G’day, and welcome to the blog of Tickle Monster, a game development company based in Melbourne.
Well, when I say a “company”, I mean it’s just me, Paul Montgomery, as a sole trader. At this stage. I have big ideas for the future.
My background is an Australian country boy from rural Victoria, with three choices when I graduated from high school: accounting, computers or journalism. I initially chose the first of those, but didn’t make it. I then chose the third, albeit specialising in technology, spending five years in Sydney as a business magazine journalist during the first dot com boom in the second half of the 1990s. After the bust happened and thousands of people like me lost their jobs, I came back home to Victoria and tried to figure out what to do next. Freelance journalism wasn’t suited to my work ethic, and after some lean years eventually I founded a Web site called FanFooty, liveblogging Australian rules football matches for people playing fantasy sports competitions. I ended up doing all of the Web development and back-end server wrangling myself, learning valuable lessons about coding high-traffic sites with live AJAX updating long before the advent of the cloud. That began way back in 2004, and I am still doing that as my day job nearly two decades later.
FanFooty is a fine business and has given me a lot in my life, but the fantasy sports industry of which it is a part does not have any growth left. I started looking a few years ago for a different project to serve the same sports-loving audience. I always had computer games as my primary hobby, and now saw an opportunity to extend my amateur programming skills from HTML4 to HTML5 to make my own game.
Phaser as the framework for my game was an easy choice for an old JavaScript hacker who never had object-oriented programming taught to him. I also went with Firebase as the back end, not wanting to manage my own servers with custom code like the bad old days. Over the past year, Midjourney has also been a key part of the game development process as I have not been able to afford investment in original art assets. More on all of that later in this dev blog, of course.
What is a Tickle Monster, and what does it look like? Only my kids know, they thought of the name.
The first game I have been working on is called Mr Football, which I will introduce in the next post.