Joshua 'Jak' Williams
My Story
1989-1991
A child of the 80’s, I grew up in rural Western New York. The pre-internet, pre-mobile phone era meant that summers were filled with making our own fun. To keep us busy, aside from the standard list of summertime chores, my parents brought home what was, by today’s standards anyway, a massive IBM desktop computer. Loaded with MS-DOS, a few games (Sierra Online’s Space Quest and King’s Quest stand out here), and a literal library of owner’s manuals and instruction books, my life was changed forever.
At some point in the very early 90’s, thanks to a rainy day and nothing on television, a very curious me flipped through some of the books that came with our first PC. There I found the “User’s Reference for Microsoft GW-BASIC”. I recognized the name GW-BASIC, while poking around the filesystems on our desktop I frequently saw the “gwbasic.exe” program but never quite knew what it was. After skimming the first few pages, my mind was blown. This is how I program and make the computer do what I want it to do! The rest of that summer was a blur, using my free time between chores and seeing friends to pour myself into that book and experiment with all the cool things it could do.
Eventually this led me to create a game inspired largely by the MS-DOS text-based game “Lunar Lander”. I remember it clearly: the player is a knight, navigating through a mountain cave to reach the hidden pile of gold. However, there was a dragon also hidden in the cave that if the player discovered, it would be game over. Everything was very static, the dragon and gold were always in the same locations (there’s only so much a 10-year-old can do with IF, THEN, and GOTO statements.) However, I do remember being clever and incorporating a skip mechanic where entering a specific word at the title screen would place the player deeper into the dungeon than if they started from scratch.
It’s worth mentioning that skip mechanic was a trick I had learned from the September/October 1989 issue of Nintendo Power. It escapes me which game in the issue inspired it (possibly Ducktales). Regardless, it led to a very passionate request for a subscription to Nintendo Power from my parents. Their argument was that I had a Game Boy and Nintendo Power was meant for NES system owners. I responded by clearly pointing out that just because we did not have an NES that doesn’t mean I couldn’t READ about the games. I still lost.
By the end of summer there had been some real progress but like most summers when growing up, they eventually end. School starts again, activities and homework take a larger chunk out of less free time, and summer coding projects are lost to time.
1999
Forward to 1999. An issue of PC Gamer and its standard demo cd included an exciting new franchise entry called Unreal Tournament. I was instantly hooked. The maps were amazing, the weapons felt good, and the action was fast paced. The full game had way too many hours given to it than I’d care to admit.
Once again, my curiosity took over and while checking the install directory of UT’99, I discovered UnrealEd. If I must narrow down a true, life changing moment, this would most likely be it. The power to make fully realized 3D levels using preexisting assets blew my mind. It wasn’t long before tutorials were being printed and organized into folders, piling up everywhere. Some maps I created gained positive comments from within the community, but nothing anywhere near the quality included in Epic’s own community map packs.
This obsession spilled over to Starsiege: Tribes. While in college, a small group of friends and I would regularly get together to host local Capture the Flag matches in Tribes. When I finally did figure out the workflow of launching the editor, creating the map, and distributing it to others, it became a regular thing that I would have a new map for us to play every few weeks. One such map made for deathmatch consisted of multiple forcefields, oriented into a cube into the sky. That one stuck out more than others due to the fact it caused more crashes from so many forcefield object effects.
2003/2004
As Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 released, I found myself just as excited to get my hands on the updated editor packaged with them as I was for the games themselves. The mapmaking journey continued, however just as I had less time for GW-Basic, life managed to get in the way. Adult responsibilities and a cost to computer hardware ultimately forced UnrealED to the backburner.
2007
When Unreal Tournament III came about in 2007, I did everything I could to make sure my computer was up for the challenge and surpassed the recommended specifications. I knew from previous releases that an updated editor was coming, and with the game’s amazing graphical overhaul to the character models, environments, and weapon effects, I was ready to take my mapmaking skills to the next level. I got even more excited while playing through the game, seeing all the new capabilities that might be available in the editor.
