This article originally appeared in Dev.Mag Issue 22, released in June 2008

My name is Danny Day. I'm 27 years old. I own QCF Design, an independent game development studio. I run Game.Dev, a non-profit community of South African game developers. I've lectured on games at UNISA, given talks all over the country and consulted on local and international initiatives on growth and innovation in Information and Communications Technology in South Africa. Generally I just answer a ton of questions and try to get people's enthusiasm channelled in ways that will show them results and keep them going.

Danny at rAge 2007

I've never really considered Game.Dev as a service, but I guess we are… If you want to find out about game development, have an idea that you'd like feedback on, want help learning how to make our own games, have a skill that you'd like to offer other game developers or simply have a ton of experience that you'd like to share, Game.Dev is the place to go.

I spend a ton of time online, as do the rest of the Game.Dev regulars, answering questions on our forums, solving problems and giving feedback on games. Every two months I come up with a competition concept that I feel will grow skills and direct interesting discussions, run the competition for a month and then spend an inordinate amount of time judging the entries that come out of it. There are also the physical events like workshops, development LANs and the hugeness that is rAge every year. The main goal is to raise awareness and visibility of game development as both an art form and viable solution to some of our problems across the country. It's idealistic, but it seems to be working so far.

If I look back, I've always been ‘designing games,' from drawing mazes by hand for other kids in primary school, to being the one that always comes up with new things to play during break. If there was any kind of interactivity to something, I wanted to get in there and make my own.

One day my dad brought home one of those ancient folding-keyboard workstations and started writing his own games on it. He had all these theories about how people learn and what environments they learn best under, so my sister and I became guinea pigs. We got very, very good at mastermind and mathematics playing Mastery and MathComp respectively. To my dad, the games were just a means to an end, but I was hooked on them after that, always looking for the next game that would challenge me to learn or understand something new. I never really cared for programming until someone showed me LOGO. I got hooked on its instant results and never really looked back.

QCF officially started life as Squirrel Cube Software in November 2007. The original name was

chosen out of desperation and ended up changing pretty quickly because it would confuse people…

QCF stands for Quarter Circle Forward, which is usually a special move in most games, hence QCF + Design being a "design special move." Corny, but us gamers like that sort of thing.