I'm a big believer that in our late capitalist society, what we choose to buy is among the most important choices we make day to day.

Whether its choosing to fill a bottle at home rather than buy a plastic bottle of water, or paying more for that new hoodie cos you know it wasn't made by slaves, every decision is a tiny little vote for the world you want to live in.

This brings me to my small dilemma.

When I enjoy a game that's either free or very cheap, I often like to purchase something in-game to support the developers and this week I've enjoyed Apex Legends enough that I want to pay a little something for it.

However, I hate random drop loot boxes and I can't bring myself to buy them. I consider loot boxes as a poisonous, predatory practice lifted straight out of the gambling industry and I see buying them as a vote FOR them. By buying them I'm helping the business case for having them in games in the first place.

So what to do? I've unfortunately concluded that I won't be sending any money Respawn's way until there's a way to do so that doesn't involve gambling.

Give me a store where I can buy characters, skins, quips, whatever... for straight up money and I'll buy 'em.

In April 2017 an idea for a game popped into my head. A snippet of gameplay, of a motorcycle in a dark, menacing city, trailing light behind it as it slid around a corner and accelerated down a street lined with blurring neon signs, came fully formed into my brain.

Having no experience of making games I wasn't really sure what to do with this information. On the one hand you hear all the time that making games is notoriously hard, takes a huge investment of time and money and requiring a large and diverse set of skills. My first thought was that maybe the way to approach it was to try and create some promotional materials and see about raising some money.

A little Photoshop work later and I had this first image:

and a title: Tokyo Light Cycle...

That was it to start with. A title, a picture, two seconds of gameplay in the form of an imaginary animated GIF and a plan to maybe somehow raise some money.

I chatted to a couple of friends who either work in games or CGI creation and they indirectly convinced me that maybe I should learn how to make it myself. I found a number of good articles (Google phrases like "getting started in game development" or "beginners guide to making games") and ended up downloading Unity and following their basic beginner tutorials.

With a few (maybe 10 - 20) hours work I wrote my first chunk of my own code and with some super basic geometry, created a little box and a bike to drive around it.

I was hooked...