Elysian Shadows

Here it goes:

My dad first bought my sister and I a laptop (Windows XP I believe) when I was about six. I was completely in love with it. I spent all my free time playing little online games. I went in 6 month stages through many different games. I was very fascinated by our laptop and I was pretty proud at the time I knew how to change the desktop background, lol. When I was about nine I discovered the game Runescape. (I know, I know) I though it was so cool how I could interact with monsters, weapons, and NPCs. I played Runescape off and on until I was 12. By then I was so intrigued by the question, "How could I make my MMORPG?" After about a month of non-stop googling of various subjects, I learned I would not make an MMORPG inthe near future, lol. I also learned about programming languages. I didn't want to have to learn one of those at the time, so I discovered game maker. I stuck with that for about a month then quit because I felt like I was cheating. By the time I was 12 and a half, I was learning C++. I became pretty good at it in the next half year or so. (For a 12 year old) I got sick of command line programs, so I moved on to SDL. This is kind of where I am now, at age 13, developing games with C++ and SDL.

I hope you enjoyed that, it took forever to type on my iPod touch,

Age 7 learnt some really basic HTML to make a site for my GIF animations, age 12 learnt some proper Flash AS2 scripting to make some flash games, age 16 got into C++ and real OOP and programming for fun ^^

For me it started off at some book store in Hamburg where my parents bought a book about visual basic 6. Must've ben around 2002 when I was 7 years old. I followed it a bit but it soon became boring because I was unable to understand some stuff back those days. Learnt the basics, though. Then for about 4 years I didnt do a lot. Probably got that book out once or twice. When I discovered vb.net 2005 i started over again... had several adulteries with c# and moved over to c++ in the meanwhile^^ Still programming with vb tho when it comes to school stuff coz thats what we have to use there.

I always had wanted to make a game almost my entire life ( I had an idea of one that are non feasible ), just one time. I had sat down many days (when I was 10) with my limited knowledge of computers (although I was very good with Microsoft Office in general) and typed "how to make a game" into Google on my computer. I got many confusing results (nothing about programming languages) and figured it was just something that people that are non existent to the rest of us did. Then one day when I was about 12 almost 13 I ACTUALLY FOUND SOMETHING! I found a website that introduced the concept of a programming language and what ones are best for game development and why. I selected C++ and wrote my first successful "Hello world", 2 weeks later ( because I couldn't figure out the compiler XD ). I learned C++ ( and picked up GML, HTML, some Java, some original BASIC and Logo on the way), met some inspiring people, had a some great mentors and when I finished I wanted to make a game like I had originally set out to do. Thus (after several failed attempts at HL2 modding, some crappy game maker games, several incomplete console games, and a failed attempt at a RTS) White - Storm: Lightning (my game engine) was born (of which I plan to use to make a game)!

I've always had an interest in games from an early age but I didn't get to play them very often until my early teens because we didn't have a console or PC. I always had ideas for games but I thought that programming was in the realm of geniuses and never really bothered to look into it.

When I was about 17 and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life I came across a website full of web development tutorials, so I started to learned html, making a couple of websites, I found it interesting. I Thought I might have ago at learning programming and came across a C tutorial and started learning and I found it very interesting. I played around with command line programs for a while, not really getting anywhere and not sure where to go from there.

After a couple of years I came back to programming and started learning C++ and a little 2D graphics programming until I came across a good OpenGL tutorial. Thats when I really started to get interested, seeing a graphical output, rather than text, was really satisfying.

After many tutorials, experiments, failed and a few finished projects, after learning many things and learning I know very little, I've returned again to game programming after about 6 month of no programming. Now I'm just going to experiment and have some fun with it and see where it takes me.

I began learning to program because I'm into developing/building/designing things. I like technical stuff, and programming gave me a way to sit down independently and build something without a budget, without backing, without someone else looking over my shoulder. I started with C++, but was influenced to move onto Python largely by this article: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

I spent about 4 months with Python going through tutorials and generally trying to wrap my head around a whole new universe of thinking. Following that I jumped into C# because I became determined to sell a game on Xbox Live Indie Games. I picked up the basics of the language and then hopped right into learning XNA. I probably should have stuck with learning the rest of the language because it would have made some later challenges easier when I got into more advanced topics, but I was determined to get underway on the game. I was working with a friend of mine who was doing flash art/animation. After a few months he quit - the game was progressing slowly and he was about to start a job that would literally consume every waking hour of his day working on an asphalt crew. I stepped back, came up with a new idea (ships flying around in 3D in a multiplayer arena), and started going down that route.

I religiously focused on working on the game to the point where it impacted my sleep, job, girlfriend, and later on school (went back to school in Computer Science). Back in March of this year I released the game to abysmal sales (received about the cost of my membership to the XNA App Hub service), but damn did it feel good to get it released and finally wrap that up - and it was honestly the most amazing learning experience I've ever gone through. It was incredibly discouraging to have it bomb sales wise, but I don't regret working on it through to completion and releasing it.

I've since tried to get balance back in my life. I still have an overwhelming desire to be independent career-wise, but I have my priorities set better than I did back then. Lately, I've been working with Env3d which is an open source Java engine (my instructor developed) for teaching computer science, and developing games/simulations. I've also been working on developing sites using Drupal 6/7 for a business a couple friends started up recently. Over the past week I've gotten the Android SDK installed and running with Eclipse and I've been playing around with building little apps (and I think it's an amazing platform to develop for).

