) and I came here after watching the Adventures in Game Development and Elysian Shadows Revolution videos for awhile. The first videos I watched were Falco's "Game Development: Where to Begin" videos. At the time, I had been learning Python and a little C++ for about half a year and was just switching my focus to C#. I was intending on making a game in XNA for a Microsoft Creators Club competition with a friend of mine (who was doing spriting, backgrounds, etc and understood the underlying concepts of programming enough to talk to about some design issues). We had about three months, so not surprisingly we didn't totally finish it - though it was one of the most intensive periods of learning I've gone through and I'm glad that we pursued it because I feel like I grew a lot from it (and it's led me in the direction I'm currently heading).Due to different goals between myself and my friend, he decided to focus on work and I went back to learning the fundamentals of C#. I never really went as deep into the language as I intended since another friend of mine, who'd starting programming a couple years back with the purpose of making a game (started in C and went to C#), recommended jumping straight into XNA with what I knew and trying it out from there. It probably wasn't bad advice since time was limited and it gave me a good reference for "connecting the dots" when I went back to it later. Afterwards, I figured that going back and really becoming familiar with the language was a good place to take my next step since it was becoming obvious that I wouldn't make much further progress without that knowledge. Though I realized that I enjoyed it prior to working on that game, I realized how much I like programming through that experience. I knew how much I enjoyed math prior to this experience (I'd been doing a math course by correspondence this whole time out of interest), and I really enjoyed the ability to "bring into reality" in some tangible way the ideas and concepts that I have floating around in my head.
Currently, I'm working on another project in XNA. My friend and I had been working on a tower defense game since a) it was relatively simple in concept, and b) we had played a couple tower defense games that we thought were fun pick up and play games. I decided that what we were working on seemed unoriginal and required more for additional art assets than I cared for, so I went to working on something else. Right now, for the sake of brevity (this post is already getting a bit long for an introduction) I'll just say it involves trebuchets and that the idea kind of spawned after I started coming up with a basic physics model for a trebuchet while on a ski trip and decided I want to come up with a visual model for it on the screen.
Other than that I'm looking at going back to university this fall for Comp Sci/Math. I'd previously done Kinesiology for a year and half, but I lost interest for a few reasons - I also wasn't in a good headspace at the time so I wasn't working very hard at it and didn't know what direction I wanted to move in.
It's nice to meet all of you and I hope that I can contribute something positive to these boards
Also, thanks to the Elysian Shadows team for making the videos and this site a reality as well as a forum that people, such as myself, can peruse and engage with.
