How I got here and the road ahead

Who I am

My reddit account can be found at /u/teryror, but I'm not a partcularly active user there, so if anyone actually remembers me from my activity in an online community, it would be as Darkshark. By now the name sounds stupid to me, but I guess that's to be expected from a name I picked when I was around 10 years old.

I am a hobby game developer who entered the industry - if  you would even say that about a hobbyist - in a rather unusual manner. At least I don't know of any professionals who did it this way.

(By the way, I am in no way affiliated with Code: Witch, a spanish [?] RPG Maker game I will not comment on.
I am also in the German equivalent of high school, so please, [politely] correct my English whenever you spot a mistake. I like the learning experience and appreciate opportunities to improve the quality of this blog.)

Why I started this blog

I didn't start programming with Karel the Robot or any of its clones, and I certainly didn't start with a programming book for kids; I stem from the Pokémon ROM hacking scene, i.e. I was registered on a Pokémon themed messaging board and one day stumbled upon the fan game section. Within the hour, I had a game running in Visual Boy Advance and fiddled with the maps in a homebrewed map editor, programmed by some stranger on the internet who reverse engineered the map system.

In that community I learned my first lessons in level design and most of my lessons on pixel art; more importantly, I learned about programming and the technical intricacies of both games and computers in general. My first real programming experience is founded in the Pokémon games' internal scripting language, which was also reverse engineered by hackers. I got quiet proficient at it, too, porting features from both older and newer games, as well as implementing my own little mini game.

I reached that level of proficiency only because I invested time in understanding how the game actually worked: I learned how the compiler I used for my scripts worked, and how the game processes the byte code it would spit out. I learned a bit of assembly for the GBA's custom cpu. I learned how the game stores your progress in RAM and on the flash memory for save games.

What I am getting at here: I have a certain perspective on games that not a lot of devs seem to share. I hope that writing from that perspective helps people understand and appreciate games better.

What this blog is about

That said, this blog will mostly be about my own programming endeavors.
I'm a big fan of Microsoft's C#, so expect a lot of that. I use Java for school and my summer job, so that's a possibility as well. Finally, I'm looking to getting into C++, so if I ever stop procrastinating and do that, that will show here as well.
Since I'm so huge on C# and game development, I have quite a bit of experience with XNA. Since that is no longer supported, I tried MonoGame, which is a hot steaming mess of unusability, and Unity, which doesn't match my mindset (and yes, I aknowledge it's a great tool for many, I even made a prototype with it to see if it is for me; it isn't). I'll have to try out Paradox3D, which apparently is better for a code-first approach, or just switch to Java and libGDX.

Until I have my libraries sorted out, I will focus on small-ish projects for this blog:

• The first series of posts will be about implementing a simple scripting system, because there recently was a discussion on reddit, and a lot of people where screaming that it's not manageable for small studios, nor neccessary, considering how easy integrating Lua is. I will get into more specifics on that when I write the firtst post in the series, which will mostly deal with upfront considerations.
• I'm considering a series on a content system designed to make localization and modding easier, although that's still in its concept stages and, as we all know, the devil is in the details.
• I may also do bits on RNG (on which I wrote a paper for my advanced high school course in Computer Science) and procedural generation, though I don't have anything specific in mind for that.
• I could see myself writing posts on the frameworks and engines I listed above, as well as game prototypes I create with them.
• Finally, I've had this idea for an Android app that I should write before I leave for university, maybe I'll put my Java skills to work and blog about it?

Other than the first one, I haven't planned out any of this, so I'm not making any promises. Just a quick overview of the kind of things I have in mind for this blog. I might also end up writing about game design and art, rather than programming, but that's not part of the plan at the moment.

How to contact me

I would be happy about any comments on my posts and will try to read every single one of them, as well as answer as many as I can. I'm still only figuring out this whole blogspot thing, so we'll see how that works out.

Also, feel free to PM my reddit account with questions concerning the blog, should blogspot not allow that for unregistered users, or you just want to message me privately.