Hi, my name in Shahmeer.
I just turned 18 a couple of days ago. During my 18 years on this planet, One can say, accomplished a lot as an individual, at least in my field. I love video games and especially making them.
Before I turned 18, I made over a dozen games for Android. Got asked by Microsoft to put those games on Windows Phone. Got a Windows Surface RT, Windows Phone and $1000 in advertisement money from Microsoft. Made a game for Steam, got Greenlit, and published the game. Got on national news for doing so. Got my second game Greenlit within 1 month after posting it. Got a deal with Xbox to get this game on their platform as well.
Here is how it all happened.
One summer, specifically the summer of when I was in 8th grade, I was discussing the future with my friend. We talked about where we wanted to go in life and what we wanted to do. As far as I can recall, he wanted to be a lawyer. However, for me, I had no clue. In school, I was known as the IT guy, the person who knew his way around computers and other tech stuff and can help others when they had issues. But that was about it. I didn't want to end up as an IT guy or in tech-support. I knew I wanted to be more. That's when I started to create my first game.
During 8th grade, I could model 3D figures, environments and animate a bit, this lead to my interest in game development. So I worked hard the entire summer and made my first game, The Lost Town, to this date I have left it there so I can remember what I had made.
It can be found here, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.IneedPlay.TheLostTown&hl=en
It was a simple walking simulator that completely changed my life, even though to this day it only has 50,000 downloads.
However, this was the start of my journey.
I kept making more walking simulators, and I touched about 3-4 games that were walking simulators and even built a small fan base on Facebook. Then, a comment completely changed my life.
It was something like "Stop making walking simulators, make horror games." And that is when I decided to make my first horror game.
The game received a lot of traction and was well appreciated by many people.
I realized that he was right. Horror games are the future for me.
And this is where I made my first breakthrough. I realized a trend, something within horror that could have been easily turned into a game. I found out that there was this site called "Creepy Pasta" and it had a relatively large follower base. So I made one of the most popular Creepy Pasta into a game, the game is called "Jeff the Killer".
This game got over 100,000 in a few weeks, and this was shocking as my other game had still to touch the 1,000 mark in a few months. The game was getting an insane amount of downloads and that is when I knew, horror games are my future.
I no longer own the game because I sold it to an investment firm which allowed me to begin the second part of my journey.