When I was very young my father started playing video games with me on the family PC and NES. We spent a lot of time together playing adventure games such as Myst, King’s Quest, Zork, Day of the Tentacle and 7th Guest. These adventure games along with the books my father also introduced to me as a child are probably why I find storytelling and immersion in games to be most important. Even as I moved into first person shooters such as Dark Forces, Doom and Quake, it wasn’t until the original Half-Life that I was truly taken by the genre. For me, escapism is one of the main draws of gaming and I believe this is best achieved through a captivating, immersive story and environment.
The first video game I had a hand in writing was a text based game in a Visual Basic class in high school. That class along with a hardware and a robotics class were my first experiences programming. I started college seeking a degree in Biochemistry but started taking programming courses my sophomore year, eventually picking up Computer Science as a second major. During my junior year in college I took a Game Design and Development course which required groups of students to create a semester long game in Microsoft’s XNA and present it to two Microsoft MVPs at the end for a competition. My group won with The Second Coming, a top down two person cooperative shooter. Spring semester of that year I took a Computer Graphics course whose final exam included writing a checkers game without AI. The next year along with my senior project in robotics, I was part of a three person team (two programmers, one artist) that developed another XNA game, Bubble Blow, as an entry into the IGF 09 student competition. After graduating I started work on a variation of Bubble Blow, Outbreak, to keep up on programming and game development in my spare time. Currently I am working on another game for Xbox Live Indie Games to which I hope to dedicate significant time and effort and hopefully bring an artist on board. Even though I took a course in Digital Imaging, my artwork is absolutely horrid and I would actually like to market this game and have some people play it.
Games
When I was very young my father started playing video games with me on the family PC and NES. We spent a lot of time together playing adventure games such as Myst, King’s Quest, Zork, Day of the Tentacle and 7th Guest. These adventure games along with the books my father also introduced to me as a child are probably why I find storytelling and immersion in games to be most important. Even as I moved into first person shooters such as Dark Forces, Doom and Quake, it wasn’t until the original Half-Life that I was truly taken by the genre. For me, escapism is one of the main draws of gaming and I believe this is best achieved through a captivating, immersive story and environment.
The first video game I had a hand in writing was a text based game in a Visual Basic class in high school. That class along with a hardware and a robotics class were my first experiences programming. I started college seeking a degree in Biochemistry but started taking programming courses my sophomore year, eventually picking up Computer Science as a second major. During my junior year in college I took a Game Design and Development course which required groups of students to create a semester long game in Microsoft’s XNA and present it to two Microsoft MVPs at the end for a competition. My group won with The Second Coming, a top down two person cooperative shooter. Spring semester of that year I took a Computer Graphics course whose final exam included writing a checkers game without AI. The next year along with my senior project in robotics, I was part of a three person team (two programmers, one artist) that developed another XNA game, Bubble Blow, as an entry into the IGF 09 student competition. After graduating I started work on a variation of Bubble Blow, Outbreak, to keep up on programming and game development in my spare time. Currently I am working on another game for Xbox Live Indie Games to which I hope to dedicate significant time and effort and hopefully bring an artist on board. Even though I took a course in Digital Imaging, my artwork is absolutely horrid and I would actually like to market this game and have some people play it.