I was born in Latvia in former USSR. The first time I saw a computer I was maybe 12 years old. The computer loaded programs from a usual cassette recorder, and it was funny to turn the volume up and listen to the digital noises while the program was being loaded. We had a class with a bunch of Elektronika BK computers at school.
There was also a central computer with a diskette drive, but pupil were not allowed to access it. In first lessons the teacher loaded some games into the central computer and we had to execute some commands to "log in" from our consoles and then we could launch the game from the central computer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektronika_BK
and this was the central "server" with "consoles":
http://savok.name/uploads/komp/5.jpg

But I soon got tired from playing games (actually I was not a very good player, my reaction sucks) and wanted more, I wanted to make computers to do something for me. Some months later the teacher finally showed us what the BASIC is (yes, USSR engineers had developed a clone of MS BASIC interpreter). So we did some basic stuff on BASIC (pun intended ). After lessons I kept trying out what BASIC can do for me. When I was at home, I put on a sheet of paper my very first algorithm which draw some kind of an eagle. I have no idea, why it was eagle, I just thought it would look cool on the screen. And I guess, it did, even if it was just black and white

After that my interest for programming vanished, especially because there were no books and tutorials about how to program something cool. Also the computer classes for us in elementary school were just for one year and thats it.

Then came the high school. And finally my country, Latvia, got free from USSR and we got our first IBM PCs in school, yay . Those were Intel 386s and a couple of 486 machines with Windows 3.11. I had a glimpse of Windows 95 in the year when I graduated. I got a russian book on programming Turbo Pascal. As we had little time to access the computers and programming was not planned in the educational course, I had to do most of programming at home on a sheet of paper and enter the code at school, hopefully to launch it in the same evening. Not much time for debugging.
My very first program was some kind of a GUI, just some clickable buttons with configurable colors and labels. I had no idea about OOP yet, so the code was pretty messy, but the buttons worked, and the teacher and other classmates were curious how did I do that stuff. One year I represented my school in a programming contest for my region and I got the 2nd place in the region. But that was a total failure for me because I felt so miserable with those contest exercises - mostly something abstractly mathematical, almost no creativity at all. That kind of tasks made me think that programming is not for me because most of the world will demand from me only solutions to some mathematical problems.

The other problem was that I had a severe vision problems since birth, so one more factor against programming: "Hey, do you want to become completely blind?" Although the computer was really great way for me because I could enlarge the fonts as I need .... anyways, I went to study economics in the university. Oh, man, that was boring, that was not for me ... I needed programming badly, so I finally got a cheap Pentium I and started looking into Pascal for Windows. But it seemed too awkward, so I turned away from Pascal completely and started to look into C++. I got Sams "Teach yourself Visual C++ in 21 days" and after more than 21 days I finally made my first MFC application which drew biorhythms and calculated the moonphase and day of birth. At the same year I finally got access to the Internet in a university library. I found an article on the Internet which told that there were a team of blind Japanese programmers who localized the Japanese version of JAWS. And I thought: What the hell, I have nothing to lose, it's obvious that I will never be a good economist.

So I made a switch and officially became a programmer. As a surprise I made it till the end, despite the fact that I saw almost nothing on the whitebard and power-point presentations, so I had to study much harder to keep along with the others. And I guess I did. My bachelor's work was a keyboard training program for visually impaired and blind people. It had an enlarged and vividly colored GUI, it supported keyboard layout for almost any Eurpoean language (oh, man, how I hate the messy Microsoft keyboard API with all those dead chars...), it supported integration with Microsoft SAPI compatible speech engines and it was the first that kind of product in my country. I did not got payed for my work, but I received a high mark and I know that this program is being used in rehab center for blind and visually impaired, so that is the best payment for me - to feel that I have done something useful.

Latvia is a small country and game dev industry is almost non-exitstent. We have no commercial 3D games at all, only Flash and browser games. So during the university and after that I could work only for a business programming company. I got a pretty good experience in C# and various Microsoft business-oriented technologies.

Then came the recent economical crisis, and that company went bankrupt. I and my former collegues made our own small company and now we earn for living with some web sites and browser games. Some of us spend more time searching new clients than doing actual programming. But that's the way it is these days. I do not want to leave friends and family for a bigger salary in some other country (although I had some proposals already).

So, the final question: what am I doing in game dev forums? I guess, because it stops my brain from becoming stupid of those web sites and simple business apps I am doing for living. Game developing is the very bleeding edge of everything: technologies, algorithms, project management. I know, the chance that I'll get into a real 3D game dev team which makes money for living, is close to none, but it is so exciting to read game dev books, watch videos, and follow cool stuff on forums. And I have promised, when/if I have some free time, I'll try to do something with Ogre3D/enet/OpenAL/physx. I still have a dream to create an experimental collaborative virtual 3D world were other people could help me to create some minigames and do some "cool stuff".
So enough from me, this post seems to get out of control, I better should spend my time writing some code

Heres my pathetic story, i started playing a game called roblox (i know but i liked its scripting feature) found out later its actually a toolkit its like unity except more homosexual and they removed lua features every week. anyways yeah i started with lua scripting then my friend basicly said hey look dumbshit this is how you make real games i was like holy shit that looks hard then i watched gyrovorbis's tutorials took his words to heart and taught my self C++ and boom i started learning SDL got pretty good at it started my own engine back in march and now i got a ok game engine with lua embeded. now im trying to figure out tolua++ it looks good, anyways games are my life when i was young i had barely any friends i'd just play my super mario and my zelda then i found out ways to make my own games yeah so thats my pathetic story of how i started and got into programming, id also like to recomend Sams Teach yourself C++ its a damn good book.

Well, first I learned a little Java as a kid, I think I was 8 or 9,
but only very basic stuff, some input and output, and I think how to use an if statement.
Then, I think when I was 11 or 12, I learned about something else.
Then, I think when I was about 17, I learned some C++.
Now,19, I am trying to learn more C++ and SDL.
So that's about a summary of it.


-Benjamin