Chevy Ray Johnston has moved from strength to strength. Following his Ludum Dare winning game, Beacon, he created FlashPunk, a free open-source 2d game engine for flash developers. Alongside Flixel, it has inspired a large trend of developers to enter the world of Flash. More recently, Chevy created videogame concept-art tumblr blog, Gamestorm. Having easily eclipsed 1,000 followers, it would be safe to say that this was yet another success story.

At the end of this interview sits a small reward.

Age?



22.

Location?



Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Dev. tool(s) of choice?



What do you do?



I make games, originally on my own, but over the past few years all my projects have been collaborations with various different artists and other developers.

What are your goals in the independent gaming community and your aspirations as a game developer?

My goal is to become as well known and prolific as comfortably possible without it ruining my life, and to meet as many creative, ambitious, and good-humored people as I can. This is my goal for all aspects of my life, not just indie gaming / development. My aspiration as a game developer specifically is just to learn more and more, be more ambitious with every project and always challenge myself and learn more and more until either my brain bursts or my life ends prematurely.

Define game development ruining your life.. what would it take?

Being insanely popular, like celebrity popular is just a scary concept to me, and oftentimes success can be sudden and explosive in the games industry. For example, look atMinecraft: now everything Notch creates is going to be compared to Minecraft and everything he says and works on is observed and criticized by so many people (and the loudest are always the biggest jerks). That doesn’t sound fun to me, that sounds intrusive, overwhelming, and as a result, massively obstructive to the creative process. I like to be able to talk to people eye-to-eye, as it should be. I don’t want them idolizing me or getting all star-struck just ‘cause I made something successful (whether it be by luck or hard work).

So I enjoy creating games I think are fun and creative and making tools that different niches of people can use, but I don’t really ever want to be “Minecraft” popular (or rich) (I don’t think).

Firstly who have you collaborated with and secondly, is there any specific reason you have shifted to collaborations?

Beacon was the last project you released with Gamemaker. What was the initial spark that set off the chain of events that would lead to the creation of FlashPunk?

My friend Matt Thorson was teaching himself Flash and starting some projects, so I decided it was a good time for me to as well. Because he was taking computer science courses in college, he had a more solid understanding of programming than I did and I could ask him any questions I had and he could help me along. I did, and he did, and when it got to the point where I just needed to practice to get good, that’s where FlashPunk came in; I used the creation of FlashPunk as a way to teach myself best practices, optimization, and new programming techniques. The fact that I got a re-usable game engine out of it was an intended result, but underestimated.

Underestimated in what aspect?

Underestimated in how many people were going to use it. I thought only a few friends of mine who were waiting on it were going to try it out, and maybe a few stray users here and there, but it exploded and now there are hundreds of FlashPunk games appearing, and several developers who are making a good buck with the games they’re making with it. I think that’s pretty rad.

At what point did you decide to release FlashPunk to the public and why?



I’d always planned on releasing it to the public. I saw no need to keep it to myself. It bothered me a lot that so much of the game industry (and many creative industries, actually) were so withheld and secretive, as it was a hindrance on my quest to obtain infinite knowledge. So, I figured, if I created something that other people could use and learn from, and not really care if it was stolen or whatever, I could sort of break down that wall that was keeping a lot of people from learning how to develop games, or at least get started.



I’ve seen a number of people comment that FlashPunk is similarly structured to Gamemaker. Is it?



Most 2D game engines are somewhat structured similarly to Gamemaker, if I’m not mistaken (I usually am). You have game objects that update, collisions that need to be handled, you can scale / rotate / orient objects and you need to handle keyboard / mouse input. The way you do this with FlashPunk is not really like Gamemaker any more than coding in Flixel or Unity, but I think because I came right out of Gamemaker and made FlashPunk, and lots of people knew that, it gave them confidence that they could do the same, so FlashPunk felt like a safe choice for a lot of developers.



It seems that FlashPunk (and Flixel) has given a generation of developers the chance to make some money (via sponsorship), while continuing to release games to the public for free. Was your interest in learning how Flash worked, at least in part, due to wanting to earn a living from game development?



