I am a indie game developer and software developer from Wollongong Australia.
Arguably my first programming experiences was writing scripts for the first Neverwinter Nights game. I had always been interested in making games and had books filled with made up stats for some imaginary games I wanted to make. There were other books with stories and histories of fantasy worlds I created for the Dungeons and Dragons games I would run.
During high school was when I actually learnt to code. At the time we were taught Visual Basic which I took like a fish to water. It was the good old VB6 days and I was fortunate to have family who had access to the visual studio compilers and bought coding books that I asked for. During my gap year after high school I was lucky enough to meet my future boss who helped to teach me c++ and game development.
I studied computer science at Wollongong University majoring in game design. I was majoring in software engineering but during my final year I began working in Queensland for Euclideon. I also met my partner in Wollongong which then meant having a long distance relationship, constantly travelling between NSW and QLD (Don’t do it).
At Euclideon I was responsible for making several systems and was fortunate to meet many great programmers. Unfortunately I had picked up some allergies in QLD and my partner worked in NSW but would require retraining to move QLD. I ended up making the decision to move with my partner and so moved down to Wollongong where I founded Hypergiant Entertainment Pty Ltd.
I worked on a couple of ideas, the first being a global fantasy and scifi map maker. This changed to one of my other passions Astronomy, when I started nbody.space, a space physics simulation that runs on Mac, Windows, Linux, Android as well as a version for the browser. The eventual goal is to have a stand alone physics simulation of the solar system with a procedural galaxy and to then build a RTS strategy game on top. Work on this is current ongoing.