Dustin Auxier

Dustin is an independent game developer known mostly for his Enchanted Cave series.

Early history

Dustin started making games for fun when he was 12 with RPG Maker on a PC. He also tinkered around quite a bit with 3D animation software Blender around then, with the plan to become an animator for games or movies because he saw programming as the most difficult and boring thing to ever exist. Several years later however he started learning bits of code to edit RPG Maker scripts which eventually led to him to writing an "action" type battle system with turn meters for party members to replace the default "wait" type battle system. This taught him the basics of looping and program flow which is essentially the foundation to any game.

After that

Armed with the fundamentals of programming and mediocre art skills, Dustin set out to make a flash game using online tutorials, code docs, and a healthy dose of trial and error to guide him. The Enchanted Cave was inspired by a very fun side-dungeon called The Ancient Cave in the SNES game Lufia II (In hindsight he regrets not having a original name for The Enchanted Cave but was a game dev newbie who was not expecting more than 1000 plays or so). This was 2009 and 2010, with the game being finished during his freshman year of college. The game did surprisingly well with millions of plays across tons of sites today, and led to him making a few more games in his spare time and of course The Enchanted Cave 2, the long-awaited sequel in 2014.