The pursuit of happiness.
Entry posted by AggrorJorn ·
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The world of games, game development and game design is awesome. I just love it. The fun part is, that I only realised this since the past year and a half. Before that, I just liked playing games. Nothing else slipped in to my mind about "how a game is made etc.".
I like to tell you a little story about myself. We didn't have a computer at home until I was 10. Before that, I used to play games at my neighbours house. My neighgbours where German and their kid had a computer at his room with one game. This game was some kind of science fiction game. The first level you would have to fly above this icy landscape shooting all kinds of robots, including this really huge weird elephant kinda looking robot.
It took about me about 5 years to understand that this was called "Starwars". 
I was 10 I think when my dad got himself a computer including 2 games specially for me. Since my dad worked in Germany, the games he bought were also German. Although the village where I live in lies in the Netherlands, most of the people are either German or Americans (Awacs airbase and Military Outpost are like half a click away from my village.) The 2 games where Abe's Oddysee (German)and Delta Force (my first English game). 
Okay now here is somethin funny: I liked playing games on my computer, but for the rest I disliked computers. I didn't like typing in this green/gray interface that was called 'W98'. I rather prefered writing stuff down on a piece of paper. When The first Dial-up connections were introduced most of my classmates started talking about a program called EM ES EN. Anyway I did not care about computers and their stupid programs and especialy not the inter net (back then I thought it were 2 words). I only liked the games. My first game that had an editor was 'Cossacks'. And alhtough it was a demo, you could play with it for as long as you want. Al the enemies in the game feared my massive armies muahaha (evil laugh).
Now here comes the most ironic part of my live. I finished mid school aged 16 and I had absolutely no idea what to do next. I actually went to an open day for a Health care education. But the idea of changing old people's diapers quickly made me change my mind. A friend of me said he wanted to go IT because he new a lot more about computers then I did and it seemed interesting. I was still totally blunt about my direction, so I decided as a total "computer-newb" to join IT education. Ironicly my friend did not go IT after all. I felt really misserable the first year. Everyone knew more then me (which wasn't hard anyway, since I knew zero.). From Operating Systems to CPU, from Windows to something called "Linux". They could as well talked Chinese, because I did not understand a single word. I realise that my smartest decision I have ever made was when some IT student gave me this sticker saying "I Love Firefox.". Since my computer knowledge was pretty much nihil I hadn't the slightest idea what Firefox was. The decision was to not say that out loud. (I personally think that they would have killed if I had.) Yes, I still had trouble leaving my naive idea of my opinion towards computers. The 'Internet Explorer idea' was the biggest of them all. I thought that 'Internet' was an abbreviation of Internet Explorer, thus meaning the same thing. Probably 99% of the IT students played a game called "War of Worldcraft" or something like it. Since I already fell behind on everything, I decided to buy it as well. And I didn't like it. Sure it was fun at the beginning but it just boring after a while.
But as time went by I became more and more familiar with the IT world. Year 1 was okay after all, since the rest of the education sucked big time. The education supposed to teach you a way to prepare yourself for adulthood. Big wonderful HAHAHAHA. I had a hard time understanding this all, because my education was more something like a pre-school slash prison slash citydump. If you want to see a collection of criminals, junkies and stereotype nerds, just visit my class. second problem: no girls what so ever. In the past 4 years there hasn't been a single women inside the school building. (except the cafeteria lady).
In the mean while, games kept playing a big part of my life. I bought my first console: xbox 360. Although it is a great product, it can never, never break through the wall of computer gaming.
So to sum up this part: 3,5 years ago I knew nothing about computers, programs, Operating systems and above all nothing about game development.
This changed a little bit when I found a program via youtube, called '3ds Max'. Back then I used it for making small movies and animations, but not for game designing. This changed when I played this game called Marble Blast. It was made by the Torque engine. I don't know why exactly but I started googling this torque engine. We are talking about 1.5 years ago here. The Torque engine itself seemed too difficult, so we (Dreamhead ) started with buying the Torque game builder. It is a great program for making 2d games. However, due to bad documentation this program was very soon abonded. Dreamhead mentioned "FPS creator.". So we started using FPS creator. It was fun, it was cool, even made a few cool examples, but we reached the limits very soon.
My first model in Fpscreator.
The biggest mistake I made then was going for Darkbasic. With absolutely now programming experience I just couldn't handle darkbasic. And then I saw this add on the game creators forum about the Leadwerks engine.....!! 
So I am 8 months further and a lot has happened since I purchased the engine. First of I graduated my IT education . For the past few months I have been looking more and more for my upcoming education. At first I thought about NID (Netwerk Infrastructure Design), then I thought of Programming(C# and ASP.net) and only since a couple of months I have been considering going in to game development! At first I was sold when I went to an open day at the SAE Qantm college in Amsterdam (International college for media and game creation). However lady unfortunate came looking around the corner: Games programming was to be no longer given at the Amsterdam location. I would have to go to either Munich, Berlin or London. Luckely another option was available: High School of Amsterdam. They offer a game development education for 4 years. Many languages from Java, Actionscript to C++ are being tought there. I have subscribed for the classes of next year, so if that would come true, man what would be great!!
What I want to tell you with this blog is the following: Josh mentioned in one of the video tutorials that he got in to games programming because of quake. For me it is the Leadwerks engine. And that is why I want to say to Josh (and his team)as well as the Werkspace community: Thanks for finnaly opening my eyes! It has been a dream for me to become a game developer, but I never realised it that it is actually possible to become one! Lets hope I can start at Game development in Amsterdam next year. :D
Thanks for reading!!
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