Digital Dave

Well… Hello, World.

For the past 2 years, I’ve had my blog hosted on a game development website, GameDev.NET. While it was a great place to be, I couldn’t resist buying up my own domain to be hosted by a friend for free. I also need a site where I can keep a personal portfolio of my projects. Looks like this will do!

I’ve spent the last two years working in the independent game development scene, and I’ve come to a realization that it just isn’t for me (career wise). I am WAY behind the curve, and as hard as I worked for those two years, I felt like I got nowhere closer to making me a better candidate for employment in the games industry as a programmer.

Granted, I still have a year-and-a-half left at Kansas State University. But I think it’s time for me to spend this last year-and-a-half here working on the software side of the house.

From the game development side of development I’ve experienced working on small independent projects that had gone retail. I’ve experienced the designing phase of writing short story ideas, and watching those ideas come to life on the screen. I’ve done an incredible amount of testing for people. I’ve developed a couple of games, one of which was a Breakout Clone (which I hope to have in a download section soon, including source (C++/SDL)). All of this in my spare time. So, I am no stranger to dedication, initiative, and working hard.

So, this blog will not only house some of my personal experiences from random thoughts, but it will also house some of my independent software projects that I work through. I would also love to begin writing tutorials to help solidify my understanding, and to help those that are just beginning. I don’t intend for this blog to reach out to that many people. But for those that it does reach out to, I hope you can get something out of it. I am always up for meeting with new people, helping, and best of all, I am only one instant message away.

You can get a idea of who I am in my about page, but I can summarize here in my first post.

I spent 4 years on Active Duty for the Marine Corps (2001 – 2005), and am now serving the last few months of my contract in the inactive ready reserve. In addition to that, I am currently a student at Kansas State University. I will be graduating December 2008 with a B.S. in Information Systems. Next summer I hope to earn an internship at Google, Lockheed Martin, Facebook, or any other company that might give me a chance to work on their vision. Depending on if I get an offer to move into a full time position after graduation, I might go for a M.S.E. We’ll see.

I enjoy programming. I don’t claim to be anywhere close to being an expert, and I learn something new every time I open my compiler. My main choice of languages are C++ and C#. Why? Mainly because I have yet to dive much deeper in any other languages. However, I have experience with Java, and ASM.

I don’t have a rich history with programming. Getting my first computer at 15, and leaving for the Marine Corps at 17, didn’t really give me a lot of time to program. However, I did dabble with Visual Basic while I was 16. I Got into the Marines and found little time to do anything with computers. Once I got out and started school, I did get into C++ during my game development phase, and used C# for a period of time to create a map builder tool.

But, the last couple of months has been pretty lazy. I haven’t opened the compiler due to some tough courses I was taking over the summer. In addition, I was taking on a new hobby — Equity Investing.

School starts this coming Monday, and I’ll be back into the swing of programming. I have a business programming course that will utilize COBAL (erm?), and a networking course that will either use Java or C++ (pretty sure it’ll be C++).

Other than that stuff, I enjoy the Harry Potter movies, reading through various books from programming to business, bowling, learning, chess, messing with my new Husky, and spending time with my girlfriend, Megan. I can’t believe I waited so long to watch those HP movies… I just watched those last week, and they were friggin’ awesome! I just picked up the movie 300, which I hope to watch tomorrow! Yeah, I’m slow, I hardly ever watch TV… To busy messing around on the computer. And I’m sure you can only imagine what being a game developer can do to somebodies life…

That’ll be it for now. Take care!