Intro and Inspiration

Hello!
Hello GG community! I'm going to introduce myself in this .plan/blog, talk about what I've done with games so far, and hopefully inspire all the other youngin's like me to get moving! This may end up being boring (another person who wants to join the industry...for a reason!) but the pictures ought to help that a bit. Edit: or, since I don't know how to scale them down here, just go to my lacking website to see them: www.pixelvalley.net/EasTech.htm

Introduction
My name's Tom Eastman (Eastbeast314 on the web - I was under 18 when I made this profile) and I'm a rising sophomore at Dartmouth College. My interest in games started in fourth grade when I watched a friend play Warcraft I, way back in fourth grade. I decided then that I wanted to make games (along with being an astronaut and pro soccer player). Looks like that dream might actually come true because I'm going to be interning at GG this fall!

Past Work
My development experience started at nehe.gamedev.net/, learning OpenGL and C++ nice and slowly. My freshman year of high school, I made my first 'complete' game:

Shape E-vaders This game used the height of my game-making skills: it was object oriented (one object...the shape class) and it had textures! The only thing of note was that it was a complete game. Menus, high scores, mouse support. I wrote everything myself, and although it pains me now to look at the code or the graphics, it is still fun for a bit and can keep young kids entertained.

Rings Wars
Having finished Shape E-vaders in less than a few months, I began work on my next game during finals of freshman year. My plan was to make a top-down tank local multiplayer game with powerups that used a whole bunch of classes. I wrote the core game in a few days (always my favorite part of development - somewhat unfortunately). Over the rest of high school, I'd go through phases of hard work, bug fixing, integrating new OpenGL tidbits, and making tools. The game ended up pretty far from my initial (basic) vision, but still gots lots of play time in my school. As I learned new graphics tricks (like blending!), I'd add them (some would say "tacked them on"), only making the code uglier. In addition, when I finally decided to make the game 3D and third person, I wrote an entire .ASE importer and class to load models I made it 3ds Max. However, when I wanted to add animation to the models, I ran into the very scary fact that .ase outputs every vertex ever x frames. Multiple megabyte text files aren't so awesome, especially since a low value of x results in terrible looking rotation.

So, I used maxscript to write a rigid-body key frame animation exporter that works with the .ase data to make models move with seperate animations stored in one file with the model data. Took me a long time, but I learned a ton (quaternions, anyone?). That loader was probably the hardest thing I've written and the mostrewarding. Not sure if I'd recommend writing such a complicated system without even understanding pointers.

Eventually, I finished Ring Wars (after renaming it from Ringworld Arena because Larry Niven wasn't a fan) and wrote my college essay about its creation. Despite the fact that I gave up on selling it online and that the code should never be seen with human eyes, I still am proud of it. I made a complete product, all by myself, learned far more than I did during a year of high school, and did it while I was young enough to have the time. The games mentioned here (and some other stuff) can be downloaded from my website: www.pixelvalley.net/EasTech.htm

Money!
During the past two summers, I interned at Fabian-Baber, Inc. I was contracted to make a supplemental game to go along with an educational video they had made for Discovery, Inc. The video was about the ancient Mayan base 20 math system, so I planned out a game based on exploring a temple to collect tablets. Every door had to be opened by solving a math problem and every level had to be completed by matching up our modern numbers with the Mayan numbers. The game had to be made in a few months, so I ended up cutting a few features (like attacking animals). Nevertheless, it was a fun game, I got to work with a professional animator, made some money, and (shock!) I learned a lot. The game couldn't have been that bad, because Discovery bought the rights to the game last year.

Future
Now that I've been accepted into the GG internship program, I'm going to be working with Torque over the summer, making a few prototype games to get used to the engine. I've been reading plans here for a few years and think I have a good feel for the community. I'll work even harder at GG knowing how much the community cares (especially since I'm already crazy to do an unpaid internship. I haven't decided whether to learn TGB or TGE this summer (perhaps Tim will give me a hint what I'll be doing if he reads this), but I can't wait to dive in once school is done for the summer.

After college, my dream is to find a job at a dev studio and get to work on games as a programmer or designer.

Speak Up
The real goal of this huge self-call was to make it clear to all the kids/teens who visit this site to read the .plans/blogs (I'm not the only one, right?) that it is totally possible to make a game. It's a lot of work, it absolutely sucks at times (I had a ton of fun with a bug that made half my Ring Wars objects dissapear at random times), but it's completely worth it in the end. Games have gotten me 5 internships now, into college, and given me a direction to head which many of my peers haven't yet found. Perhaps this is a sign of changing perceptions towards games (although Dartmouth profs still have to refer to games as "interactive real-time simulations" to get funding) or perhaps I just got lucky.

So, to anyone who reads this and thinks "I could do that!," you definitely can! I wouldn't recommend doing everything from scratch (I couldn't believe how easy GUI's are to make in Java when I took my first CS class at Dartmouth). Instead, from what I've seen of TGB, I think there's finally a great product that lets people make games as long as they meet one requirement: they are determined to do so. I'm continually stunned at what GG is offering (and for so cheap!). I think that user-created content is a step in the right direction and user-created games are even better!

Hopefully I will serve the community well at GG. I'm planning to blog during the internship (about what I can) in the hopes that it will encourage others to find the joy of game development that I've found.

If you actually made it this far, thanks! Check out my website (download the games discussed here) and read my research paper about Halo. www.pixelvalley.net/EasTech.htm You can email me at gamedevATdartmouthDOTedu. I'd love to share ideas, code, or recommend resources. Game on!