1996 was a great year, wasn't it? Great music, good movies... and Klik&Play. I still remember being a budding 14 year old, religiously obsessed with video games. It wasn't long before my interest turned into creativity when I discovered a copy of Klik&Play laying around at a friends place. His father was a computer programmer, and desperately wanted his son to take interest in the hobby as well. Unfortunately, his son was far more interested in guns and cars than anything computer-related. It didn't take much to talk my bud into giving me his boxed copy.

Walking my way back home, I couldn't help but open the software box and scour the included manual. When I got home, I installed that sucker on my IBM Aptiva from the three floppy discs included. My first project was retarded to say the least. A Winnie the Pooh game which equipped the antagonist with a gun and allowed them to play through the 100-acre wood, shooting at all of the forest-dwelling creatures. I'm embarrassed even mentioning it.

It wasn't until the latter part of 1997 that I discovered other Klik&Play users through "[url="http://web.archive.org/web/19971012170832/www.tne.net/silky/index.html"]The Wall[/url]" that linked to a Dalnet-based IRC chat called #K&P. The users were normally friendly (although, a few of them were kinda douchy *cough*Kraas*cough* (I kid, Kraas. I don't want my account deleted).

Between bouts of talking about video games, internet rofflez, and life in general, I learned a lot from the other game makers, and in turn, created much more viable and entertaining "demo ware".

Eventually, The Games Factory hit the scene, and because it seemed quite different from it's predecessor (and since things were getting a little too official in #K&P for my liking), I created #TGF. #TGF became the new #K&P without all of the strict guidelines and rules, but unfortunately, #TGF was rather short-lived.

Some number of months later (I'd assume late 200 Dalnet ran into some server issues and downtime became a prolonged problem. At the time, I had already created a few AOPs in #TGF on Dalnet and really didn't jump into conversation very often, so I was probably one of the last to know that #K&P and the whole of the IRC-based Klik community had moved to Blitzed.

By the time I logged onto Blitzed, someone had already registered #TGF and every intention I had to keep #TGF an open-forum to people who wished to freely express themselves without bounds had been shattered. It wasn't long before the new #TGF operator began imposing the exact same rules held in #K&P. With that, attendance dropped. Some members moved onto other channels. Some stopped using IRC entirely... so did I.

Without a single full game release, I practically fell out of the community and began using whatever talent I might have had toward other venues. Photoshop, audio production, video editing, desktop publishing, web design, hardware, and limited programming. I became a bit of a "jack of all trades" as far as computers are concerned.

Moving from The Games Factory to Multimedia Fusion was a challenge for me. I couldn't get used to the new UI design, and the graphics editor was so alien that I simply didn't bother with it. I still continued making limited apps, installers, and utilities in The Games Factory, but the few examples I uploaded fell upon deaf ears. Very few people were still using The Games Factory, and I was being ridiculed for not updating.

Then came my idea for kliker.com. Kliker.com was a game website which reviewed commercial games, but focused on home brew games and apps coming out of the klik community. Finding editors was a chore, and some of them couldn't write in English very well. The mix of poor-quality editorials and reviews along with the lack in marketing eventually lead me to completely change the format of kliker.com, eventually becoming a streaming klik community audio showcase.

Eventually, I shut that down too. I was running into issues where people were logging on and literally stealing music samples for use in their own games without permission. Keep in mind that we're still talking early 1999 here. Flash was around, but I didn't know how to use it to protect streaming audio.

I became sick of the hassle, tired of the lack of helpful community, sick of all the fanboy fangame creators flooding the community and felt that I was done aspiring to be a game creator in a job market that didn't value coders.

Every once in a while, I returned here, to #K&P, and to Clickteam's forums just to see if anything had improved and get back in touch with some of the old-school compatriots. Unfortunately, what I'd found is that many of the originals had moved onto other game makers and actual programming languages and simply didn't hold any kind of interest in Clickteam products any more.

I already had my hands full with photoshop and website design, so I'd say my piece and leave, popping in again every six months or so just to say hello.

Fast-forwarding a bit, I've purchased MMF2, and I do use it from time to time. I have a few game releases planned, but none of them are anywhere near demo or preview state. I don't have a time-line, and I only work on them when I don't have anything better to do. Juggling work, a girl friend, web design, vlogging, and the plethora of other PC projects I seem to take on and dump half-way through, I can't imagine finishing any of my MMF2 projects in the foreseeable future, especially since I seem to like to scrap full engines and rebuild projects from the ground up a second, third, or fourth time to add new features.

I'm no longer a part of the "community" because as far as I see it, there's really not much of a community left. #K&P and #TGF are always empty, Clickteam doesn't seem to want much of anything to do with their community, and sites like the Daily-Click are great for showcasing works and receiving feedback, but not so awesome if you're looking for a friend or two with the same interests.

My ventures into game creation are for fraught. I partially blame myself for not being more serious. Had I focused on creating simple games, I could be selling them and turning a good deal of profit at my age, but I'm just too old to be messing with any of that now. My interest waned when the support community and my circle of fellow klik-buds fizzled out.

Forget about your skill, your interest, or any of your other motivations. If there's one very valid and solid tip I can give any of you that will keep you from becoming me in a few years, it's that you need to make friends within the community and keep them around no matter how pathetic or lose your ties are to them. Without them, everything else is going to slowly fall apart.