About SkaterDee Games:

How does one go about explaining a lifetime of failure to become a gamedev? I began with MS BASIC on my family's Tandy (Radio Shack) computer, copying programs out of a "BASIC Computer Games" compendium. But nothing stuck. I didn't learn how to make a game, I just got really good at copying text from a book into a computer and running it.

After that, I moved onto QBasic in the late-90s. I learned a little bit about coding graphics and making a text-based adventure game, but again, I just didn't get very far.

Next came college, building websites and content-management systems using PHP and MySQL, attempting to learn C++, Java, JavaScript, etc. I could make a functional web thing or practical database application, but whatever it was about games just kept slipping through my fingers. How do I get these sprites to move? Animate? Shoot projectiles at other sprites? Build maps and worlds? I felt really stupid for a long time. I gave up. Decades passed. And then I discovered Pico 8 and Lazy Game Dev's Academy.

2024: for a good, solid month, I hyper-focused on everything Christian had to say in his Lazy Dev's videos. How to make a sprite in Pico 8, how to make them move, animate, shoot bullets, level building, collision detection, music, etc. After a few weeks of that, at last, I finally felt confident enough to try coding without training-wheels. Time to get out of "tutorial hell" and build something on my own. It was a struggle, at first, but amazingly, the concepts clicked. Something stuck! I actually began to understand how the code worked! After another month, I had successfully rebuilt one of my favorite Atari 2600 games, Haunted House, in Pico 8, releasing it in August of that year.

October 30, 2024: Mischief Night, a Pico 8 shooter game in the style of Operation: Wolf is released.

December 1, 2024: I released Snowball Commando for Pico 8, lightly based on the arcade game Commando.

August 12, 2025: my first game jam entry, ReBound, is released for Pico 8. It ranked #66 overall, with an average score of 3.1 stars (out of 5). (Highest rank was #47 for gameplay. People found it interesting and oddly addictive.)

November 17, 2025: Dark Stalker, a Pico 8 remake of the Atari 2600 game Dark Caverns (which is a port of the Intellivision game, Night Stalker).

December 23, 2025: Santa Dash, a fun, Christmas-themed maze game running in Pico 8.

March 10 (MARIO DAY!), 2026: 5-Minute Dungeon A short, turn-based RPG running in Love2D. My first project actually released using Love2D!