though I still keep the website alive. I didn’t have any real clear idea of what I wanted to do so that explains the result. That’s also something I’ll probably revisit later.

Both these projects were really not something I was taking seriously enough to get anywhere even though I did spent quite some time on them. I guess I just wasn’t ready to go for it.

There’s times in your life where your eyes open and you’re finally able to do things you thought you’d never do before. For me it was in the summer of 2007. I don’t know why but I knew I was ready to try something bigger and to be serious about it. That’s when I came with the silly idea of building an MMO. Yeah I know what you’re thinking. That’s why I didn’t say a word until I had a prototype ready to show (demo is at the end of the post). It wasn’t much but I had a server, a client and a mini zone to move and chat. I had no idea what kind of game I’d build with that. I just knew that I wanted something that would give me a lot of freedom to aim for a sandbox game.

It took me 1 year to develop the framework and the actual game Golemizer. You’ll notice that the game is still online and active so yep, I did it! It might not look like much but players can have pets, houses, run cities, create new zones, dungeons, quests, … So next time you’re about to laugh at that noob with a silly idea just make sure he’s not stubborn like me because he might prove you wrong. Ok I didn’t become rich with it and still have to keep my day job to pay the bills but still.

I’m now about to release my 2nd game built with the same framework as Golemizer, Blimp Wars. I learned a lot while doing Golemizer (and I’m still am) and received incredible support and help from Brian Green so I now feel that I might actually get my license some day!

I’m also expanding my skills a bit by experimenting with Flash. Oh I guess I passed the fact that both Golemizer and Blimp Wars are running with Javascript only (client that is). A Flash game on the same theme as Blimp Wars will soon be release at the same time as Blimp Wars itself.

So why wasting more bandwidth on the web with this version 2.0 of my blog? Well the reason the first one never got anywhere is that too often I have things to say but take too much time to think about it and end up convincing myself that there’s no point in posting it. Sounds weird as that’s not a bad thing but the fact is that I’m building web games. I need to be there somewhere. I’m too busy to be an active member of a community so I guess my best shot to exist is to do my own thing at my own pace.

So what it means is that I’ll probably be posting stuff that some days/weeks later I will have a different opinion on. I rarely see things in black and white in the long run. I’m that guy in the back of the room thinking instead of arguing with everyone else so I look like being inactive while it’s quite the opposite. So for 2010 my objective (among other things) is to be more active on the Interweb. Getting out of the shadows and start to actually exist!

Now I need to stop writing this post as there’s already dozen of things I want to change (see what I meant!).

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