Hi! I’m Lyn, but I mostly go by Strawdoll/Straw.

A general history of me is that I have been online since I was 7 and doing “computery” and “arty” stuff ever since.

A longer history: My career of the last 11 years has been Full Stack Web development but I originally got into coding because I wanted to make games, and have been a big indie game lover for a very long time. The Web Dev side tracked me a lot, but I had a few tries at making some games, never getting an actually playable thing out for people to play and give me feedback. I also worked on drawing and did some Live2D rigging and streaming on Twitch, as well as some 3D modeling in blender more recently.

Before Web Dev I was studying Graphic Design which was also the side tracked version of what I actually wanted to do - Illustration/the other kind of design. I also worked a year at Walt Disney World as a mascot character for a year, but that’s not super relevant here.

Somewhere weaved into the Graphic design and High School I found a place on Deviantart where I made some friends through digital illustration (anime style) and eventually Cosplay and Photography.

And around the end of Primary School to early high school before Deviantart I was making Pixel dolls, but I can’t seem to find any archived sites which is a bit of a shame!

Somewhere in the later end of my primary school I made the school’s website! I don’t think many adults at the school knew how to do it but somehow I offered to help and did a lot of the small site that it ended up being.

Before the school website, I was watching my dad play around with html and websites, and I learn to rip flash games off sites and display them on my own local pages, like a small collection. I was already playing stuff like Neopets and the Sims around or before this, and even before there was Mystic Towers and Museum Madness and Zork and other games that came on those Windows 98 samplers.

I guess the earliest things before this I can remember is drawing bad Sailor Moon drawings and Disney and sending it in to Saturday Disney hoping they’d show it on TV. And home karaoke with my family!

I enjoy a lot of different things and I will probably write about more than just Game Dev here. I’ll post mostly process entries - me writing as I figure stuff out, and then if I get good enough and people ask questions I will add tutorials.

Also, I’m married to Cooptayto, you can check out his blog on the Ultimate Indie program blog there too.