When I was young, I designed Zelda dungeons in grid books, roamed half-built houses, and wanted to build a trap-laden forest temple in the woods.

I soon found myself playing classic indie games, such as Seiklus and Cave Story, and came to realise that making my own games was possible. One or two times, I experienced an overwhelming sense of awe when playing these games, and in those moments knew with clarity that I wanted to spend my life bringing that feeling to other people. I booted up Game Maker for the first time in 2004 and convinced myself that I was going to be a game developer — that I was going to bring an overwhelming sense of awe to people through the mediums of creative work.

Before I die, I am going to bring that overwhelming sense of awe to you.

Contact details:
@itsmaple

― TOOLS ―

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In case you wanted to escape the role of consumer and start creating, yourself, I've compiled this list of tools that have been a great help to me on my journey.
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✦ GAME DEVELOPMENT ✦

Game Maker: Studio

http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker

A great game development tool with the ability to export your games to various formats for different platforms. I've been using this tool for forever, and YoYo Games has done a good job of giving me no reason to move on.

Flashpunk

http://useflashpunk.net/

If you want to make flash games, this is the tool for you. Hit up the tutorials section for everything you need to get started. When I ventured away from Game Maker, I delved into ActionScript 3 with Flashpunk, and that was only positive.

✦ DIGITAL ART ✦

Aseprite

http://www.aseprite.org/

The perfect tool for pixel artists. It has pretty much all the features you could want. The biggest of which I'd say is the ability to add frames and animate your sprites.

PaintTool SAI

http://www.systemax.jp/en/sai/

If digital painting is more your thing, and Photoshop is above the budget, get this. You may have a little bit of trouble setting up your graphics tablet with it, but it's worth it.

Paint.net

http://www.getpaint.net/

Nice free alternative to Photoshop. This was my sole image manipulation tool before adding Aseprite and PaintTool SAI to the mix.

✦ MUSIC COMPOSITION ✦

PxTone

http://studiopixel.sakura.ne.jp/pxtone/

Free, simple yet powerful piano-roll music composition tool, made by the creator of Cave Story. There's also a brilliant English fan-made user manual with added goodies to get you going, which you can find here.

MilkyTracker

http://milkytracker.org/

This is my favourite chiptune music tracker software. I find myself drifting between this and PxTone, depending on the vibe I'm going for.

Little Sound DJ

http://www.littlesounddj.com/

Chip tracker for Gameboy. If you wanna go hardcore hardware with thick chiptunes like the cool kids these days, grab yourself an original Gameboy and an LSDJ cart. Or, you know, an emulator works too, I guess.

✦ GAME JAM GOODIES ✦

Chronolapse

https://www.chronolapse.com/

A nice, simple tool for capturing timelapses of your computer screen. I generally capture at 1 frame every 9.6 seconds, and assemble at 30 frames per second. This turns 24 hours into exactly 5 minutes.

SFXR

http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html

This is a good program for last minute chirpy sound effects. You can set the parameters and generate a variety of sound effects within seconds. This has definitely saved me within the hour before deadline.