Introduction
Welcome to my blog! If you’re reading this and don’t know me personally, you’re probably a fan of my games. Which is great news! That’s what most of this blog is going to be about!
Anyway. Hi! I’m notexplosive (usually written as NotExplosive because people will misread the former as “note-splosive”). Some people call me “Explosive.” My real name is Wyatt, but I’ll be referring to myself as NotExplosive in most (if not all) future posts.
I make video games! During the day I’m a gameplay engineer at a small Seattle-based studio. On nights and weekends I do my own thing. At one point I dreamt of being a full-time indie like ConcernedApe or Toby Fox. But working fulltime in games has disenchanted me from that idea. I would much rather work on a team where I can do the “fun parts” of making a game while someone else runs the actual business. Or, better yet, do all that as my day job and then make the games I really want to make on the side without having to consider commercial viability.
I’m an avid participant in game jams. I participated in my first game jam in 2012 (although proof of that is lost to time) and I’ve been jamming constantly ever since. At time of writing I have participated in 27(!!) game jams, and that’s just counting “canonical” games that I include in my ludography.
I used to run the Game Design Club at my university, many of the jams I participated in came from that. We would put on a game jam every academic quarter (skipping summer). Running that club, and meeting people who run a similar club at a neighboring university, has built me a great network of gamedev friends.
I plan on using this blog to talk about my work, sometimes technical details, sometimes just sharing anecdotes about development on a particular project, or some lesson that I learned. It won’t be all games all the time. I’ll talk about whatever interests me, but my interest tend to intersect with games. Making games leads you to learn about art, music, user experience, relationships, storytelling, empathizing with strangers you’ll never meet, and so much more. This blog will be about all those things. But mostly games.
I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while. I’ve tried a couple times at doing the whole YouTuber thing and I think I’m just not cut out for it. Despite all the skills I’ve cultivated from game development, I’m still not great at long form writing, voice-over, and video editing. So I think a blog is a better format for now. This way if I can just get my thoughts down as text it’s done. I don’t need to spend months packaging the text into a video format, I can just post it as written, and even edit it after it’s live!
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy!