Hello my name is Alex, and I am a game developer. If you've heard of me at all, then you probably know me as 'timetocode' from my devlog on tumblr. I am also the owner of timetocode LLC.

Back in 2011 I was working as a web developer, but I was always thinking of game development. The new year struck and I resolved to make a more serious effort towards game development. One day shortly after the new year I woke up and thought to myself, "It is time to code." I know that doesn't sound like much of a deep thought. Really it was just a way of saying, 'Hey no more excuses, start working right this instant!' I went to create a tumblr account as a devlog and typed my name as timetocode.

I immediately tried to make game development into a business. I tried to make little flash games with ads, and I also tried to make mobile games. I found myself losing steam on many projects, usually due to the sheer complexity associated with game programming. Being a web developer gave me some familiarity with programming, but games were different -- they grow and grow and all of their parts are interconnected. Without a very clever design a game is quickly crushed under its own weight. And how does one learn about these designs? By making more games, I suppose.

To stay true to my initial impulse I adopted a policy that new projects needed to be started very regularly. Everything became a learning exercise for something else. If I wanted to pursue an idea again then I wove a new iteration of the idea into a new project. Things seem to get half way decent by the third take.

The most interesting of these ideas is probably nengi.js -- a networking layer for games which can sometimes hit player counts in the hundreds. Nengi isn't going to work for every game, but when it does it can really add some power. I've been preparing nengi.js for release for quite some time. I shared an initial alpha to some clients 3 years ago now (wow...). It has come a long way. A newer version of nengi is what allows Sharkz.io to have ~150 players and ~550 ai entities all moving around. In certain simple games player counts of 300 or 400 are sometimes possible.

These days I spend my time working on nengi, and working on new multiplayer games.