Welcome to this new blog of mine.
Not my first
This isn’t the first blog I’ve started. Recently, I’ve started a study in Breda at the NHTV called International Game Architecture & Design (IGAD), with a focus on Programming. Before this, I studied somewhere else (Game Design & Development at USAT in Hilversum), but quit after two years. I discovered that a focus on game design isn’t set aside for me. From the start of that study, I enjoyed programming more than anything. When I quit, I decided to spend time preparing for IGAD. Improving my math skills, working on my C++, and do some blogging. Blogging forces me to think about the software I’ve written and gives an insight into my way of getting tasks done. Blogging also improves my skills in writing and understanding English. English isn’t my native language, Dutch is.
My old blog features the intake assignment I had to create for my application to IGAD, a project I started in XNA/C#. It also has my old portfolio before starting IGAD, summarized into one blog-post.
The revival
This website will function as a portfolio and a blog. It will also feature a short bio and links to social networks like LinkedIn, Github, and Twitter. The reason for having this website is to have a central hub for everything that has to do with my study and my upcoming career as a programmer. While developing software, I am also developing myself in a way that I keep getting closer to what I really want to do on a daily basis. What that is, I can’t really tell at the moment, but I am tending towards Graphics Programming.
My education offers me general game programming and principles at the moment, but in upcoming years, I will specialize myself into a subject. Not knowing what that exactly is, is somewhat exciting, because I already love working with the broad subjects, and going into the depths of one of those sounds like a lot of fun.
The blog?
The blog on this site will feature post-mortems for projects I have done, posts on graphics programming, attempts at clearing my mind of annoying programming-related issues, and software architecture related stuff. Probably more, but that’s the fun of this journey, I have no clear idea where I’m going!
The portfolio?
The portfolio is, at the moment of writing, still empty. I have a few projects made at school which I will add to it as soon as possible. You can expect several 2D games, including a small clone of Super Mario for the NES, a “clone” of Zelda: A Link to the Past (it has the graphics and parts of the mechanics, but a different game), and a clone of Galaxian. Those were the first three graded assignments for Programming this year. Then there’s the game we got to make for the second block of Programming. This was my first attempt at making a 3D game using OpenGL, shaders, and models.
I’m also considering adding the first GameLab game I had to make. That was a group project made in Unity. I’m not quite sure if I find it portfolio-worthy enough, but it would make a nice post-mortem with references to the portfolio.
The end… for today
Next week, I will fill in the portfolio and write a post-mortem on the 3D game I made. I have some other stuff to write about, so that might be posted next week as well. Thanks for reading!