I've always loved games, and more importantly developing them. In late middle school / early high school my family purchased our first home PC. We were a bit late to the personal PC game - this thing was a Dell computer running Windows 98. It was around the time Starcraft was released, which my brother and I addictively played over our AOL dial-up internet connection. There were also games such as Descent, Baldur's Gate and Half-Life which immediately grabbed me. I loved to play them, but more importantly I was incredibly curious with how they were made.
My uncle worked at Interplay (anyone remember that company?) and I was lucky to know someone with real experience in the industry to ask all sorts of questions to. I purchased a little game engine called 3D Game Studio (this was before the time of Unity and Unreal) to learn anything I could. It was a neat framework for developing games, but of course my curiosity was recursive. How this this tool work? How was 3D Game Studio made? I had to dive deeper.
Once I graduated high school, I sort of stumbled into Computer Science by accident. I had no idea what the major entailed other than it was heavy in math and that it had something to do with computers. I quickly discovered it was a perfect fit and I immediately fell in love with programming. In every class I related each subject to how games would be programmed - be it data structures, compilers, programming languages, theory of computation. I eventually took a class called Computer Graphics - and this was it - everything I was looking for in order to put pixels onto the screen. I was hooked.
I eventually went on to graduate school and wrote a thesis on large scale terrain rendering with real-time deformation and after graduation worked a short stint at a small game studio where I worked on some unreleased titles for the Xbox 360 and PS3.
I've now worked outside of the game industry roughly 10 years but as a hobby continue to develop the Wax Game Engine.
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