Hello, and thank you for checking out my about page.
I'm Ciera. You might see me around the web as UnicornIntestine(video games) and Knittlewine(writing).
I'm originally from Oklahoma, and that's where I reside now. I've also lived in Kansas, Texas, and Arkansas throughout my life. The times I lived in Kansas and Texas were when I was a child and my father was in the military. I lived in Arkansas for part of my early adult life. I moved back to Oklahoma in 2012 and have been here ever since.
I met my husband, Murphy, in December 2019, but we lost contact and then reconnected in May of 2020. Covid definitely impacted our courtship. We were inseparable, but with everything shut down and people being quarantined, we spent most of our time backroading or hanging out at one of our homes. We'd talk until the sun came up, sleep, and talk some more. We talked about everything, including marriage, but our relationship was still so new that we didn't think it would be appropriate to jump into marriage. Instead we moved in together. Life was perfect until 2022 when I had a health scare that lasted about a year. We got married during that time period, and I have since recovered and have been thriving.
My background is varied. In my early life to my late-20s, I was mostly humanities focused. I was interested in writing, literature, history, politcal science, and art. I wrote some short stories and a couple of books during that time. I've been on-again-off-again working on an English degree with a history minor since I was 18. The major changed a couple of times, but I always came back home to the English degree. I'm pleased to announce I will be completeing the last class and portfolio for my degree this fall and graduating in December 2026. I'm excited to be finally finishing my bachelor's degree. I do also have an associate's degree in General Studies that I completed fall of 2013.
As I entered my 30s, I became interested in making video games as a hobby. I've been an avid gamer since I was about 3 years old, and my dad introduced me to the Sega Genesis. I was interested in the story-telling possibilities that video games held as a medium. I picked up RPG Maker MZ on sale and started following tutorials. I had a blast! RPG Maker takes care of a lot a stuff for you, like making a character move. Plus there's a good amount of art available to use right out of the box. It streamlines the process and is fairly easy to pick up and play with. It did introduce me to some programming concepts like variables and conditional statements.
So, I caught the game dev bug pretty hard. I really enjoyed the whole process of making games in RPG Maker MZ, but I found myself craving more creative and technical control. I got tired of working within RPG Maker's guardrails and sought out a new engine. This led me to Godot. I've always been fond of open source software, so an open source game engine really drew me in. I had only minimal experience coding at this point in my life, mostly from random learning rabbit holes I went on, and I had no experience digging through documentation.
I started with tutorials like character movement and animation. One of my favorite tutorials was making a small platformer with collectable coins and enemies you had to avoid. I learned a lot with that tutorial!
I enjoy making video games because it requires so many different skills. You've got coding, writing, art, music, etc. If you're not in the mood to create art, there's always coding to be done, and vice versa. I've always admired the polymath or Renaissance Man ideal, and I strive to be as well rounded as I can be in my learning and skill acquisition.
This is a cozy narrative game set on a purgatory-like island that is always the season fall. The protagonist, Silas, wakes up on the island a stone's throw away from the Mansion with no memory except his name. The goal of the game is to either recover Silas' memories or find a way to physically leave the island.
This is an incremental game where your goal is to adopt out all the stray cats in the world.
I'm interested in web development, and this website is going to be a space for on-going project updates, my portfolios, and anything else that tickles my fancy.
If you're interested in supporting me or just getting newsletter updates, I have a substack: Ciera's Substack