Lente's Game Dev Journey | Part 2 ⛵ @LenteGameDev #GameDev #IndieGame

Following our last peak into Lente's Game Dev journey we thought it might be a good idea to follow it up with some more detail with a peek into Lente's extremely interesting life so far. 

This is an excerpt from Lente's Newsletter that we found very interesting and hopefully you will too.

You can sign up for the Newsletter HERE

I'm Lente, that means 'Spring' in Dutch :) I'm 23 years old and live in The Netherlands. If you're more of a podcast type of person, I was on one!  I grew up here, on a ship that my parents bought in 1995.

This spot is what we called the 'Zomerplek' or 'Summer spot'. This is because for winter, we would move to the harbor in town centre.  It was in the middle of nature. For electricity, we had a generator on land that we would turn on whenever we needed it. These moments were also when me and me brother could play on the laptop. We would play CD-ROM games, or flash games. For drinking water, we had these Bar-le-Duc cartons that we would fill up at the marina on the opposite side of the river. For all of our other water: for doing the dishes or taking showers, I believe we had a filtration system, to take water from the river! I had an amazing time here as a kid. I played outside a TON. To go to school, or anywhere really, we had smaller boats to cross the river and get into town :) I lived here until around 2009/2010 (I was 9/10 years old). Unfortunately, the town municipality forced us away from this spot. My parents started a long lasting lawsuit that they won after 5 years.  For them, it wasn't easy, financially. Fortunately as a kid I didn't notice much from this. Although I do still miss that old spot in nature to this day. The municipality had to give us a new spot somewhere else, and things have been better since :) It was here where I started getting into Game Development. At the age of ~15, around 2015 :) I started out with making little clicker games in Python, and later in HTML and JavaScript.

Not long after, around 2016, my brother and I made this 2D game in Unity about a teddy bear named 'Bert' that we found in a vacation rental in Belgium :) My brother did the art, and I did the programming! Sometime after, in 2017, I made a bigger project. This time for mobile! I seemed to have a thing for clicker games at this time ;P I actually released this game on the Google Play Store, and managed to get around $60 in ad revenue! that was really cool :) Bert 2! a sequel to the first Bert game, made in 2018. Me and my brother started working on this when we were in the same rental house, a year later! My brother did the 3D art :) Some other games I made after Bert 2 the following years: I tried going to college for game dev multiple times, but it just isn't suited for me. I have since decided to start my own business of making games and art :) It's quite exciting, and I'm happy something clicked in me: that I could achieve anything I want, if I really put my mind to it.   This is around when I got my own boat!  She needed a lot of work, but she has a really solid base.  (She is 90 years old!) Since then, me and my mom have worked on it on the weekends. This is what she looks like now!  My goal is to eventually roam around with the boat and make games and art from wherever :) Current project   Currently I'm working on a game about cleaning up oil spills with a boat! It is called 'Spilled!' and has a free DEMO on Steam :) I recently made a Patreon :) This is where you can play early access dev builds of Spilled! Along with get getting the game for free on release and getting frequent behind the scenes updates & more! Patreon.com/Lente That's a short story of my life so far haha! Thank you for reading all the way through! It hasn't always been smooth sailing, but I'm excited for the future!   - Lente