A Brief History

My first trip down the path of a games programmer came when I applied to study it at Reid Kerr College, which is in paisley. The first platform I worked with was XNA 3.1, in which I was given lectures and tutorials in which to advance my knowledge and my programming skills, unfortunately at the beginning I found it all overwhelming and it was a struggle to get to grips with it, but I got there.

The first game I made was titled "Invaders Must Die", Which unfortunately I have lost the source code for. There is a video of it in among a collection of other students work at this like :- 

Another game I had the pleasure of making was one called "Galactic Football" , It was created with Bryan Watson(http://bryanwatson.me). That game is also featured on the YouTube link above.

Going from college to university was a large jump, as the change from a development environment where the code is laid out for you in a template to one where you are literally working on a blank sheet, is very scary.Naturally we were "eased" into programming with C++, The first game I made with C++ was a console based maze game. This game was created in a partnership with Bryan Watson Again.

Later on in the first year of university, we were set a task to make a 2D game created with openGL. The game had to have some basic physics about it. Again I teamed up with Bryan for this, we chose to create a cannon game, in which you controlled the angle of the cannon and based on the angle and power of the shot, the cannonball would follow a certain parabolic trajectory in an attempt to hit a fleeing soldier.

As I advanced into second year, I was to create a game, any game but it had to have multiple levels, power ups, traps and enemies. It was also entered into a class competition in which it came second *sad face*. The game was called Stencil, it was created by Me, Scott Docherty and Barney Randall. The idea of this game is to jump on the platforms, destroy enemies, avoid traps and get the power ups. The games graphics were completely hand drawn by me.

And then came the second semester of second year and there were three separate projects on the go. One project was to create a rocket flight simulator with proper physics, safe to say that one did not go exactly as planned and as such I do not have any pictures or videos to showcase.

Another project I was involved in was on android and it was called Operation: Pure Defensive Warfare. This was a hugely ambitious task Bryan and I had set for our selves in that it was too grand for the time scale we had and along side two other projects was just insane to attempt to create this. We did however create a lesser version but we were unhappy with it. The sole copy is kept on my android smart phone and will not be released but who knows about the future.

Finally the latest game, It was created in C++ and is fully 3D, it is more of a tech demo showcasing my skills in created 3D programs. This again did not turn out as I hoped.

Currently I am working on two projects over this summer. One is for android devices and hopefully will be released on the android marketplace and the other is a 3D game using C++ and openGL. More on them later