ABOUT
My name is Charles, otherwise known by my online alias "stixc" (pronounced "sticks"). I am a 23 year old game developer, musician/sound designer and graphic artist 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!
BIOGRAPHY:
I was born in Memphis, TN, USA on October 23rd 2001. I was initially diagnosed 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 progressed, many of those elements diminished, such as being non-verbal. I was later re-diagnosed with high-functioning autism (or Asperger's Syndrome) a couple years afterwards.I've wanted to become a game developer ever since I began playing games as a toddler. The very first game I played was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64, and it left a huge impression on me and sparked my deep interest in video games over other mediums. Though I also had interest in other things, such as art/cartoons, music and technology/IT, making games seemed to be the medium that suit me future wise. In the late 2000s I started learning programming through websites like Scratch, then later I dabbled in HTML and Python with mixed results. Alongside coding I explored game modding, tinkering with games like Blockland, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Doom, and Quake. I experimented with engines like Game Maker, Stencyl, Multimedia Fusion, and Unity as well at a young age.Despite my interest, coding always intimidated me—likely due to my ADHD or something else. And to this day, coding remains my Achilles' heel. As a kid and tween, my game development efforts mostly involved sketching ideas, doodling characters, and writing concepts, whilst hoping my adult self would someday accept how game development works proper.But in the meantime in the early 2010s, like many gen Z kids of my generation, I was in the process of making dubstep music. From 2012 onward, I taught myself music production and sound design, and some time by 2018 I was officially releasing music as Digiwire. While I now find dubstep somewhat cringey and annoying, I still feel proud of what I achieved and the skills I developed in music and sound design. During this time (2012-2016) I also created YouTube videos, including machinima in Blockland and Garry's Mod, alongside general life stuff. However looking back and recalling from memory, they're pretty cringey and naive and I'm sort of glad they're lost media. I can be sentimental about many things, but my old videos aren’t one of them.Afterwards the COVID-19 pandemic hit, giving me a chance to dive back into game development. I downloaded Unreal Engine and started learning the Blueprints system for it's ease of use. This marked the beginning of my hobby project CyberAnima and the end of my music "career" as Digiwire. After a year of working in Unreal I switched to Godot due to its lightweight nature, which was perfect for CyberAnima. This is because it allows me to authentically replicate the PS2/GameCube era graphics, a challenge I found tricky to tackle with Unreal.As of 2024, I’m still working on CyberAnima. However, mental roadblocks, personal issues, and other life challenges have slowed down development. Despite the issues, I remain committed to finishing CyberAnima. Though life has been brutal in some areas, I haven’t given up on what I love the most. But once it's done and it's released, then I will party hard for getting this far.
TOOLS OF THE TRADE:
This is what I'm using to create CyberAnima:
• Godot Engine 4
• VSCodium
• Ableton Live 12
• Adobe Photoshop
• Blender
• TopoGun
• TrenchBroom
• MediBang Paint ProIn terms of the plugins used in Ableton for CyberAnima's soundtrack, I use synths such as:
• Roland XV-5080 + JD-800
• KORG Triton + Wavestation
• Spectrasonics Omnisphere + Stylus RMX
• theusualsuspects Xenia (Waldorf MicroWave XT emulation)
• E-MU Emulator X (with Proteus 2000, Xtreme Lead-1 and Orbit-3 banks)
• AudioRealism ABL3
• Native Instruments Massive
• Reveal Sound Spire
• xFer SerumAnd alongside that I use effects from iZotope, Native Instruments, MeldaProduction, kiloHearts, Softube, Valhalla DSP, Camel Audio, Togu Audio Line, and various free/open source plugins out there on the internet.And most of CyberAnima's soundtrack utilizes 90's/early 2000s era samples from the likes of Zero-G, Spectrasonics, AMG, Sonic Foundry/Sony, IK Multimedia, Rarefaction, Big Fish Audio, Best Service, e-Lab and ILIO.
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've been coding some prototype concepts and throwing ideas around for this game since the pandemic started, and currently the game is on hold for a variety of personal reasons. 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