Hello World!

As a developer, I thought this placeholder title injected by WordPress was very fitting.  I am deciding to keep it 🙂

So yes, I am a developer.  I have been coding since the 8th grade.  I started out with a little tool called Game Maker.  I’ve always been fascinated with videogames and Game Maker was a great way to learn the fundamentals of programming.

During college, I worked for a small company that made games for freearcade.com.  My most notable game was Wicky Woo in Lavaland.  It was actually an expansion of one of the first games I made in Game Maker.  In another post, I should do an analysis of this game.  But I digress.

After college, I began work for a company called Pixo.  At the time they were creating mobile games with Unity.  Unity was quite a fun program to play around with.  However, I was mostly doing web development for Pixo.  Web development was alright, but I could do that type of work much closer to where I grew up, which is where I wanted to be.  I moved away from my friends and family to take that job, because I wanted to pursue doing my dream, which was making games.

Shortly after Pixo, I found a company called Root, which is where I am currently employed doing web development. After a few years of working for Root, I realized that though web development wasn’t the dream thing, that Root’s awesome culture and flexibility was a dream in-and-of-itself.

After working for Root for a few years, I went through a difficult time in my life.  Luckily, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild had recently come out, so I played the game to near completion (everything but the 900 Korok seeds) to pass the time.  It was quite an amazing game to play through.  I thought to myself, “wouldn’t it be cool to make a game like that?”

One day on the internet, I discovered that Nintendo had built a 2D prototype of Breath of the Wild to concept out new ideas for the Zelda game quickly.  I thought to myself “this would be cool to re-imagine.”  And reading through the comments on similar postings, I was not the only one.

I started tinkering around again in Game Maker with my “Zelda” prototype.  I am a big believer in Miyamoto’s philosophy of building the game around the fundamental mechanic.  Thus, I began working on the combat mechanics for this prototype.  After several iterations with people trying it out, I landed on something that other people seemed to enjoy.  And the best part is that it isn’t even a “game” yet.

So, here we are, October 15, 2018.  What’s the plan?

As I mentioned, I work for an awesome company called Root.  We’ve worked out an arrangement where I will be taking of leave of absence from January 1st through March 31st of 2019. During this time, I am going to be working on this project as a way to heal from my divorce.  Even though it has been over a year since those events happened, I am still wanting to use this project as a way to relieve stress and heal.

I’ve decided to start a blog about the experience for two reasons:

1. As a way for me to track in words (rather than code) the progress of the game.
2. As a way for me to share with my friends and others the progress of the game.

I should have started this process sooner — but as they say, “better late than never”. 😀  I am excited to share my continued progress with you!  Thanks for reading.