I was never confident (and usually really skeptical) that I could ever make a living developing games, never mind as an independent developer. I just get in these moods where I have to (HAVE TO) do something creative, have to output something, have to learn something new, that overcame me and kept bringing me back to game development. Eventually it paid off, but I’d be lying if I said I ever planned to make money doing this. Kind of glad I do now, though, as I’m living far more comfortably than I was a year ago.

How much do you think FlashPunk ultimately shortens the development time on your projects?

I couldn’t say. I’ve only used it to create three games, and they were all radically different. One was made at a jam in about 17 hours, another was made in just under two weeks, and the final was a contract project developed over about three months. I haven’t used FlashPunk for any of my recent projects, though. I don’t think I necessarily like using engines (whether they be my own or somebody else’s) for the fact that they reduce development time as much as they make prototyping way faster and easier; they allow me to sketch out a mechanic or idea without having to set-up some stupid render pipeline or collision code I’ve written before a hundred times. Of course, every engine has its limits, and some creative ideas simply require an engine of their own in order to operate, but most of my ideas are pretty simple.

Having developed your own engine that is tailored to your own specifications, does finishing projects still become a daily grind? What parts of the development process do you find especially tedious?

Finishing projects is always a grind for me, and I have a feeling it always will be, no matter the development environment. But using my own engines means I know how they work inside-out, so when problems do arise, I’m able to locate where and why they are happening. I find content to be by far the most tedious, specifically level design and menus. I enjoy designing and coding each of the bits of levels, but as soon as it comes down to just placing them into rooms piece by piece, I lose all creative drive and it becomes mindless tedium to me. I cannot work like that, so unless I’ve got a level designer on board, I usually come up with game designs that rely on a more procedural approach.

Have you fallen into the 'trying something too ambitious’ trap yet?

This happens with every single project. No matter how small a project is, I always underestimate how much work it’s going to be to get it to the point of fun and polish that I want. I used to be a lot worse, overshooting reasonable scope insanely, like any novice game developer tends to do, but nowadays I am much more aware of what goes into developing a game, how much work it takes, and how fast and how well I can do it (not to mention the types of problems / bugs that may pop up in development).

Do you think Gamemaker gave you good grounding for future coding endeavours? What are your feelings towards Game Maker nowadays?



I’d never have gotten into game development if it weren’t for Gamemaker; without it I’d never have had the guts to be able to challenge myself to keep learning and practicing. I learned most of my core coding / scripting knowledge in it, and discovered a lot about the challenges and problems of game design in the years I used it. For that, I am grateful, but I haven’t touched it in ages and I know next to nothing about its current developments or community. After about nearly two years of not using game maker, e-mails for help with it have finally started to slow down, though I probably still get about one a week. That’s interesting.



So your indie videogame concept art tumblr blog, Gamestorm hit 1,000 followers a while ago. Tell me a little bit about how this started out?



I sketch a lot. I doodle on paper. I brainstorm with insane amounts of lines, scribbles, calculations, and pictures. It helps me think, but I rarely went back and looked at any piece of paper I’d covered in markings. When I finally started to, I found them immensely amusing, and also discovered a lot about myself and my thinking process while doing so; it’s really fun to step back into my brain at a certain point in time, when I was considering a certain problem, and probably in some kind of mood (whether good or bad). I’d had the idea of starting up a digital museum of a collection of these kinds of things for awhile, and knew that considering the amount of game developers I know in the industry, I’d be able to get a lot of great submissions. When I finally launched it, it turned out that I’m not the only one that sees the creative and amusement value in game developers’ opened minds. Kotaku, Boing Boing, IndieGames, and dozens of other gaming and tech sites covered it almost immediately. It already had a decent following when Tumblr featured it as a spotlight in its gaming category (it’s still up there at time of writing), knocking it up from about 400 followers to about 1300 currently. It’s a fun blog to maintain, and I love many of the submissions I’ve gotten. I plan on keeping it active for a long time to come.

Bonus: A piece of Chevy’s concept art.