[CuRRent MooD:] Fine
[CuRRent Song:] Duno
[Last FooD/BeveRage:] Famous Amos Cookies (2nd pack in a wk...OMG) / Pokka Mint Green Tea
As I was going through so many articles nowadays, I can't help but wonder that now's an exciting time for developers as so many tools are available.
When I started out on my home's 2nd hand 386 DX26 (or was it 33, correct me big bro), all I knew of a computer is that it is something that somehow makes gaming consoles possible. I often looked at them like windows to gaming (please, no pun intended) as my second bro got the first nintendo back home and played Castlevania 2 like no tomorrow till he completed the game, then got on to a Japanese RPG known as DragonQuest III. It was the latter that got us so crazy we can remember many japanese terms and even most of the mazes in the game we needn't have the guidebook with us!
Anyway back to what I was saying. So when I got my bum into Nan Hua Secondary, it didn't take long before my interest kindled when I saw booklets which has game code written in the ZBasic and GWBasic (QBasic being an MS variant, is largely but not fully compatible much of the time) languages, that triggered something in me that never seemed to have gone away throughout the years.
The passion to create games. From then, I learnt code straight from the booklets (they are coding booklets, not guidebooks or manuals) and developed my small little games which reside in the small confinements of the PC, only making its existence known to my secondary school friends in the Computer Club. I recalled making a text-based RPG style of Battleship which you can issue commands of different weapons to sink other ships.
Flash pass a few years later, I got myself directly into Singapore Polytechnic in DCIS (Diploma in Computer Information Systems). I got distinctions for 2 programming modules, notably Structured Programming using Pascal (no one uses it much anymore nowadays but to me the lecturer helped me plenty to establish my base and knowledge, as well as fuelling the interest) as well as Data Structures and Algorithms using C (I was a lil surprised with this one, but it was a nice one). Unfortunately whichever is non-programming I tend to suck at them (exception being Business Studies which I got an A) and even stayed back for a full year and wasted my parents' money :(...well, I guess in life there's always a reason for everything.
I guess it would've been good if I've pursued my life on my interest, but somehow life doesn't work the way you want, maybe for special reasons. Instead of programming, I took up desktop support for my first job (and for now, possibly my career). Many poly frens of mine asked why I didn't take up a programming job, and all I can say is "programmers have no life". At a point of time in NS, I wanted to take up a Games programming degree course, but the expenses were hefty (SGD$30,000) and I can ill afford that, so I gave up.
4 years later, I'm now doing desktop support in general plus a few here and there. But the interest for games programming never died...sometimes I wonder.
If I put my heart into developing my programming skills, what would I be now?
However, there is no "ifs" in history.
.LuKe.
3 comments:
It was a Dx33, if you were referring to the one I brought into the family. Yeah, the family's first computer.
You can still develop games in your spare time. Nobody knows what kind of turns your passion can take you.
Well, I wished so. Still trying, but not easy nowadays. Going to try develop ASP.NET games on facebook platform which I think I will take quite some time to do it.
wah bro, you're a .NET expert huh?
Post a Comment