Alright, this is my first post. No idea whether this will go anywhere or whether I’ll have the dedication to stick with it, but I’m going to try to make a development blog to document my various projects. It’s been a while since I’ve done any real writing (Engineering lol) so this will also hopefully be a way for me to at least maintain my writing skills.
What I’m up to
I’ve just finished my first year of university and I’ve got a few small projects under my belt, the latest being LastWave. I’ll go a bit into some of the algorithms I used in the making of it in future posts hopefully, but for now suffice to say that it was written in Javascript (check out the about page for more info). LastWave is actually the first coding project (not including websites) that I’ve actually shipped to the public so it’s been a huge learning experience for me and overall I’m very happy with what I was able to accomplish with it.
Going forward this summer I’ve got an internship at Circle Learning, where I’ll be further developing my PHP and Javascript skills. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to get a job in the field right after first year, I’m very lucky to have the opportunity. While I’m happy to be developing the aforementioned skills, I’m also finding that most of my bigger projects have been coded in Javascript and PHP, which is fine but ultimately I feel that I need to get some experience with other non-web languages.
C++
Outside of web languages, I’ve got some very basic experience in Java and Python, but nothing serious. After doing some research, I’ve decided to learn C++ over the summer. C++ is one of the main languages used in game development, and as that’s one of the industries I’m considering out of university I figured I’d try to learn it.
My first impression of C++ was that it is a much more “hardcore” language than any I’ve dealt with previously. The compiler doesn’t come packaged with everything like it does with Java, and it’s not interpreted like Python or Javascript. Not only that, but getting the compiler is a huge pain. After following a couple of online guides, I managed to install MinGW and MinSYS, as well as Code::Blocks for editing.
My first project is going to be making an extremely simple ASCII platformer, so that I don’t have to deal with graphics quite yet. I don’t expect this to be very difficult as I’ve got a pretty good handle on 2d platformers at this point. After that, I’m hoping to take a foray into the 3d world. I’ll discuss all of that in a future blog post.
Alright, I don’t know how to end blog posts but I think this has been a long enough introduction (I also know nobody is going to read this :P), so I’ll end it here.