Growing up, for a brief period when I was 10 up until I was 14, my friend Buzzie and I would

experiment with designing our own levels for video games.

Games like StarCraft and TimeSplitters 2 made it easy to design levels that you could play.

Well then we found a program called Game Maker, and we started making our own video games.

This was 1999, so there weren't many tools available and what were available

were not exactly user friendly, at least not for our age group. But GameMaker made it feel somewhat

approachable. One of the biggest issues with game development in the indie game devs is trying

to build the game that you know you can't build. That's Alex Mills.

He's the founder and CEO of Froggest Studios, an independent game developer headquartered in Texas.

Alex started out the same way we did, tinkering with a process he didn't yet totally have a handle on.

The scope creep, and I don't know if novelists or writers have to do with this as well, but

the scope creep is a huge thing. Scope creep would be like me and Buzzie saying, oh, let's go build our own StarCraft,

or our own time splitters too.

And you've never built a game before. You have no idea what it takes, and it's just not going to happen.

We actually tried making a game based on the Matrix, where you would play as Neo. I spent days after school designing Neo using MS paint, his black trench coat, his shades,

all of it, pixel by pixel.

And for every movement Neo would make, like if you were going to press the space bar to jump,

I would have to draw another version of Neo, you know what he looked like when he jumped,

just like you would in a Mario game.

And you can be quite a ways into something before you realize, oh, this isn't working and it's never going to work.

And that's pretty much what happened. As the weeks went by, we got as far as making Neo jump around and fly and shoot bullets from his gun.

And we even got the bad guys in there, the agents.

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