The Games I've Built Have Opened Doors

When I was 17 I built a game that ranked 24th on a global leaderboard.

At 23 I built a game that won me 500 bucks in a competition.

At the age of 26, I built a game that I used to propose to my wife.

But before I got to any of those achievements, I started in my basement, building a flash game at the age of 9 with my dad.

(If you have no idea what a flash game is, then you didn’t grow up in my generation.)

That simple button was my first introduction to programming.

I remember sitting to the right of my dad, watching him mess with a button on the screen until we got it to play some kind of animation.

And I’ll tell you right now: I didn’t get it.

Nothing he did made sense, but the massive door of programming had been opened, and pandoras box of gaming had been released: I was hooked.

At the age of 11 my dad bought me a mac mini and I was able to start programming mobile apps.

Looking at sample code of Objective C was beyond confusing, and it wasn’t until I got a programming teacher in high school (praise the Lord) that my progress went into overdrive.

The moment I learned how to write my first lines of code, I was building games.

The first game I built was using Visual Basic. It featured a nice blue square that moved when I pressed A, W, S, or D, on my keyboard. Then I implemented walls and chasms of death for my blue box. It was amazing.

From there I made tic tac toe and my friend found a bug with it.

Then I decided it was time to up my game (no pun intended), and at the end of my 14th year of life I began building my own physics engine for a tank game. I was basing the game off of the Wii tank game that I loved. See the picture below:

I needed walls, enemies, and I wanted to make it multiplayer.

After a year, I had built a functioning game:

• You couldn’t drive through walls (win!)

• Maps were randomly generated

• Powerups were a thing

• There were enemies that chased you and defended themselves

• Bullets bounced off of walls

I had done it! I had built a game from scratch.

During this time I also worked on a game called Temple Siege 2.

I worked with random people on the internet to revitalize an older game and take it to a new platform. Looking back, I remember the stigma against meeting (and working with) people on the internet. Obviously this had no effect on me, I did it anyways.

Temple Siege 2 game reached 24th in world on the platform!

When I got to college at 18, I convinced all of my roommates to play it with me.

At the age of 18, playing my game with others, and hearing them screaming at each other (lovingly) was the most fun thing I’d ever experienced to that point in my life.

While I was at college, I met a series of other individuals that I convinced to build games with me.

With my brother and a couple of friends I built a game called Strobie, based off an old physical game my mom would play under her Christmas tree with her brothers.

Basically, it’s a digital version of hot potato with some fun sounds.

We got our hands on the physical game and recorded all of the sounds. Then we built out the game on iPad so everyone could sit in a circle and play. Lastly we implemented bluetooth functionality so people could play using their phones!

It was so fetching awesome.

I still have the game on my phone (though since no one else has it, it doesn’t work haha):

While building Strobie I learned an entirely new language called Swift.

Swift let me build games for iOS, and with my newfound knowledge I decided to build a retro game called Smashii. After a couple of months of effort, I had a working prototype. However, I ended up leaving for France for two years on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

I did not build any games on my mission, but when I got back I was revving to go.

Heading back to college at the age of 21, Smashii was completed after I dedicated my Friday nights to completing it. It was the first game I had ever published on the Apple app store.

Little did I know, the game would be so valuable:

• I figured out how to run Facebook ads to it (though they didn’t make me any money, I knew how to do it)

• It let me skip college programming classes. The first programming class I had attended in college had been beyond useless to me. I used Smashii as a “check this out, let me skip your class” card.

• It taught me Swift, a language I would use heavily in the future.

After looking through the catalogue of classes, I found the one I actually cared about and reached out to the professor, sharing the game with them.

The professor responded and said “Sure, you can skip the class. Also, do you want a job?”

Going into his office for the interview was a life changing moment for me: The things I built were my resume. I could get a job anywhere if I proved I could build things people wanted.

In that office my professor presented the idea of “Purposeful Gaming” to me. I had a similar idea: Games that intentionally taught you life skills. We hit it off immediately, and he hired me as a developer for a project he was working on called DOTKey, or the Death of The Keyboard.

DOTKey was a novel approach to a typing that functioned on touchscreens without requiring any sight from the user. Just look at what you’re typing. The “keyboard” calibrates to you as you type.

My job was to build a game that taught people how to use it.

I immediately got to work, creating an initial prototype using Swift the very next day.

Over the coming months, we built a fun game based on hill billies that are defending their campsite from monsters that are trying to steal their underwear.

My professor and I would go on to build a team of people that built multiple projects, each in pursuit of this idea of Purposeful Gaming.

As software developers, the first thing we wanted to do was build a game that taught people how to read and write code. So we built the Purposeful Gaming Framework. This tool was designed to let people reprogram elements in a game in real time!

The first game we built with it was a Minecraft mod that let you change how much damage you could deal. I was able to kill the Ender Dragon in one punch after setting my damage to 10,000.

