BRANDON McCARTIN
INDEPENDENT GAME INVENTOR
THIS SITE is somewhere between placeholder and the real thing.
GREETINGS!
My name is Brandon McCartin. I independently create video games and music and art and other wonderful things. You may know me online as BMcC, which is pronounced "bee mick see" -- a nickname my grandmother gave me so I wouldn't have to initial "BM" in primary school.
I live in Charm City with my French wife, who is French. We had a cat, but he didn't come home one night. I'm an Irish-American dropout, Capricorn, twentyish, squarely INTJ, and painfully manic-depressive. Sometimes I'm out there to win, but more often I'm smoking cigarettes in the bathtub.
Already this is more than I'm typically comfortable disclosing!
MY GAMES LABEL is GLASS ONION, which is nice sounding, appropriately ambiguous, and an indie games community in-joke (far more than a Beatles reference). I've made games since forever, but kept them to myself till just a few years ago, with my first "real" game playable on a PC at no older than age six. The Secret of Monkey Island taught me to read. No kidding!
YOU CAN AND SHOULD FOLLOW ME and my adventures day-to-day on Twitter, which is practically the only way I communicate anymore. The internet stresses me out.
SOME THINGS I HAVE WORKED ON
include the IGF Grand Prize-winning game Aquaria and the excellent ongoing TIGSource community project Balding's Quest: The Quest of Guy Balding (which is due a revival). I've since proudly served as an IGF Judge. I am also the lone Senior Editor at TIGSource, getting gradually better at fitting writing into this absurd schedule of mine. Oh, and I've got a couple tracks on the Aquaria OST! Though they pale in comparison to the bulk of that great record.
I AM CURRENTLY MAKING some pretty wild games with German ber Artist Ptoing, ranging from small to large, which will be revealed in due time. I'm also doing the sound for soon-to-be-smash-hit Fez, bound for XBLA, which has been hard work, but majorly rewarding. Apart from this, I help out other indie game developers here and there, record the occasional song, draw the occasional drawing, and attempt to absorb as much art/media/knowledge as possible. (And spend time with my lovely wife!) Sleeping is a low priority.
MY LATEST FULL SONG is Bit Depths -- a second attempt at a remix of the Open Waters theme from Aquaria (Traveler), this time mixed with the first public Fez track (ONE). I'd intended to make more of a mashup, really blurring the line between the two, but it ended up, like, 90% the original music, only built around Fezzy sounds. Anyway, I rarely do chiptunes, but I'm quite happy with this! Getting more comfortable with waveforms every day.
NOTE: Disasterpeace is doing the music for Fez now, which renders this remix a bit obsolete. I still dig it, though!
MY LATEST PRESS,
if you can call it that, is being featured on TIGRadio. I got so nervous before this interview I could barely walk. I'm worried I come off as a jerk here, since my sense of humor is a bit dry, but still, it went better than expected. And it was a true honor joining the ranks of such illustrious guests (plus Gorby Timpson)! Over time I'll get more comfortable with this sort of thing. Maybe.
Some of the topics covered include what it was like behind-the-scenes on Aquaria, the origins of Puzz-Dog, managing all aspects of game development (catering excluded), engine building, delays between BQ updates, and the compulsion to create. Also, feral peacocks, preteen Lithuanian brides, anxiety medication, MDickie's Hard Time/love life, immigration law, eating mushrooms, being the King of Africa, and punking Gabe Newell with purple suspenders. But mostly we argued about physics-based gameplay. I did talk a bit about what I have done/am doing too, but... yeah.
IN THE RELATIVELY NEAR FUTURE expect a number of small games and experiments from me, as the engines I've been developing are just about mature, and working on huge stuff all the time can really drive a man (five hundred) bananas.
THE NEXT EVENT I'll be attending is... uncertain! At the very least I'll be making a low-key trip out west to see my bros (and lady bros).
THE TOOLS I USE MOST are FL Studio with a wealth of free plugins for sound, GIMP for visuals, MSVC for code, and Notepad++ for scripting (and this site). Allegro, SDL, and Lua are some of my favorite libs.
ONE LOVE, homies. If you truly read all this, God bless you.