Before the code

Making things was always the starting point, long before programming. Drawings, then objects made from whatever was lying around, then flip books around 2010, then stop-motion animation shot on a camera, sound added afterwards. None of these left a repository, and that is the reason for this page: without it, this site starts at a degree.

GameMaker arrived between 2010 and 2012. First brick-breaker clones, what everyone does, then original games. There was no language as such: you assembled behaviours in an interface. It was exactly the right tool to understand that a game is a loop, a state, and rules that turn one into the other. Then Game Develop, on the same principle.

The first real code came in 2016, through two very plain doors: a calculator, and Python. The calculator because it was there during lessons; Python because it was the one being taught. That is the year from which building things end to end dates.

Then the preparatory classes, where free time was scarce and a series of small Python games still came about, to play in the evening among classmates. One of them, Blobby Volley, was the first local version of what became BlitzVolley, fifteen years after the first brick breaker. The others have their own pages: games, grids and their AIs, artificial life and physics simulations. Nothing planned there.

It was the only page on the site with nothing to show, until this image: a generic flip book, not a recovered trace from the time, the originals did not survive. It stays for the date, not the result: this is where it all started.