stixc's site
ABOUT
My name is Charles, otherwise known by my online alias "stixc" (pronounced "sticks"). I am a 22 year old game developer from Memphis, TN working on my pet project CyberAnima, a retro cinematic action-adventure FPS inspired by Half-Life, Zelda, with a early 2000s PS2/GameCube era flare. (as of right now it's on hold)I suffer from high-functioning autism, ADHD, anxiety, and a variety of other mental problems, and as a result, I'm a very introverted, shy, yet zen kind of person. Aside from game dev, I also make music, previously making dubstep music as Digiwire before retiring in 2021 to focus on game development. I also like to draw, tinker with technology, but don't expect me to be a professional artist or IT technician any time.As of right now, I lack a job (never had one my life so far) and a driver's license/car due to personal issues, the pandemic, financial struggles and a bunch of other reasons causing these things taking forever to achieve. In the mean time, feel free to donate if you so choose!QUICK BIOGRAPHY:I was born in Memphis, TN, USA on October 23rd 2001. I was diagnosed initally with low functioning autism and ADHD at an early age, and for a while up until the mid to late 2000s, was non-verbal. However as time flew by, a lot of elements associated with it went away, such as being non-verbal, and I was later re-diagnosed with high-functioning autism (or Asperger's Syndrome).I wanted to become a game developer ever since I started playing games as a toddler. The very first video game I ever played was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64, and it left a huge impression on me, and made me very interested in video games as a whole compared to other mediums. Later in the late 2000s, I started using websites such as Scratch to learn programming in some capacity, and much later after that I tried to learn HTML and Python to mixed results. Alongside that, I also learned how to mod video games, such as Blockland, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Doom and Quake, and I tried tinkering with engines at a young age, such as Game Maker, Stencyl, Multimedia Fusion and Unity.Despite this, either due to my ADHD or some other reason, the concept of coding scared me as a kid & tween (and to this day, code is my main Achilles' heel for what I do), and most I ever did for game development was just come up with concepts on paper, doodling characters, and other things. I waited for the future where my adult brain would accept game development, but in the meantime in the early 2010s, like every zoomer kid out there, I wanted to make dubstep music. I spent the next couple of years after 2012 learning how to make music, sound design, and eventually started officially releasing music by the end of the 2010s as Digiwire. Though I find dubstep to be a super cringey genre in my opinion, I still feel a little proud of the music I made, and my journey in terms of music and sound design.After that, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and that gave me an opportunity to try game development again, with me downloading Unreal Engine to see what I could do with it's easy "Blueprints" system. This era marked the start of my hobby project "CyberAnima", and the end of the Digiwire project. I worked with Unreal for a year, before giving up in frustration and moving to Godot for it's lightweight nature, a requirement for CyberAnima as it is trying to replicate PS2/GameCube era graphics as authentic as possible, something that is kinda tricky to do with Unreal (in my opinion).As of 2024, I am still working on CyberAnima, but recent mental roadblocks, personal issues, and other things have caused me to slow down development in some regards. With me having no single job in my life, lacking the ability to drive, among other things; I've come to slow down a lot of things and hope for some kind of change. But never fear, CyberAnima isn't dead. CyberAnima will come out in the future. It's just time and nature have been brutal in some areas. But hey, once CyberAnima comes out, I will celebrate in the most idiosyncratic and stupidest way.
DONATIONS
I have a Ko-Fi page if you want to donate some dough towards me. Considering I don't have a job, driver's license, or anything of that matter right now, it would be nice if you'd donate. I don't care if it's just a couple cents or $100,000,000 for shiggles. Anything will work, as donations keep me alive in some capacity.
I make stuff!
Games
CyberAnima
retro 2000s action-adventure thriller FPS
(on hold, pet project)
CyberAnima is a retro neo-noir cinematic FPS akin to Half-Life, with some inspiration from other games like the Zelda series, Metal Gear Solid, Duke Nukem Forever (2001 beta), and so forth. It also takes inspiration from the early 2000s, in graphics, music, and story.I have been chipping away at this game since 2021, and is currently on hold since mid 2024 (and might restart development for various reasons due to codebase and other things being messy). I am still a novice developer with an ADHD infested mind and limited coding knowledge, but it will return in the future, I swear on my own oath and it will kick ass.NOT AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE/DOWNLOAD (game not done yet)
Gearhaed
third-person mech combat game
(scrapped November 2023)
Gearhaed was supposed to be a small scale mech game akin to MechWarrior 2 but with Armored Core/Ghost in the Shell PS1-esque combat, aiming for more of a mid-90s esque style with it's PS1/early MS-DOS 3D graphics. It was scrapped because I wanted it to be small scale and simple, but I got too ambitious with it and I scrapped it because of that.NOT AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD
Flatzone Maximus
Quake map, jam entry
(September 28th 2022)
Flatzone Maximus is my entry for the Quake Brutalist Jam, and is pretty much my first and only Quake map. I made it within 10 days for a two-week jam, and even though it has flaws, it was something I made for shiggles, for funsies, alongside the fact it was the first ever map I released publicly.
Stickfigurate
stupid hand drawn FPS
(scrapped Nov. 2021 to March 2022)
This was a simple FPS game I wanted to make just to make a quick buck or so, originally being developed within GZDoom, before switching to an easy peasy FPS editor someone made, before scrapping altogether because I didn't like how the game was turning out on a lot of levels. The game could return in name and art-style, but the gameplay will probably won't be like this.NOT AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD
PotatoQuest
outdated joke visual novel
(July 2017)
This game is a joke visual novel I made at a game dev camp at my local university in 2017 using RenPy. The game has tons of copyrighted assets and a bunch of outdated, cringey and crappy dialogue. As such, I will not be releasing this game.NOT AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD
alien^crasher
a Scratch FPS
(May 2017)
Around the 9th grade, I was working on a FPS in Scratch alongside another student in my programming class. The game, based on what I was doing, took inspiration from Doom, System Shock, and Deus Ex. But I never worked on it outside of the ray-casting engine, because why would I work on a FPS game using a children's programming language? Plus I was being super ambitious about it, with the engine not being designed for stuff like that, so it's incomplete indefinitely.NOT AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD
Music
Drones of Sleep, Insomnia and Strange
2022, ambient
At the end of 2022, I released the ambient album Drones of Sleep, Insomnia and Strange on Bandcamp. It is a compilation of ambient music I made from late 2019 till mid 2022 or so, mostly worked around the time when COVID hit. It is inspired by Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, alongside the works of Brian Eno and Biosphere. The purpose of the album is to help me sleep, being full of melodic drones and noises that are calming in my ears.
Other Music