My name is Adriel Wallick and I’m an independent game developer most recently based out of Boston.
“Most recently based?”, you ask? Well, let me explain.
After a series of personal events, I decided that I didn’t want to stay in one location anymore. I let my lease expire, left my ‘real people’ job, distributed all of my worldly possessions between a 5’x7′ storage unit and the the trunk of my car, and, like any good vagrant would, hopped on a train to head out west. Since then, I’ve been attending various events and staying with a myriad of friends and family. I’ve only been at this nomadic lifestyle for a couple of months so far, but it’s already been an interesting and fascinating experience.
I’ve been working in games since 2011 after a lifetime of playing games and years of desiring to work on games. Before games, I made satellites.
Games have always been an interest of mine. As a child, my parents continually exposed my sisters and I to games and technology. I would think about each game I played for days – how does this work? why does this work? I would try to figure out the gameplay patterns so I could ‘cheat’ the system (it’s really the only way to do well playing against two older siblings).
One of my earliest memories of using a computer, was when I was 6 years old. My father had an MS-DOS computer and we were informed that there were games on it that we were allowed to play. However, we had to figure out how to navigate around, boot it up, and start the games ourselves. My sisters and I sat down with a book of DOS commands and worked at it until we could finally play Castlevania.
In middle school, I taught myself the C programming language. I wanted to “make a game” and it was the only way I could figure out how to do that. I was fascinated at how I could make the computer understand user input. I was equally as fascinated at the fact that I could use that user input to affect the program I made. The game was a simple choose-your-own-adventure text based game – but it was a game.
I used games as a way to experience things and entertain myself. Any time my parents asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I always had the same answer – games.
It took me a while to really figure it out (honestly, much longer than it probably should have), but eventually I did figure out that making games, and being involved in the game development community, is what would make me happy.
On my own, I’ve mostly worked on little side-project games, game jams, and a few prototypes. I’ve also professionally worked on things such as Rock Band Blitz as well as a few unreleased contract projects.
Inspired by the amazing creativity that I’ve seen come out of the game jams I’ve been involved in, I’ve started to plan some of my own. Currently, I’m working on a jam inspired by a trip I took this previous August. I’ll be announcing more soon, so stay tuned!
So yeah – that’s me. I have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m going, but I might as well at least write about it.