I studied Mechanical Engineering and Science at Monash University in Melbourne where I majored in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. I currently work as a mechanical engineer. Besides one summer working for Autodesk as work experience I have never actually worked professionally as a programmer. I guess I’ve always considered myself an engineer first.
I’ve been programming in one form or another since I was first introduced to Visual Basic running in Windows 3.1 on a 486 computer at the age of 7 by my father. I spent time experimenting and playing around in VB making little games based off some of my favourites of the time. The code was nothing special lots of simple spaghetti code and making it up as I went. The first game I successfully finished was a simple Monopoly style board game complete with an animated dice, thanks to some help from my father.
It wasn’t until early high school where I was formally taught programming for the first time; I started to really understand the potential of what you could do with programs and started moving toward better code. My end of year project was a space invaders inspired game in VB where you shot at pictures of the teachers from the school. I continued to improve this game even after the subject had finished.
While VB helped encourage my love of programming it was when I got to university that I fell in love with the language C++. From the moment I wrote my “Hello World” program I knew that this was the language for me. I have tried plenty of other languages since: Java, FORTRAN, Html, JavaScript, assembler and none of them in my mind have come close to C++ in terms of power and elegance.
Through university I was bored of the text based Linux programs I had to write and by chance in Christmas 2004 I found a book “SAMS Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24hours” by Michael Morrison. That book showed me how to apply the code I had been writing and turn it into windows GUI and make 2D platform games. From that point on I did everything I could to find out more and learn as much from books and online as possible on all things game programming. I can now boast a game programming library of more than 20 books on all topics game programming related from engine development to AI programming and everything in between.
With all this newly acquired knowledge my games quickly graduated to 3D and then in 2006 I had my first experience with DirectX, I incorporated DirectX 7 into a little game engine I called ‘Brainstorm’. It is now 5years later and ‘Brainstorm’ is still the engine I use today although it has come a long way since then. This marks the beginning of my 5th major rewrite as I attempt to make ‘Brainstorm’ a DirectX 11 game engine, multithreaded and GPU accelerated PhysX.
Game Programming has been a fun journey so far and I hope it continues to be so. If you have made it this far I hope you stick around to keep track of my progress and maybe even learn something along the way. Drop me a line to say hi, or comment on some of my posts and recommend the blog to your friends.
Just Remember if you give someone a program, you will frustrate them for a day; if you teach them how to program, you will frustrate them for a lifetime
The Little Aussie Game Programmer
a.k.a Will
