   Your Background
  So, I'm starting a new thread about your background in game programming. When did you start and what was your first game? Current projects? Tell us a bit about your history. Also, do you program for a living?Nalidixic[Edited by - nalidixic on January 1, 2008 7:14:05 PM]
  I dabbled in high school after the assignments were done and the doom game was full. The first game was a simple rpg thing. Roll up a character then a bunch of random fights until you died (or saved/quit). Current personal projects are a little dabbling with parsers and compilers for some naive extensions to C# and a fantasy 4X game. I do program professionally these days albeit not gamedev or really anything close to it.;  I worked as a programmer since I was 19 for many companies here. Aproximately by the time I first registered on these forums (2001) I started wondering if I could write games my self. Since then I've wrote a couple of tetris/blockout clones and a couple of engines that never really made it into a game. The last thing I remember working hard was a terrain rendering engine/editor similar to the one used in Age of Mithology. Sadly, for personal reasons I quited programming and never finished. It was actually pretty cool and I have it backed up among everything else I wrote. I'm planning to recycle all that at some point.   ;  I started in 8th grade with a GDI-based animation app. I probably spent as much time in Paint drawing the sprites as I did coding. That began a long series of graphics engines. My next was an implementation of 8bpp translucency using lookup tables. App startup included generation of a crapload of lookup tables; I remember it taking ~30 seconds.My next graphics engine was in high school. It was a 3D isometric engine with real-time lighting, similar to Diablo 2. It even had animation: the character's head would detach from his body, do a 360 spin in the air, and then reattach to the body. One of the engine's cool features was a blood-covered sword mouse cursor I drew in Paint. Drawing the engine logo accounted for a non-trivial amount of time I spent on the thing.In early college I started on a 2D tile engine that could render Civilization 2-like graphics. I actually reached the point where it could consume Civ2 graphics resources, and it had a couple other features beyond Civ2 like smooth scrolling and translucency. Looking back I think it'd be my ideal graphics engine for Civ2; I really don't like the hardware-intensive graphics of Civ4. Unfortunately I never made a game out of it.I think after this was when I realized I had spent years writing graphics engines and never wrote a game, so one day I wrote a Tetris clone in C#. That started several weeks of playing an immense amount of Tetris, and then one day I suddenly got sick of it and haven't touched Tetris since. Tetris has been my first and only completed game.By the time I graduated from college with a CS degree I realized that graphics wasn't that fun anymore. I had a research stint involving natural language processing, and that's been a subject I've been intending to revisit for a while now. I also discovered that I'd rather do UI stuff than graphics.After graduation I got a graphics-related job that has morphed into UI work. My current hobby project is a database-related project to experiment with C# and LINQ. I actually have lots of hobby projects, although most are pretty small. I have some ideas for larger projects, including games, but that probably won't be for another year or so.As you can see I don't really have a background in game programming. I just happened to stick around here :)   ;  Hmmm, I know that I started being interested in the idea of writing my own computer game in year 6 at school (11 years old?), and a friend bought a book about C programming round to my house. Couldn't understand a word of it! For some reason though, I was still adamant that I wanted to write a computer game and my next introduction to game creation was probably RPG Toolkit. I spent quite a lot of time in this software and started to really understand the scripting side of it - great fun!Next I got a copy of DarkBASIC, I remember I wrote some little 3D thing like Bonzoo Buddy and thought I was the shit :P I also remember I tried to write a skiing game, but I couldn't work out how to make the character jump off ramps (he just stuck to the terrain) and lost interest in that.After DarkBASIC came BlitzBASIC. A more sophisticated API and better build tools meant I was really starting to get an understanding of what it took to write games. This was my first experiment with writing my own implementations of things - when I was about 14 I think I wrote some cube-mapped water (that was dynamic, I remember that looking pretty cool) and a terrain engine. I also went through a Prince of Persia phase and implemented time rewinding (complete with motion blur :P) and wanted to tackle wall running but couldn't quite get it.Next I moved into C# I think and straight into Managed DirectX. This was probably around 2003/2004 because I