The second game we built was called Sentinel. It was based on the idea that you had robots that functioned like a computer (CPU), and you could attach different things to them:

• Eyes

• Treads or wheels

• Weapons

• Etc.

I was incredibly proud of this game! And it still works! I can show it to anyone anytime!

When you first get in, your robot doesn’t do anything. You have to program it to accept your input, and pass the input to the appropriate piece (like the treads to turn or move forward).

It was so much fun to build this!

One of my friends (who is not a programmer) was able to use it to teach herself how functions work, and then get her robot (Fred) to the end of the maze! That was such a fun experience for me.

The next game we built with the PGFramework was Degrammable. A tower defense game where you’d program your towers to attack incoming enemies. We didn’t get very far on this one, but it was still incredibly fun to build it!

The last game we built was the pique of the PGFramework career: VRoom.

VRoom was a virtual classroom designed for computer science professors who wanted to teach their kids how to program in class.

Students could spawn in virtual robots (similar to the sentinel) that they could reprogram.

We ran a competition to see who could build a robot and have it navigate a maze the fastest. The game could be played in VR or on a PC. It was fully multiplayer, and students could be grouped together into cohorts. The teacher could spawn in websites and share them, or have a whiteboard that they could write on.

Honestly, it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever had the pleasure to build. I lead the team that brought it all together. Scaling it up from just Frank (my professor) and I to a team of 6 people working to build it out.

In 2020, when the world went into lockdown and everyone moved to zoom, we used VRoom to run a classroom of 40 intro to Computer Science students.

2 years after the class, students were still talking about it on reddit.

After struggling to find investors and users, we had to close the project and move on. This is still something I’d love to return to, especially with the advent of AI.

During this time I also built Cosmos with my roommate and my brother Rosson (and make 500 dollars in a competition). My roommate (and best friend to this day) and I had to figure out some graph theory for this game to function. It was probably the most data intensive thing I ever built. It was awesome. I plan on finishing this one, as another one of my best friends wrote music for the game, but passed away. In memory of him, I will complete it.

Almost everything I did during college was video game focused. And not just that, it was focused on games that taught or brought people together. They either taught me something new (real time networks, graph theory, voice calls, screen sharing, etc.) or they were built to teach someone else something, like programming or they brought people together, like VRoom.

All of it was fun.

Then I graduated from college and the company I had started with my professor, Play2Learn, wound down.

After this, building games took a little bit of a back seat as I started a company with my brother, LZTEK.

We still dabbled in games, but nothing was serious.

That is until I met my future wife and she tells me this:

When she told me this, I knew she was the one for me (MBA is Master of Business Associations; MEAE is Master of Entertainment Arts and Engineering, or game development, literally my two favorite things).

After dating her for 4 months, I decided to propose with a video game.

My brother, and my coworkers at LZTEK came together to build an entire game for my wife in 3 days:

• One coworker, Jared Coleman, put together an AMAZING soundtrack for it (Inspired by the Halo 3 soundtrack).

• Another coworker built the enemy

• My brother put together multiple scenes for me

• I built the game logic, specific items (like the in-game ring), and animations

I didn’t sleep very much over those 3 days. On the last day, I didn’t sleep at all. But I loved every second of it. It was the shortest all nighter of my life. I was a man on a mission!

I recorded the entire proposal as well. You can watch it here (I got permission from my wife to share it):

It was such a cool experience.

Then for my bachelor party, all of my friends got together and we built a game called Bug of War. A game where your phone is the controller and you’re directing an ant on a TV screen, dragging fruit back to your ant hill.

We got a functioning version in 24 hours. It was absolutely amazing haha!

Now, over the past 2 years, I’ve worked on two games:

1. DadBod and

2. PlayBook

There have been two common threads to all of the games I have built (and played):

1. They brought people together or

2. They taught people something

Ideally, the best games do both! That’s the idea of purposeful gaming!

That’s the idea of DadBod! While DadBod has experienced multiple iterations on it’s gameplay, I have always focused on fun, instruction, and bringing people together in a way that builds experiences.

It’s also the goal of PlayBook: to turn books into memorable experiences to people can learn more easily. This will definitely be a useful tool for teaching others amazing things.

Writing about my history of building games has been enlightening and invigorating.

It made me realize two things:

1. I have built a TON of games, and had a LOT of fun each time I did it

2. I need to double down on my opportunities to build games, especially with other people

Building games for me is an obsession that teaches me, and brings the best people into my life.

And with the advent of AI, it only gets that much more awesome to build games that teach others real life skills, and bring them together.

For example, DadBod uses AI to generate Python based questions for the player so they can learn Python while they play!

Looking forward to the future!

Your friend,
Sterling Long!

P.S. I know this was long, and different than my normal AI centric post. I’m in a constant state of evolution. This post came to me as I sat in church this morning. God started reminding me of all of the games I’ve built throughout my life, and I decided it was time to organize all of them (if only for myself). I hope you’ve the story just as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it.