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When a gardener is a game developer in his free time

Tomas McGrath is an interesting guy. By day, he is a gardener in his native Sweden, but he also has a secret identity. By night, Tomas is known as IndieDeveloper, a pseudonym he has used for the last 8 years of his career as a developer.

Indie has worked on a wide variety of projects, and recently moved towards game development. When I asked him how he got into programming, he replied that he always liked building things, so game development was the perfect hobby. His first game is called “The Dungeon Looter” which is a 2d game in Java using LigGBK.

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He later started working on Mr Moustache, which was based on an idea that came to him early one morning. Of course, programming games is not easy, but when he gets stuck on a particularly difficult bug, he often looks to his Livecoding.tv audience to help him figure it out.

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Like almost every game developer, he also strives to be a perfectionist in his work, although he has lots of ongoing projects which he switches between. So far he has added 4 levels for Mr. Mustache, and has a well designed inventory system for the Dungeon Looter. In addition to writing code, he is an artist, so he does all the artwork for his games himself.

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You can find Tomas working on his games on Livecoding.tv, and we would encourage you to follow his progress here: https://www.livecoding.tv/indiedeveloper/.

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About author

I, Dr. Michael J. Garbade is the co-founder of the Education Ecosystem (aka LiveEdu), ex-Amazon, GE, Rebate Networks, Y-combinator. Python, Django, and DevOps Engineer. Serial Entrepreneur. Experienced in raising venture funding. I speak English and German as mother tongues. I have a Masters in Business Administration and Physics, and a Ph.D. in Venture Capital Financing. Currently, I am the Project Lead on the community project -Nationalcoronalvirus Hotline I write subject matter expert technical and business articles in leading blogs like Opensource.com, Dzone.com, Cybrary, Businessinsider, Entrepreneur.com, TechinAsia, Coindesk, and Cointelegraph. I am a frequent speaker and panelist at tech and blockchain conferences around the globe. I serve as a start-up mentor at Axel Springer Accelerator, NY Edtech Accelerator, Seedstars, and Learnlaunch Accelerator. I love hackathons and often serve as a technical judge on hackathon panels.