Bio

Hi,

My name is Nick Rawcliffe. I’ve been making games now for I don’t remember how long, but it’s been well over a decade at this point.

I’m mostly self-taught. I say “mostly” because I have a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in music tech where I did learn some basic programming. However, I do not have a computer science degree or any game dev specific education. About a year into trying to figure out game dev on my own, I ended up doing it professionally at a company for a few years.

There, I made games for Steam, mobile platforms, and web browsers. I have finished and shipped multiple game dev projects.

However, I was made redundant from that company years ago and made the choice to stay independent ever since.

So, most of my career I have been working solo on various projects.

Professionally, on most of the stuff I worked on, I was the sole programmer, lead designer, and sole composer and sound designer.

Since the beginning, I have mostly focused on making 2D pixel art games with a heavy specialization in procedurally generated games.

It’s always just been what interested me most. For the longest time, the only aspect of making games I didn’t really do was pixel art. This really made it difficult to make anything I was comfortable releasing as a solo dev.

However, more recently I have been working on improving my pixel art, and I am now officially hard at work on a game where I am making everything completely solo, including the pixel art, and I am loving the process.

Before discovering my love for game dev, my background was in music and music production, so I am also very passionate about doing all the music and sound design for my games too.

The current game I am working on is called Earthen Heart. It is essentially a roguelike village builder, somewhere between Dwarf Fortress and Stardew Valley. I am making the game completely in C, and the graphics are inspired by the Game Boy Color.

Earthen Heart is what I spend most of my time making when I am doing dev stuff. However, I enjoy doing the occasional game jam, dev challenge, or side project, and I recently made my first Neovim plugin.

Oh yeah, I don’t really do dev stuff totally full time anymore. A few years ago, I started working on my gaming YouTube channel full time, and it’s been going pretty well.

I split my time pretty evenly between working on dev stuff and my YouTube channel.

Ok now I think that’s it.