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A Game Developer

From the capital of California

Issue: 12.5 (September/October 2014)
Author: Markus Winter
Author Bio: Markus is a Molecular Biologist who taught himself REALbasic programming in 2003 to let the computer deal with some exceedingly tedious lab tasks. Some call it lazy, he thinks it smart. He still thinks of himself as an advanced beginner at best.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 4,935
Starting Page Number: 63
Article Number: 12509
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

Thanks to BayWatch and those iconic red bathing suits, California is known the world over as the "Sunshine State" where friendly and easy-going people seem to relax at the beach all day long and life is a breeze. And, thanks to modern technology, people can actually get some work done at the beach, too. But this time we have a contribution, not from the beaches, but from California's Capital city: the "City of Trees," "The Big Tomato," and "The Camella Capital of the World." No, it's not San Francisco as everyone outside and many inside the U.S. seem to assume. It's Sacramento. A place where even university drop-outs like Forest Gump do quite well... and Xojo programmers.

Derek DiBenedetto, Age 43, USA, Sacramento, California

Software Developer and indie strategy game designer, simprosestudios.com

The blue glow of the Commodore 64 was my very first exposure to the world of programming. I remember sitting up nights, paging through a wholly inadequate instruction manual, and teaching myself the intricate dance of C64 BASIC. Those 38,911 bytes seemed like a gateway to a whole different world, and I was ready and willing to explore every bit.

Fast forward two years and I was entering a "Best Game" contest at LoadStar, a disk magazine devoted to the C64. I entered a dungeon exploration game where all of your adventures and rooms were randomly generated, with seven stats for every guy tracked throughout the game, and won the contest! The rush was incredible, and my path was set. I was only 13 years old at the time.

Let us move ahead four years, and I was programming forms for my father's work to enable them to fill out accident reports and inventory requests more quickly using QBasic. (One of which they still use today!) Even then, I devoured any and all books about programming and theory, fascinated by the syntax and the various methods of writing better code.

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