Andrew kind of took me under his wing during the early days of Ambrosia and taught me a lot about game coding, while I was still in high school.
He eventually bought the rights to a game that I had put together and basically transformed it; it became “Chiral”, which I believe was the second game released by Ambrosia.
For $1500 he got the source code, data, IP rights, and a time-limited non-compete. It seemed like an almost unimaginably large amount of money to me back then (I was in my last year of high school), but I’m sure it was the smallest of his costs in polishing up the game to his standards! In retrospect, I’d be startled if he didn’t decide the code was a complete write-off and needed to be rewritten from scratch; I’d been an absolute neophyte at the time! But he was kind enough not to tell me about it, if so!
Andrew and I still have never met face to face; our conversations were entirely online. And we lost touch shortly after I went off to university. I’m a little embarrassed to have missed this talk, even though was actually in the building at the time. I was exhibiting my own game over in the expo hall, and I had completely lost track of time. Exhibiting your own game is definitely a bit overwhelming; a lot more than exhibiting somebody else’s one!
Andrew was definitely the one who got me seriously into game development and made me think about it as a viable career. In a lot of ways, I’m in the industry today because of him.
In 1999 I was 12 years old and I made an MP3 player in REALBasic. Somehow I had the chutzpah to send it to Ambrosia SW. Instead of laughing me out of the room, not replying, or sending me a routine rejection letter, Andrew took the time to send me a personal letter about why he couldn’t publish it and encouraging me to send him future projects. That act of kindness when you’re just starting out really encourages you. I wonder if I would have kept being as interested in software (at least at the time) if I had gotten something really harsh back.
I spent about fifteen years working at Melbourne House in Australia (which went from being independent to being bought by Infogrammes/Atari, and was then bought by Krome, before finally being wound down, but it was mostly the same awesome group of talented folks for most of that time. At the end, I’d been there for fifteen years and still wasn’t in the top ten list of longest-serving employees; I felt like only a medium-sized fish in a very large pond).
After that, I went to an EA studio for a couple years (which was very difficult for me, as I was put on a smallish team where I literally had more years of experience than everyone else on the team added together; I was suddenly in the very strange situation where any silly thing I said would just be taken as gospel and acted upon, and it took me a very long time to figure out how to behave to mitigate the risks of that). Then I did a couple years in (non-games) statistics software to pad out my resume a bit and show that I could do non-games work as well.
After that, I started freelancing, doing both games and non-games work, to support myself while I worked on my own game, which is now up on Steam in Early Access. Freelancing was a lot of fun, and I love the freedom to switch between projects and solve the most difficult problems of one project and then moving on to a new, different project with a new ‘most difficult’ problem to solve. Though obviously the lack of job security was a bit of a strange new experience, after spending my whole career on a salary!
I also spent a couple years acting as an advisor on the local Film Victoria’s games funding grant program, helping select projects to allocate grant funds toward and just generally advising applicants (whether or not they eventually received funding). I’m super proud of the work those folks do and that I got to be a small part of it for a while. I feel like the blossoming we’ve seen here in the local indie games scene has a lot to do with their support for the industry.
He eventually bought the rights to a game that I had put together and basically transformed it; it became “Chiral”, which I believe was the second game released by Ambrosia.
For $1500 he got the source code, data, IP rights, and a time-limited non-compete. It seemed like an almost unimaginably large amount of money to me back then (I was in my last year of high school), but I’m sure it was the smallest of his costs in polishing up the game to his standards! In retrospect, I’d be startled if he didn’t decide the code was a complete write-off and needed to be rewritten from scratch; I’d been an absolute neophyte at the time! But he was kind enough not to tell me about it, if so!
Andrew and I still have never met face to face; our conversations were entirely online. And we lost touch shortly after I went off to university. I’m a little embarrassed to have missed this talk, even though was actually in the building at the time. I was exhibiting my own game over in the expo hall, and I had completely lost track of time. Exhibiting your own game is definitely a bit overwhelming; a lot more than exhibiting somebody else’s one!
Andrew was definitely the one who got me seriously into game development and made me think about it as a viable career. In a lot of ways, I’m in the industry today because of him.