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Zontelfonzo
I like to make games, but the big question is, are games an art form? Oh yeah, and would you like to see my spaceship, best pickup line ever.

Zont El Fonzo @Zontelfonzo

Age 32, Male

Capt. of a Spaceship

BooYeahVille, AwesomeTon

Joined on 7/23/08

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I Made a Game!

Posted by Zontelfonzo - June 23rd, 2012


I wrote a little something on how i created my game Walrus Baloon Ride, and posted it. Here's a link to the game if you want to play it before you read any futher:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/597505

I've been making small games and engine components in Game Maker since i was about 12-13, About 7 years now. For my 8'th grade talent demonstration project I made a game I called SpellQuest. Using Secret of Mana sprites and Simple programing trick I had managed to make a game with cinematics, a combat system, NPC interaction, and multiple levels. 7 years later, and I've made more games, come up with neat tricks, composed music, coded at a collage level, and what did I do with any of the works that I made. Not. A. Thing.
Recently I changed that. That turned out to be a lot harder than I would have initially have thought. One day I started to make a game in class based of three ideas I came up with while I was simultaneously having a conversation with somebody. Those ideas, where hot air balloon, walrus, and file cabinet. I had been looking the file cabinets along the wall instead of the person I was talking to for the majority of the conversion as I tend to do while I'm thinking. After I was finished my brain started to put the game together in my head. Thoughts ran across my like "so if put the walrus in the Balloon, and drop cabinets like bombs.." and "flying seagulls would help break the repetitive nature of mashing a fire button" and so on. I sat down at my computer, opened Flash and started drawing.
While I doodled my brain created a world where a walrus named Rick, was riding peacefully in a hot air balloon. Suddenly a seagull whips past Rick startling him. Rick turns to see that seagull pays no attention to its near miss with the broadside of Rick's face. Rick's response to this is to take one of the file cabinets he's been tasked to transport and heaves it over the side of the balloon's basket right at the absent minded seagull. The cabinet hits the absent minded seagull like a freight train colliding with a china shop. The bird is stunned an plummets to the earth and Rick has had his revenge. Rick looks over his shoulder to see that the sky he's about to drift into is filled with more absent minded seagulls, airliners with intoxicated pilots, and jetpack owner who think that the sky belongs to them.
So a week later Walrus Balloon ride came into existence, although it almost followed of countless projects into cybernetic oblivion. I'll be the first to point out that is not the best I could do, but various factors kept the project from becoming used file space. For one, my Newgrounds aura is set to Game Developer. This was honestly one biggest motivators to publish this game. A couple of years I came up with an idea for life planning, that consisted of visualize what your Wikipedia article would read. There's a similar therapy exercise where you write your own eulogy. A Wikipedia article seems less final and more like an active goal list then a final one. I want my article to start with "Zont el Fonzo is a game developer who I known for... ".
Other influences like Neil Gaimen's speech at the University of the Arts helped push this project into the world. I've never how much anxiety that there is when submitting your work to the world until I did it. But Now that I have I'm glad I did it. The positive responsive to my game gave me motivation to build more games to share, and the negative comments gave me ideas of how to make my work better. I'm not anywhere near top of my game's high scores list, and that makes me happy( and just a tiny bit ashamed at my terrible gaming skills! Just kidding). But I'm hopping any artist reading this will share their work with world. I guess what I'm trying to say long as you love what you do and work with at least a little passion. If you don't get anything else, you will get the satisfaction of having created something that is making the world just a little more interesting to place to live.


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