A few years ago, I had a little blog online about games in honor of my late brother Mitchell. I'd been thinking about doing a similar thing again and decided to start this one. This one is called DavidHK's Thoughts about Play.

I don't know how long I will do this or how often it will necessarily be updated. I just know I'll put some thoughts of mine on here and maybe it will spark conversation and bring up some interesting thoughts of your own.

My name is David Klingler. I love Jesus. I love my wife. I'm a musician and have written about 300 pieces of music. I'm a gamer with many world records and tournament results across several different games. I'm a game developer, having created quite a few games in several genres in different toolsets for different platforms, including the first real-time music-driven game. I like helping other people to be able to make the things they think should be made and to be able to express themselves.

I started really playing games immediately upon playing Earthworm Jim Special Edition for the first time on August 16th, 1996, my brother's 8th birthday. I began playing the violin in November of 2000. In summer of 2006 I began focusing my violin playing on Scottish fiddle music. In the spring of 2010 I received a vision from God about what games should be as an expressive medium. In October of 2010 I won the Niel Gow Fiddle Award at the U.S. National Scottish Fiddling Championship and began in university for computer science two days later.

On December 17th, 2010, I finished a prototype for the engine for my first game at the Atlanta airport after three days of programming in a language I was learning along the way. In January 2011, I dove in headfirst into solo game development after ending up on medical leave from university. I officially founded Solanimus on September 16th, 2011. I was building up a team, creating new projects, eventually releasing Signal to Noise, the first real-time music-driven game, on November 20th, 2015. It was a terribly botched launch. On February 13th, 2016, I lost my brother Mitchell to suicide. On March 21st, 2019, while at the Game Developers Conference in California, I decided to quit the game industry.

Obviously, I didn't quit. On this blog I'll talk about the way I think about games, what's going on in the game industry and how it fits into the rest of what's going on, what I think is on the way for games as a medium of expression, what I'm working on, what I'm playing, and why I didn't ultimately quit the game industry.

Until next time,

~DavidHK