remember using VS2003 and .NET 1.1. This was a massive leap and slowed my progress down a lot - learning what vectors and matrices were, how to implement quaternion rotations (not having a clue what a complex number even was) - but I did finally get there. for the next few years I just did the same thing... start a graphics engine, get bored, restart, etc and eventually got fed up with the cycle.I lost interest in game programming at this point, and started playing with Ruby on Rails and Django and started loving these new languages, that challenged my thinking. Django really clicked with me and I did a lot of work with it, and fell in love with Python.Now I'm back in with game programming (after reading this blog post) and said, "Im going to write a game not an engine for once." So I wrote Asteroids, and it was insanely fun once again, to game program.These days I'm working on a little 2D turn based strategy game and it seems to be fun and still challenging me :)I've also missed out a lot of my programming past because I know I have PHP and C++ experience in there somewhere. Oh well.   ;  Started in 1983 on a ZX Spectrum ( 3.5mhz 16 k memory) with my first original game called Barbie and the Rapist ( I was a sick sick child). Prior to that I was just coding games from the magazines until I figured out how to make my own.Let me put my time line 1983 -1984 ZX Spectrum1985-1992  Atari ST1988-1993  Acorn Archimedes1993-1998  Took a long break, college moving from Africa to USA etc1999-2004  PC (linux and Windows ) some of this some of that no real games just some graphics and AI experiments.2004-2007 took a break , got married had a son, lurked on gamedev.net =)2008-Current Decided to get back to making games by entering the 4 elements contest. Its going to be a remake of one of my old games, hope the judges like my art style.   ;  I started by typing games coded in BASIC from programming books into my Tandy CoCo 3. After I got my first PC I started hacking games in GWBASIC then moved on to attempting to write some of my own. I wrote some basic RPGs that never got finished, a sprite editor, and some sort of strategy war game that also never got finished. I learned a lot though. Then I got Turbo C 2.0 and began programming in it. I wrote a little graphics library that didn't do much other than draw lines and blit images.Frankly, I had never finished a game until about three years ago. That game was a Tetris clone, and I haven't finished one since.In 2001 I started working at a Yellow Pages firm as a junior programmer. I worked there for six years and change. Now I work for a company developing a video-on-demand educational system for hospitals, clinics and doctors' offices.   ;  I started programming in 7th grade (12 or 13 I think), unless you consider HTML as programming (I don't, but if you do you can add another two years). I was looking at one of those game builder software packages that my friend showed me, and the website said that it could use c script which was "similar to the c or c++ programming languages." So the next day I went to the bookstore with my dad and bought a c++ book (C++ for Dummies which I wouldn't recommend). My actual first game was a text-based game called Hobo Hunt, and it totally sucked. My first graphical game was pong written with WIN32/GDI. After that I started using DirectDraw 7.0 for simple 2D games. I got tired of that quick enough, and moved on to Direct3D. 6 Years passes really quickly ですね.I have a lot of current projects, mostly because I start a lot of projects and complete very few. I have all sorts of projects, most of which don't relate to games. My most recent game projects are a space invaders clone (for trying out XNA), a simple (i.e. sucky) 3D RPG, a multi-player 2D tiled game, and a tile editor for said 2D game. Unfortunately, it looks like most of these will never be finished (except maybe the space invaders) because I don't have the time, and soon, maybe not even a computer (I'll be going oversees for a year, and I don't have a laptop).Unfortunately, I don't program for a living, though that is my intention. I can't imagine doing anything else (except hardware stuff, maybe).   ;1987 - 1990Programmed on my parent's ZX Spectrum and Philips P2000 (Basic), mainly due to the unavailability of proper games.1991 - 1995Girls (no noticeable brain activity).1996 - 1999Besides university work, used Pascal, GWBasic, QBasic, Visual Basic and later C/C++ together with DirectX (started out with version 5 if I remember correctly).2000 - 2002Started to do some part time web development to pay the rent (and beer). Mainly ASP scripting and Perl.2002 - 2005Worked full time as web developer, .NET/MS SQL mostly. Still made some 3D stuff with DirectX and OpenGL, and some online web games in &#106avascript, Flash and PHP. Did some semi-professional mobile game development (J2ME, and C++ on the Symbian OS).2005 - TodayProfessional game developer. Predominantly C++. I still do some game programming as a hobby, but I find myself having less and less time to dedicate to it.   