Ted Lim, 33yo (turning 34 next week!) here. I'm originally from Las Cruces, New Mexico, but I currently live in Flint, Michigan for school. Former elementary school teacher turned Electrical Engineering Technology student when being a teacher became too big of a financial burden.
My introduction to IF was a little unorthodox. As a kid, on a long car ride, I was becoming the typical overbearing "Are we there yet?" child. As an attempt to keep me occupied, my sister created a map and a story to go with it where I could go in different directions and different things would happen -- fight a group of pirates if I didn't have gold to give them, end up in a field of flowers that put me in an eternal sleep, that sort of thing. It was like a simplified version of Dungeons & Dragons, I suppose, minus the dice rolls. I also vaguely remember once playing some IF game on a Commodore 64 as a child, though I have absolutely no recollection of what game it was. All I remember is that as I was playing it, I was reminded of the game my sister played with me.
Fast forward to my last year as a teacher -- 2016. At the end of the day, after all our work was done, I would make maps and play this same game with my students. They loved it. The more I made, the more creative I got, incorporating concepts we'd learned in order for them to solve puzzles in the game. Then, I remembered that there were digital versions of these games (though I had absolutely no idea what they were called, so finding them was not easy at first). I tried playing some. I sucked. Even the easy ones like Lost Pig (which is quite possibly one of my favorite games to play, although it definitely contends with Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom). So I thought if I learned how to make them, maybe I could get better at playing them since I would then have a better understanding of how they work. I also thought it'd be neat to be able to create an educational game to send to my former students for them to play.
As I started learning how to write IF through Inform, I quickly discovered I actually enjoy writing the games just as much (if not more) as playing them. It's like I'm a god with the ability to create a whole world out of nothing -- that, and I just love creating things. I have two games out right now (both of which are buggy due to my limited programming skills): Just Another Day and A Cock and Bull Story, both of which can be found on the ifdb. I'm currently working on a third game, Journey to Slay the Gods, which is an adaptation of a book I wrote that I never had the courage to try and get published.
My ultimate goal is to finally write a successful and entertaining educational game to send back to my kiddos in Cruces.
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