Protodroid Delta's journey from Mega Man fan game to Humble-published title
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Today marks the awaited release of indie title Protodroid Delta, a 3D action-platformer from solo dev Adam Kareem.
Game development is never an easy endeavour to start with, but Kareem went through it on Hard Mode, as a hobbyist developer who had to balance his dream project with a full-time job and raising kids.
"I’m a bit of a poser, you could say, because I don’t have any background in games formally," Kareem smiles. "I was studying mechanical engineering in school, and I work full-time in tech, doing hardware engineering type stuff, but I picked up games as a hobby, just because I saw games like Sonic Adventure, Mega Man X, things that I loved as a kid.
"I always felt like there would be some cool ways to improve on them. And so, I decided as a hobby to tinker with, 'Hey, maybe I can make a Sonic that controls really well in 3D', because I felt like Sonic Adventure wasn’t really doing all that."
Kareem also says that he "always hoped that Mega Man would make the jump to 3D," which is what led him to develop fan games for a couple of years from early 2018, during his winter break.
"A friend of mine told me about game engines, what Unreal was, and that’s when I started taking online classes, and just diving headfirst into YouTube. Let me tell you, not just because I work at Google, YouTube is great," he laughs, referring to his day job as a product design engineer at the tech giant.
"It’s just as easy as that, I took advantage of that. Really great YouTube channels like Matthew Wadstein’s channel, and Virtus Learning Hub, and Ryan Laley… Just folks who, out of the goodness of their hearts, are like, 'I’m going to teach some games dev
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