Anthony Enright

Anthony Enright is a UK-based indie game developer working full-time since early 2017. He made such games such as GEO (Gather, Explore, Observe) and Sweezy Gunner. He is currently in progress of making his third game, entitled Dreamstones.

Early life
Anthony's parents have separated when he was still very young. His father would drive him to a Wembley market on weekends to buy him brand new games. Around the release of the Sega Genesis Anthony was becoming fascinated by videogames, with his favourite game at the time being ToeJam & Earl which paved the way for Sweezy Gunner's visual style. He would spend a lot of time playing videogames with his brothers aswell as designing his own videogame characters and locations. His older brother was drawing levels for his own game and Anthony was jealous of that.

His videogame passion has become an obsession when he had discovered Nintendo and their games. His next console was the SNES and then eventually Nintendo 64.

Interest in game developement
Some time later, Anthony bought DIV Games Studio, a programming language similar to C and Pascal aimed at game developement. He would spend hours on end copying the code until he had a working Space Invaders clone. "It was fantastic(ly bad)" - says Anthony. However he was still happy with it as it was his first ever videogame. As time passed, he became aware of other game engines and came into posession of RPG Maker. Role-playing games were always loved by him and he set on to create one of his own, entitled "The Adventures of Tao". All that is known about it is that it included all friends and family of his and gave all of them a copy.

Later on he would purchase industry magazines. One such magazine included a disc copy of The Games Factory. Developed by Clickteam, it was much more user friendly than DIV Games Studio and allowed for a wider scope than what RPG Maker offered.

Anthony would spend every spare minute making games, most of which were smaller pieces of huge games. He'd always wanted to make a huge game as a one-man developer. He'd also start visiting The Daily Click, a forum for game developers to share their work and play other's.

Anthony had started working on two games at that point: Dreamweaver, an RPG with a crafting element added to it and Scratch, a Wonder Boy-inspired platformer. Neither of those were completed but it taught him a lot and for him it was an enjoyable process.

During that time Anthony decided to upgrade to Clickteam's more professional tool called Multimedia Fusion (now Clickteam Fusion 2.5). He made a few more small games before taking a break from game developement for several years. At this time he was almost 20 years old and had moved out of his parents' house with his girlfriend who is now his wife.

Sweezy Gunner
It wasn't long for Windybeard to jump back into developement. After his break he has returned with a different mindset: "it was no longer a hobby but something I had to do." He hasn't stopped drawing during this break and had become a proficient Adobe Photoshop user. He settled on to make few more small games, none of which were released to the public. At this point of time Anthony was a cook in a pub kitchen. The pay was small and he wanted to work in the games industry. For that, he applied for a job at EA in QA. Anthony was invited for an interview and was asked questions about game developement and bug finding and got the job.