I am 16, I develop games so I can get into the industry later and for fun.

<- Digital Explosions ->
"Discipline is my sword, faith is my shield
do not dive into uncertainty, and you may live to reap the rewards" - (Unreal Championship)

I started to code abit late, at the age of 17 and now i''m 24, still catching up to the skillz of a pro

I''ve been programming since I was 12 and now I''m almost 16( just 2 more months till I turn 16 ). I guess it''s good getting started at an early age because it tells that you''re very interested and devoted to your programming work . I just can''t wait till I get a job at some game company.

hm.. i started when i had an atari st 520 (what a great machine back then *lol*). i was even stupid enough to buy magazines with code for simple games and typing thousands of lines just to have another game. when i tried to program on my own it ended with basic and terrible if-goto code that never did what it should.

then came a long break until i began to study cs and bought a book about opengl (and im ashamed to say it was my first contact with c/c++ and i picked up a mix of it along the way). after playing around with it i knew what i wanted to do later on. 4 years later im 25 and sitting here, still a student and watching all game developers in germany die or firing half their staff to stay alive.

so i seriously doubt to get a job as game programmer over here (lucky me, i wanted to move to the us sooner or later anyway).

I''m 19 years old (almost 20, in less than a month) and I''ve started programming about two-and-a-half years ago, when I started to study computer science in the Netherlands. The past year I have SERIOUSLY started to program, as my study focusses on EVERY aspect of computers, including hardware, server adminning and programming. Perhaps I should have chosen software engineering instead of computer science, but I''m happy with it.
I finished my first game this week (http://struct.m33p.net) after a LONG break from C++ and having started with OpenGL a few months ago. And I have decided that this is what I want to do in the future, also as a profession.

I don''t believe age is particulary important in game programming. It''s all about how you can get along with the gaming generation and how you can think the way of a gamer. You still have an audience to appeal, and you will have a hard time addressing a large audience with an old game with no new innovations.
Also programming experience is important, so I have been told, if you want to do game programming.

What I (put accent on "I", this my personal opinion) feel that is often forgotten when people talk about games is the psychological factor of a game. Everyone comes up with neat ideas and great features, but often forgets that a game is meant to be an escape door from reality and is meant to set a goal for the player.
Everyone splits a good game up in graphics and gameplay, while in reality it''s a combination of both, with the added factor of making the player think he''s achieving something and is winning the game. That''s exactly what makes retro games like Pong or Tetris so popular: They are simple, but when playing they can make the player believe that he will win and get a place in the highscores, this all without neat graphics, but with a good immersion factor and a simple, natural interface.

My apologies for the extensive last paragraph. I never meant to make it that long but it just all flew out of my head right onto the screen.

I am old enough to remember a U.S. flag that only had 43 stars.

I used to program assembly on a Commodore Vic-20.

I helped define the C99 standard, I helped deisgn the X12 EDI standard for the HIPAA protocol, and I worked with the W3C committee to standardize D/HTML.

I built an IC board from scratch to fit into a Tandy RS-232 expansion slot... for no good freakin reason... just so I could simulate voice from a hardwired analog sampler microchip that I bought from Radio Shack for $20.

I''m not only older than dirt... I''m older than the dirt under Linus Torvalds'' fingernails.

(grin)... Why do you ask?

Well I´m 19 and I´ve been programming since I was about 10 or 11.
Actually I´ve been interested in games and game development since I was about 6, but at that time I wasn´t serious enough to start programming
It´s kinda strange, I didn´t decide I wanted to be a game programmer until about three years ago. I live in Sweden so we don´t have to much options when it gets to game development education, but I´ve found one school not to far from where I live, unfortunatly they only accept 25 students every semester, but I´ll give it a shot. Well, back to the subject. Age has nothing to do with it if you just are focused on your goals and work hard to achieve them. Start out small and build your way up. When I started actual game programming my first goal was to make this awesome 3D shooter because I didn´t realize what kind of work that would demand. Those dreams were toned down some time ago and now I´m programming a Pong clone. It isn´t much but if I make it I´m ready for the next step.





Bad Monkey Productions

I''m an 18 year old freshman in college. I''ve been programming since I was 11. I started programming when I started making levels in the game "Hexen" and it mentioned that its scripting language was like C. My dad had an old C book (which is strange - he isnt a programmer and has no idea how he got the book) and I started toying around with it. It included a dos-based microsoft interpreter on 5 1/4 disks.

The only other `good programmers` (people that can think logically and understand me when I ask questions) I''ve met so far are my professors, and only 1 of 4 seems to REALLY know his stuff (the ''data structures'' teacher). Unfortunately for me, I''ve done all the stuff the programming classes at this college teach, but I have to take the classes anyways for the degree. Really sucks. I''d love to be able to take a class on compiler theory or something like that, but instead I''m stuck with calculus 3 and `learning` how linked lists and binary trees work. Last semester I had to take ''Advanced C++'' which was really ''Intro To C++: Semester 2'' [/rant]

I program for hobby right now, planning on moving into the professional world after I get my degree. I have a real hard time sticking to stuff though =-( I start one project and then get bored after hundreds of internet searches return almost nothing on it and none of the forums I know of mention more than the most basics of basics. My current ''project'' is to write a nice scripting language, similar to unrealscript, but most tutorials cover only the most basics and I don''t want the most basics. Also, none of the scripting language I have been able to find are to my liking.