Hello from Good Value Games.

As any coder does when learning a new language, first we say "Hello, world!"

In a way, a devlog is a new language, and blogging is an entirely new environment for me, let alone language. If you continue to visit, you'll see me learn in real time.

I'm SkotDude, the one and only employee of Good Value Games, an independent game developer from Australia.

My passion for game design goes back to 1994, playing games like the first Duke Nukem and Lemmings on PC, Gunstar Heroes and Streets of Rage on Sega Megadrive (known as Sega Genesis, elsewhere in the world). The industry was already well established, but it of course has grown much since then.

My interest continued, finding a love for all games, unwittingly studying the design, the stories, the art. Come the time for high school graduation I was dedicated to a life of being part of that world, having self taught myself the very basics of programming, and even making a lot of projects with the original Game Maker, none of which have survived in any form to this day.

So off I went to university to study game design, hopeful, yet naïve. Passionate about game design, but completely oblivious to the business of games. This was 2008, World of Warcraft was dominating the space, and they were much more overt in their design philosophies.

Addiction. They'd seen it in EverQuest(EverCrack), how do they refine that? How do they monetise that best? It seemed the entire industry was shifting, paid DLC, microtransactions, player psychologists, forming habits. Manipulating players was first, it was permeating every subject and I suppose that's how the world spins. You gotta make money after all, otherwise you can't make any games.

Morally I could not reconcile with this. I continue to struggle with it. Game design become a child's dream then, and my life took a very different path. I left university and I got a "normal" job. Retail, sales, management, etc. I worked hard building a career in pawnbroking, buying and selling and loaning. Game design was always there in my heart, but my time and focus was elsewhere. Business came first, and then came a family. With three kids and a wife, provisions must be made.

Along came the year 2020. I found myself without a job, and with health problems. Maybe I worked too hard, maybe I didn't work on my body hard enough, maybe it was something else, but in the end my back gave up on me, and so did my career.

The game industry has changed in the meantime, as all things do. What I consider morally loose practices still abound, but the indie scene has grown into something so much more.

So, here I am, with a promise to work towards delivering good value games, with good values.