Opening the editor this time was a jarring experience. My beloved UnrealED had evolved into the Unreal Development Kit, or Unreal Engine 3. This was a whole new realm I wasn’t prepared for. No longer just a level editor or map maker for an existing game, UDK was a complete game engine. My excitement to reenter the world of UT map making quickly diminished as I researched and explored the engine. Anything I had learned through the previous iterations had practically been thrown out the window.
Carving out levels with static meshes, applying preinstalled textures, configuring switches for elevators and doors, all gone. Now the functionality you want needs to be crafted using UnrealScript and/or C++, neither of which I had even a remote handle on. I vaguely remembered the basics of coding and scripting concepts from my days in the early 90s with GW-BASIC, however this was an entirely new ballgame now. Not to mention I had no clue where to begin making the visual assets.
Beat down and discouraged, I walked away from UDK. The hobby and passion that had reemerged multiple times throughout my life had grown up. It became painfully clear that while the development of game engines and tools was constantly evolving, I was not. At least not enough to keep up and make sense of it all.
2015
Life moves on. New hobbies and interests are acquired. In 2015, Epic Games announced Unreal Engine 4 would be free for everyone, including all major updates. Interested in this development, I took a shot and gave it a look. Much like my experience with UDK, I realized once again that I was out of my league. But with one exception. With the 4.0 release of Unreal Engine, Epic dumped the UnrealScript language and in its place implemented a visual scripting tool called Blueprints. That gave me a slight flicker of hope that maybe the change in programming approach would give me an easier path back into what was no longer just “map making”, but rather game development as a whole.
Regardless, the problem of not having access to assets remained. The UE Marketplace along with many other digital storefronts offered high-quality models and meshes, but at a price. A fledgling developer can only go so far with basic shapes and colors.
2018
In 2018, my life had slowed down. Filled with routines and ruts, I decided I needed a change and began looking for something as a hobby I could really sink into. Not something that could be done and completed in a couple months, but something that was constantly evolving with limitless possibilities. My thoughts immediately returned to game development and Unreal Engine. Looking back on my previous experiences with Unreal, I took stock of the skills I would need to establish a starting point in learning this massive ecosystem. For asset creation, Blender was a more than suitable choice, and Andrew Price’s famed “Donut Tutorial” was just what I needed to kickstart my understanding of 3D modeling. Armed with basic 3D modeling knowledge, a library of YouTube tutorials and Udemy courses, and a renewed mindset, I dove headfirst down the rabbit hole that is game design and development. This time for good.
2021
In 2021 I could feel another life change was on the horizon. No longer satisfied or challenged in my retail job I began to look at alternatives for a career change. The pandemic changed a great many things in the way we work and communicate, creating more remote positions than ever before. This was huge to my decision to actively pursue game development as a new career. The fall of 2021 and winter of 2022 was mostly spent devising a plan to make that change a reality. The biggest question I had to answer was, what portion of game development did I want to concentrate on? I had fundamental and basic skills in many aspects by this point, and it was extremely hard to narrow down that answer to a single niche.
2022
In spring of 2022 I found CG Spectrum, an online training school staffed by industry veterans and offering a wide variety of courses covering almost all aspects of game development. What really caught my eye was the game design course, which I thought was rare considering most other online training schools of this style offered mostly just art or programming based courses. After studying the curriculum and an Open Day presentation on what game designers do, I enrolled in the introductory term in June.
After an amazing experience for the three-month introductory term, I immediately reenrolled for the full game design course proper in October of 2022. A full nine months later, I completed the course and earned certification. The past year has given me much more knowledge and confidence in my abilities as a game designer to finally answer that question of which part of game design to focus on, which is technical design. I love the prospect of not only solving problems creatively, but also having the knowledge and experience to implement solutions as well.
Present Day....
As I sit anxiously waiting for the next chapter in my life to unfold, I can’t help but look back on the path that got me here. Game design and development has been a recurring theme throughout much of my life, and in some instances probably saved it as well.
It has been quite the journey, to say the least.