I’ve decided to make every friday a Q&A day. I receive quite a few questions via email, and many of them get repeated over and over again. Seems better to get them out there in the public so I can just link people to a post rather than writing up answers for them each time. This week’s questions are from Avishay.

Hey Peppy!

First of all, I want to thank you for writing those blog posts, I (and most likely more people) really enjoy reading them daily. So, before I continue on with the questions, I’ll quickly introduce myself. My name is Avishay, 17 years old, I play / edit maps on osu almost daily, nothing too special. You seem like an interesting & successful person and I want to ask you some stuff, I hope you don’t mind:

How knowledgeable were you when you started working on osu? Knowledgeable of programming, software and such?

When I started work on osu!, I had been working as a software engineer for a couple of years (Java / classic asp / ms sql server). I studied computer science at university, but I can’t say that really taught me too much. Most of my knowledge came from personal projects over the years. From writing text-based games and programs in BASIC back on a Commodore 64 when I was 4-7, to using Klik & Play and The Games Factory during primary school to make slightly more graphical games. Also made a good number of Nintendo game fan sites back in primary school; some of the first you could find on the small internet that existed back them.

I spent a good portion of my high school life working with databases, hacking around with stuff, building PCs both for myself and as a private business, running events involving large network setups, designing dynamic webpages for local businesses using Frontpage/Dreamweaver (they were pretty rare back then!). Ran arguably the biggest Windows XP resources site and forums out there during the year leading up to its release (design is a bit broken in the link).

During the later years of high school and the beginning of university, I ran several Ragnarok Online sites/systems (anonymously) that were integral to the whole game community. One still exists to this day (I passed it over to a good friend). I also played far too much of that game, but learnt the Japanese language while doing so - arguably not a complete waste of time!

Did you have any previous projects that helped you to develop osu? Or did you learn most of what was needed while developing / starting to develop it?

I’d argue that everything I’d done before osu! helped in some way. Running a game like osu! single-handedly requires a vastly broad range of knowledge. Software, hardware, networking, databases, front-end design… you name it. I strive to be able to potentially do everything myself. If I can’t do something, I will sure as hell learn how to. The positive outcome of this is that if I am disappointed with someone else’s working (or they are slacking off) I am able to fill in myself.

Any tips you’d give to younger self when you just started with the project?

Nope. I don’t really think back like that. Forward is the only way :).

Any tips you can give to me? I really love programming and a lot of computer-related stuff and I try to study by my own to increase my knowledge, most likely I won’t be able to develop a successful game like yours by myself in the next few years, so I really want to see how your perspective changed, from back then, when you just started developing osu, compared to now.

Do. Do anything. Make a start. Don’t stop. Don’t sleep. Find a source of infinite motivation.

Thank you for your time, Avishay.

Most welcome, Avishay.

For future Friday posts, I will likely accept questions on twitter the day before. Please don’t spam my email; I will announce it on twitter when it happens :).

Oh, I got the complete username change system working today. While it may look quite simple, this change allows us to have:

Custom store product pages.

Products with infinite stock.

Products which don’t rqeuire shipping.

Products with custom user data (in this case the requested username).

The start of much more to come. Make sure to check out flyte’s latest post over on osu!next if you haven’t yet; it has some big reveals!