Hello folks
Im not very known here, but I’d like to post something to thank you guys for what you have done for me. I wanted to give something back to this community for being such a good place, but I couldn’t come up with anything of value to you, so I decided to write a text instead. Thanks for taking the time to read.
My story
It all began around July 2009 when I was 16. It was a heatwave here in Sweden and I was spending my days in front of my computer playing games. It was about a year after my parents’ divorce so I had been away from school for about 9 months. During those 9 months I had spent most of my time in front of my computer, playing games, with no idea what to do with my life. While being away from school I grew bored and discovered that one could build small batch file ”viruses” using notepad so I was playing around with that, it’s pretty silly now when I think about it. However, after getting hooked up on writing codey stuff I picked up FreeBasic, played around with it for a month or too, then went on to HTML which bored me to death, tried to learn C++ which was so cryptic I couldn’t understand any of it. After a while I gave up on computer programming and decided to just play games and try to go outside the house a bit more.
Around July I began talking more and more to a girl called Klara. I had bought a game called The Sims 3 which she wanted to play but her computer couldn’t handle it. So I invited her over to play the game at me instead. She was going away to Turkey on vacation for a week though so she told me we could schedule a day after she had gotten home. 3 days after she had left my computer died. As I said earlier, it was a heatwave and the PSU overheated. I was thinking about the possibility to have some computer store repair the computer but it would take a couple of weeks and I could not really afford it. While pondering whether to have a professional repair the computer or try to repair it myself I remembered that I had promised Klara to play The Sims 3 with her after she had returned. The responsible adult in me took over and I decided to open the computer up and manually repair it, even though I had never repaired a computer before in my entire life. I was very careful and managed to fix the computer by replacing the damaged PSU and when Klara got home we enjoyed some gaming together. That was the first step of my path towards becoming a geek.
After my first computer repair I found out I was enjoying playing around with computer tech. I decided to build my own computer, and half a year later, in March 2010, my current computer was finished. By that time I was still unsure what to do with my life though, I wanted to work with something game related, and I was somewhat hooked up on being a game designer, even though I knew nothing about game design.
It was also during early 2010 I began failing in school, my motivation was pretty much non-existent and I spent 3 weeks of only sleeping and eating, never leaving the house. My dad decided to take me to a high school here in Sweden which specializes in game development education to try to boost my motivation a bit. The high school is called Högskolan I Skövde (HIS for short). On HIS they have a bunch of game development related education programs, one for game programming, one for game design and one for game graphics. When driving to HIS I believed that I was going to walk around looking at what the game design guys were doing, but due to some mixup I got to walk around with the game programmers instead. Suddenly I began thinking about building programs again, I was unsure how to do it though. They introduced me to a simple tool, Game Maker. I spent maybe half a year playing around with Game Maker, but for me which knew nothing about real programming, it was mostly confusing since I couldn’t find any good tutorials.
In September 2010 some guys in school contacted me because they wanted me to build a cellphone application for them. They had overestimated my technical knowledge but I saw it as a challenge and accepted. I began reading about the different cellphone operating systems and what languages was used to build programs on them. I told the guys that I wanted to build an application for android since everything I had read suggested it to be the ‘hottest’ operating system out there. They basically said: “Fine just give us the app later”. I began learning Java from the new boston’s youtube channel and later from various books, mostly Head first – Java.
About a month later the guys that contacted me told me they were going to do something else instead, so they canceled the android app order. I however had discovered how wonderful it is to program, so I decided to stay with Java and learn more. Now about one year later, I’m still learning, and still experimenting, and still spending entire nights investigating some annoying bug, and still drinking tons of coffee, and most important of all, I’m still having lots of fun!
Because that’s what programming is for me, a whole lot of fun!
I have done a lot of things during my first year learning Java.
In December, 2010 I built a horrible, unstable visual novel game. It didn’t work though so I scrapped it and began building a new one from scratch in late January, 2011. That one worked pretty well, even though it was an applet and the code looked like shit. You guys helped me out with the code though and taught me some good OOP principles.
In May, 2011 I began playing around with probability and I learned that there is something called ‘pseudo-random’ (It was you guys here at JGO that taught me that). I built a pseudo-random number simulator that ran 4 different pseudo-random number generators in parallel and logged patterns. I was pretty basic stuff though so no real science here, but you guys helped me out here as well.
In June, 2011 I tried to build an android app using LibGdx, it worked but it wasn’t really my thing so I pretty much left it at a android version of my first applet ever created which is called PilenBounce. Guess where I discovered LibGdx, that’s right; JGO.
During the summer I was busy with other stuff, but in August, 2011 my current project was born, Project Mathematics, which has also received helpful code from the folks at JGO.
So, one year later, and I’m still learning, still experimenting, still debugging, still addicted to coffee, still having fun, still having lots of fun. Thank you all at JGO, for this would have been very different without you.
TLDR; Thanks to JGO and it’s awesome members for being such a supportive community, There are many people here that I look up to and I want you guys to know that you have helped me a great deal on my road towards my dream, becoming a good game programmer.
