Who am I
To be super brief - just some 30-something guy from New England, in the United States.
To be a bit more specific? Programmer, artist, historian, painter of miniatures, and game designer. I’m not going to try and recount my life story here but merely try and give some context to the person behind this entire project.
The threads winding their way through my life to get to this point would be longer than socially bearable to recount. Two events in my childhood, looking back now, I think, are what would end up altering my career path. These are more clear in hindsight, about 20 years later, but at the time and even into college I didn’t really think about it.
The first event was joining the ‘Computer Club’ in 5th grade. Now to be clear, this was a normal public school, in 1997, in more-rural-esque Connecticut. So, if you expected a guided experience with some old sweat coder….you are quite wrong. It was run by a well-meaning if a bit misguided teacher who wasn’t so great with computers. The club was mostly about using macs and the program called Hyperstudio to create super simple ‘programs.’ hilarious outdated link. Most of the things we made in that club could be charitably called ‘interactive Power Point presentations.’
The roots of the idea was there, though. The program showed how to create menus, do limited animation and sound. It was a ‘first’ step towards coding and computer game design for me if there ever was one. Up until this point I thought I wanted to go into Marine Biology.
I’ve wanted to be a game designer / maker since 8th grade. The reason I can remember it so clearly is because of the TI-86 graphing calculator ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-86 ). Every student at the time was required to get one in my school as we entered 8th grade in 2000. One of the discoveries we, students, made was that not only was the TI-86 super handy actual math...but it could also run games. In 2000, seven years before iPhones and ubiquitous mobile devices, being able to play games anywhere was still a bit of a luxury. Sure the GameBoy was around but you couldn’t exactly play that in class without getting it taken away at some point. The TI-86? Perfect camouflage.
By 9th grade, the start of high school, I had found you could indeed code your own games onto the calculator...and into the internet of the early 2000’s I went. I scrounged around for tutorials, how-to’s, anything I could get my hands on. I read up on printing characters to the screen using an X/Y coordinate system. I learned about interpreting user input, and the keycode number for every key on the calculator. I played around with writing simple little menus for my games.
Early attempts were clones of projects I found online, printing out reams of code on paper for later reference. Although many of these projects existed on my family computer (I did buy the pc / calculator cable so that I could code on the pc), sadly all were lost in the subsequent years of hard drive failures. After this point, things were reliably on track for me through high school and into college.
Those early habits of scouring any and all knowledge for help in my own efforts has stayed with me. In a quirky twist, these skills also ignited a love of History that still burns today. As to how this relates to battleMETAL? In the coming posts you will see how the self-confidence of that young programmer would be challenged and reforged. How learning to sift through and collate disparate fonts of information would help in completing a (so-far) arduous task.
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