Beginnings and plans

I have been a developer since I graduated High School in 2009, but started coding while taking a Computer Repair class at the Career and Technology Center. My class was the guinea pigs the last two semesters of the year. We were the first to try the new “Intro to Programming” course they wanted to offer going forward.

Granted it was simple, the code was in VBscript which you don’t hear too much about now adays. Didn’t really touch on basic industry standards and more on helping our teacher figure out how to actually teach the subject. Over the course of the class we developed basic apps: a calculator, submission form, etc. So nothing really groundbreaking.

After graduation I took on a Web Developer position at a local company where I learned ASP.NET, HTML, CSS and eventually PHP and JavaScript. I stayed there for a few years before moving on to where I am now programming exclusively in Java. Oh, Java how I love thee.

For the past few years I’ve mainly been working on in-house proprietary apps for the company and learned a few new things.

I’d like to add that after High School all the programming languages learned have been self taught and through trial and error. StackOverflow and Google have been my greatest ally before any A.I. was introduced. While there are benefits to A.I. I am still a fan of the old tried and true methods of learning. I’ve used played around with A.I. such as Copilot, Claude, Grok, and ChatGPT, but nothing beats learning the hard way. I believe it helps ingrain those lessons more so than relying on something to just give you the answers. Times are changing though.

With that said, I’ve been wanting to stretch my coding skills lately in different areas. Learning C++ and C# alongside Unity3D and Unreal Engine alike. At first I was using Unreal and enjoyed the challenge, but coming home from work and only having a few hours of free time Unreal was too much to dive straight into. So I landed on Unity3D which doesn’t have a built in Blueprint/Visual Coding module. Just how I like it, raw code.

I started doing this because I have also had many game ideas over the years and want to create them. I’m in my early 30’s and really want to put something out there that I created and has my name on it, not something I’ve done for someone as a background player.

Right now I’m running through tutorials, landing on a GameDev.TV course for C# and Unity3D 6. The course has been fun and teaches by having you do projects. Below is a video of a level from the Rocket Boost section.

Level created for Rocket Boost section.

I’m not fully done with the section of the course and it’s not even the halfway point, but I’ve already started working on Projects to help hone those skills. I’m starting with a simple greybox prototype of an endless runner, which will help in learning what’s needed to create the idea for a game I have. Once I’m further along on that I’ll provide an update with a video and a link to the itch.io page.

I won’t upload links to the itch.io page for projects created in the Udemy course.

That’s all for now. Take care of yourself and go make games. :)

- FennecPheonix