Oh!
Hello! My name's Bryan, or, I suppose I show up as ObsidianBlk on the forums, not that I've been there much as of yet. I suppose there are a couple things you're curious about. Who I am, what I'm doing here (as in, what is my relation with the great, game development industry), and where the heck did I get the name ObsidianBlk and #!/Bin/Bash?!
I'll begin about 25ish years ago when my father was playing around with his Commadore 64 personal computer. My father has always been a high school math professor, so, his interest in computers was purely "academic", or, rather "Ooooo... cool new gadget!" Ok, for the early 80s, perhaps he was a bit more of a geek than your average guy, and he started learning to program on it. Cyan on darker blue... ahhh the eye strain... anyway... I too, at the early age of 5ish started to learn to program. Did I learn to hack into the Pentagon? Nope, I was more interested in making color blocks flash randomly and scroll across the screen, or (later) Zork-esk adventure games. And so a programmer was born.
On the whole, though, I've made a couple of attempts to get into the industry, to little or no success as of yet. For now, I do game development for fun, but I still want to learn and grow and see where things take me.
As for "ObsidianBlk"... A good game of Wing Commander Armada and earth science in high school bore that name. First time I saw obsidian I fell in love with the rock. Having a call sign "Obsidian Black" sounded so awesome when I blew my fellow classmates out of the stars!
#!/Bin/Bash I'm sure more than a few people on this sight is familiar with. I've played with linux off and on for the last decade, but over the last couple years I have been trying to completely go linux. I love the freedom, but it sucks game-wise. My reaction? Try to rebuild modern games for Linux (and MacOS and even Windows because it's only fair, really). Perhaps I'm biting off more than I can chew, but, then, Linux has plenty of pong and asteroid clones, and, more to the point, I prefer games like NWN and Fallout.
Which, for those of you who've actually read this far, that brings me to what I'm hoping this journal will be about. I'm currently working on design documents and chunks of code that I hope will eventually lead to an Aurora-esk engine I'm currently calling the 7A, or Archetype engine. (Aurora, if you are unfamiliar, is the engine on which Bioware's Neverwinter Nights runs). Within a month or so, I hope to have enough designed where I can start asking for help and building a team. Do I plan on making money of this engine? Nope. Great portfolio piece for those working on it though, wouldn't you say?
Here's to the future! Let's see what happens!
I hope you're going to find out and share interesting stuff. I did play with linux, like 10 years ago but it bite me really hard. The scars still hurt so I never turned back to it but I know I need an update.