You always hear people say “follow your dreams” and “never give up” but at what point do you have to give up on your passion?

I’m 23 years old and I have a passion for making video games. I started for the same reason most developers start, because I love video games! I love playing them, I love the immersive stories, and I love the masterpieces that people come up with.

It all started in middle school when my brother took a game development class over the summer, he would love showing off his little games that me made that were just for him. He never had the intentions of “getting rich” off of making games, he just had the passion and the drive to create something he loved. At this time the games were nothing special, they were full of poorly designed images, crappy sound effects and never a complete piece of work.

But one day I played his version of Call of Duty (he called it Ball of Duty because all of the characters were just circles with guns) and I saw his eyes light up when I found myself actually having fun in a game that he made. He was so proud and happy of his creation and that someone was actually having fun with something he made, I knew right then and there that I wanted to make something with him.

I wanted my eyes to light up just the way his did the day I played his game.

Making games in High School

We knew that we didn’t have the capacity to make huge AAA games like Halo or Call of Duty so we set our scope on small mobile games. We knew that every person and their mother had a smartphone so we set our sights for Google and Apple phones. We ending up making quite a few games and apps through high school in our spare time between intense World of Warcraft sessions.

To be frank, all of our early apps/games sucked but that was okay, we learned a hell of a lot. Our first app was a random number generator that turned out not to even produce random numbers in the first place... But hey, we were young, it was on Google Play, and we were proud of it. This was the beginning of something great.

No longer available for download :P

In high school we never really thought that we would be Game Developers or own a Game Studio, we were just making games for fun.

We went on to make about 1 game per year in high school. All of which technically failed in the eyes of the mobile market but every game we were making was better than the last.. and we were proud of what we made.

Fast Forward to our college years

During this time my brother and I started an unrelated seasonal business that allowed us to make enough money to live.. and enough money to fund our passion. At this point in time we were balancing school, both businesses, and just life in general.

This is when we started getting serious about making games, we realized that if we wanted to follow our dreams we had to start trying harder on our games and start trying to make some real money from our passion that we were spending 15–20 hours a week on.

During this period we made some awesome games that are still available for download today but none of them were “successful”. This is when we started thinking that any one of our games could really take off, and that our games were starting to actually get good.

Dodgy Dragon.. Technically a Flappy Bird remake that barely got 1000 downloads. We learned that you cannot make another Flappy Bird, you HAVE to be more original than that. Still a fun game with lots of bosses to fight, looking back it’s kinda like Cuphead meets Flappy bird ;)

Matter Meltdown… An arcade game that we spent a WHOLE YEAR on and it even had a failed Kickstarter. This game taught us a hell of a lot but the game was too complex for the mobile market and never took off. This game was one of our biggest mistakes but also our biggest learning experience.

Color Glide… A colorful puzzle game that i still one of my favorite games to-date. We actually started to get some press on this game but it never took off like we would have hoped. The game was STILL too complex and had a variety of other issues that weren’t worth fixing after release.

Poly Crack.. An high-score arcade game that was fast paced and addicting. Once again, we were starting to get some press but the game still failed to “take off”. This is when we started realizing that we were close to making something great!

Shit, we’re out of college… now what?

Time to double down? or time to pull back?

Welcome to present day. At this point in life my brother and I are forced to make a BIG life decision. Do we keep making games? Do we get a real job? or do we focus on our other business?

Or do we say “Fuck it!” and keep following our passion and keep doing what we love? Spoiler alert: We said “Fuck it!”

At this point in life we’ve probably bugged every single person we know to download our games or to give us a rating on the app store. Honestly most friends and family are probably sick of hearing about our new games, and sick of making space on their iPhone for our next release. But also at this point we’ve come to realize that we truly do have an amazing group of friends and family that truly do support our dreams and and for that, we are forever grateful.

So at this point we needed to ask ourselves.. What do we need to do differently to make this work?

The games have to be simple, people generally give up if there is too much to learn.

Our artwork isn’t cutting it.

We need to release games faster!

We need to go into this head on. No excuses and no giving up.

So we are currently fixing all of those things. We’re working on our games full-time and really putting in the extra effort to make something great. We hired an awesome artist who has been working for us full-time. And we’re on pace to release a high-quality game every 3–4 months.. And they’re not our regular quality of games, we truly think that our next two games will break the App Stores.

We just released our latest game called Landslide Ninja on iOS and Android.

The game is set in an unknown universe with five vastly different planets, players attempt to climb to the top while the colorful blocks come smashing down. One wrong move and the colorful blocks become your biggest threat and they squash your marshmallow-like character into oblivion.

We’re starting to create not only games.. but works of art. Works of art that we can be proud of, and works of art that the App Stores need. We’re sick of seeing terrible apps & games get millions of downloads, we’re dedicated to creating high-quality and original works of art and other mobile developers need to take note.

Isn’t she pretty?

I’m too young to give up on my dreams and so are you!

If I gave up now I think that I would truly regret my decision on what could have been. I don’t want to be the one working a 9–5 job where they blast white noise through the speakers so that it isn’t too quiet in there. I want to be the one who said “Fuck what people say, I’m following my dreams until I die”

I’ve never written a Medium article and I hardly know how this site works but I just wanted to share my experiences following my dream. I hope that you found some inspiration to keep doing what you love.

Let me know if you want me to write more articles, I kinda liked the way it made me feel.

If you want to support me and my dreams, download my latest game! Search for “Landslide Ninja” in your app store. Means a lot, appreciate all of you.

Matthew Titus

Eternal Studio