Finally, the barebones first version of my personal blog on game development is online. I will post my entries both on this website and on my personal blog on Blogger (link).
Let's start with a little introduction about myself and my games, in the coming weeks I will try to post regularly on the subjects I am struggling with as I am improving the games I have made so far and as I think about new topics for new games.
Enjoy!
About me
My name is Jaap, I live in the Netherlands and I enjoy both programming and designing games. I started the latter when i was probably around 8 years old and (according to my parents) i spent considerate amounts of time trying to create my own games with pawns, marbles, dinky toys and little toy soldiers. Theoretically this means i have been a game developer for 25 years ?
When i was 12 i started programming in GWBASIC. I really liked it a lot and have been doing it a lot (sometimes more and sometimes less of course). I have tinkered with different languages and IDE's to finally settle on the ones mentioned below.
Besides programming i have a full time job, a beautiful wife, two kids and two dogs (german shepherds). When i am not behind a computer trying to program stuff, i love to play video games myself or to go outside to go hiking or running with my dogs.
Games I like (to create and to play)
First of all, i really enjoy turnbased games. I love the ability to think about stuff and i hate losing because of a wrong buttonpress in the heat of the moment. Basically all the games i have built so far, and probably will build in the future are therefore turnbased.
Besides computer games i really like sports a lot. Mostly football, cycling and running. This combined with the fact that i enjoy turnbased games is the reason why my favourite game of all time is the Football Manager series. It’s also for this reason that I started working on Cycling the board game and Football Manager Stories.
Finally i love to build and manage stuff. I must have played each entry in the Civilization series for at least 100 hours or more. I also enjoyed older simulation/strategy games like Rollercoaster Tycoon, Settlers and Capitalism 2. These games inspired me to create the games Tycoon and Civilization Wars.
My progamming experience
I do not have any formal education in programming but i do enjoy the technical side of programming. I mostly work in Visual Studio, programming in the Monogame framework in C#. Back in 2012 i participated in the AI Mooc, organized by Stanford and Google.
Why Black Wolf?
Because i have an awesome black German Shepherd called Nero, who looks a lot like a wolf, I decided to make him my mascot for my game development.
My games
So far, i have started development on four different games:
Please click on any of the links to find out more about them (links go to my personal website).
Thank you for reading!
Welcome!