I'm not sure how many people know me very well here.. I've been around for a few years, but I don't often post. I still haven't hit 2000 posts in almost 3 years now.
Anyway, I would like to talk about Career Plans. Yes, just like the ones you talked about with your teachers when you were 6. "What do YOU want to be when you grow up?" From an early age, I've always been attracted to electronics, and not romantically. I got my first computer what I was ~7 years old, and I was free to do absolutely anything that I wanted on it. Unrestricted internet access, and I was on whenever I had any free time.
One of the first game sites I followed was called
BYOND, or "Build Your Own Net Dream". A nice community with a lot of gifted programmers, artists, and an overall friendly and helping community. I joined many games, and I decided I wanted to make my own. In BYOND, game production is set into 4 primary sections. Programming, 2D Sprites, Musics and Sounds, and then optionally having a Host that has a copy of your server up for other people to play. I didn't really like drawing, I had no way to compose any musics or sounds, and I had absolutely no clue how to host any of the variety of servers. (Remember, I'm about 7 or 8 by this time..) Naturally, I tried to fit myself into the last open category, Programming.
I didn't get very far, and I believe the most I ever got finished on my own was a horribly made island in which you could choose two characters to go between them. Link from LOZ and another character that I forget. I was enjoyed by typing simple phrases to make a world come alive. I had steady progress with the engine, and I eventually just gave up because I couldn't comprehend what I was actually doing. Jumping ahead into the near past, I decided to try my hand at creating a game, and I got decently far creating an Engine for which my game was based on. Some of you might know of it,
Tweed 
.
On my path to reach my career goal of becoming a Programmer, I found a somewhat friendly community called the Blockland Forums. (That's you!) I learned how the game actually works, acquainted myself with the users of the forum, and decided I would try to stand out a little and develop some Add-ons that may benefit the community. My first was
Fixer Gui, it was a simple GUI that was created to help fix a few problems the game had in that version. One of these problems was odd textures extending out from places they shouldn't have been. My second, was an actual script this time that had a nice little function, the
Avatar Locker. Gaining a thousand downloads, this handy little Add-on would let you type in a simple command to prevent players on your server from changing their avatars, letting you force an appearance onto them.
I never really could get any ideas on what to make with the Add-on system, because I felt it didn't allow me the instant progress that I felt I required. When events were first introduced, I quickly learnt the flow of the system. Becoming quite adept at it, I started working on an
NPC system for Hectic, where I
carefully planned how it was going to work. Lastly, I created a topic to create a few VCE systems that users might not know how to make. I called it,
The Eventing Help and Dump.
Present Time:
I'm currently following along in a very long series of videos created by a group of people that have classes on a lot of different subjects. I'm following the Unity and C#/XNA videos. I've currently progressed through making 3 'games', because it's a game development course, and am continuing at a steady rate due to it being summer and me having nothing better to do than watch 16 hours of videos that I follow along with.
For anybody who is curious about the games I've made, minus the first one because essentially cleared out the map code (lol).
| Game Name | - Date Posted | - OS | - Download |
| Bouncing 'Ball' | - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 | - Windows (.NET Framework) | - DL Here |
| Cannon I | - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 | - Windows (.NET Framework) | - DL Here |
Bouncing Ball Description: A simple game that runs in a window. The 'Ball' bounces around, and you can toggle gravity by clicking it. Resizing the window affects the room in which the 'Ball' bounces in. Making the window smaller than the 'Ball' squishes, and kills it. You can 'feed' it, and see how many times you've fed it in the top left.
Cannon I: The first in a 3 part tutorial. A generic shooter in which a Target comes from the top of the screen, and shoots down randomly. Your lives are counted for in the top.
Note: All of the games listed above are part of me following along, don't expect them to be good. I'm planning on starting my own small project from scratch after I have followed all of the C# tutorials and have a solid understanding of the language.TL;DR: MY CAREER PATH IS PROGRAMMER AND I AM PROGRESSING, WHAT IS YOURS?
