Today's speach was conducted by a guest speaker and concerned the many factors that went into designing a game. I have to say, without any exaggeration, that I had a very good time listening to how monumental the game industry is to the computer inductry, and the inspiration that it creates.
I say this because games are my passion. I can't say that Games brought me into computer science, as that would have to go to wanting to create an AI talk bot (which eventually turned into an English grammar checking agent), but games have pushed me to a level that has sustained my interest up to this point, and most likely will for the rest of my life.
I suppose that I realized that I had a passion for games when I was very young (age 7?). My parents would never buy me a console system, so instead, I bought the player's guides (a book of maps, enemies, and the general database to each game) to all my favorite games and played the games out of those player's guides, complemented by cardboard and pen where I kept track of my progress based on how the console would if I had the actual game.
Later, my passion brought me to designing simple games. This was around the age of 10, and as I was unable to use a computer, all my games were strategy based board games. All of the information concerning the game was stored on paper, and fortunatly, my parents allowed me to use the family MS word computer at the time, which allowed me to docuement everything on actual typed paper.
Later on, before I hit 13, I grew somewhat more high-tech in my approach to designing games and birthed a new project out of love for a different type of game, called the turn based Role Playing Game. Some work in this genre birthed a short lived docuement that I unfortunatly lost interest in. What became of it was a player's guide, structured in much the same way as the first player's guides that I used to play my first games!
After I gave up on the RPG genre, I had begun programming. Through programming, I began to see what designing a game was all about. Namely, balance, and the mathematical trends that make the game fun to play. Several years afterward, around the age of 16, I began work on a grandiose project that was of the MMORPG genre. This was more out of "can I finish step 1???," as a project of this magnitude (as all MMOs are), would be something WAY beyond my ability. I liked the name of my RPG enough to keep it for this game as well, and this is what became of it:
http://cwftp.nrgservers.net/CWF/Productions/Fantasy%20and%20Reality/FantasyReality[main].docand its excel database counterpart:
http://cwftp.nrgservers.net/CWF/Productions/Fantasy%20and%20Reality/FantasyReality[database].xlsOver all these years, I have not strayed from the player's guide format. I doubt that the nostalgia from my first years as a gamer will ever leave my blood.
And so I arrive at the present. The more I learn, the more eager I am to create something new. Just in the past several years, I have learned to program at the level that would be required to fashion simple games. In addition, my formatting dream came true! Over all my games, I seeked to find more standarized ways of formatting my player's guides, databases, etc. Up to only very recently, that as been stop and go with MS office products. Lo and behold! LaTeX!
TeX is truly a dream come true. I can fashion professional looking docuements, and utilize programing at the same time! I can compile LaTeX in the Scheme compiler so that I can program the different games' databases into a file, set them to automatically update based on whatever I choose, then automatically upload them into bueatiful PDFs.. Coming from all these years of MS word, all I can say is "COOL!"
Post Grip: The FTP address to the complete listing of these projects can be found:
http://cwftp.nrgservers.net/CWF/Productions/
