About Me
Hi, thanks for being interested in learning a bit more about me! My name's Dale (aka Findo), I'm a developer with a passion for making cool and interesting games.
If you're interested in what I'm like as a person - I've included some of my other passions below and a bit more of a detailed breakdown of my life of programming right from the very beginning.
Game development, whats that?
How I Got Started
I first started my foray into the world of games years ago with Minecraft, I found out that you can add new items to the game. Minecraft was written in Java, so I spent countless hours trying to get the development environment setup in Eclipse with great difficulty. Once I had it working though, it felt like magic, I got quickly bored and wanted a bit more of a challenge. It’s a little embarrassing that Minecraft is what got me interested in video games, but honestly without it, I might never have found game programming.
A New Foe Has Appeared
After working with Java for a while outside of the minecraft realm, I decided I really wanted more of a challenge, the obvious next steps would be to take a small incremental step like learning C#, but not for me. I wanted to go straight to C++ which was extremely challenging. It forced me to re-evaluate how I approached programming and gave me a newfound appreciation for game programmers. But now in hind-sight, it was probably the best thing I could have done, spending every waking hour trying to get my head around the language really taught me a great deal of persistence is required sometimes to get the job done and it's almost never easy haha.
Finding The Artist Within
Working in C++ for a while was great, but it wasn’t hitting all the right buttons. For whatever reason I still felt like I was missing something about the game's experience. I had really enjoyed the 3D-modeling aspect of minecraft stuff so I decided to pick it up again. Luckily enough, I was still a student at the time and I could get access to 3DS Max and Maya for free, so off I went, trial and error watching hours of digital tutors content that I begged my parents to buy me. But something was still missing, what if i could bring it all together…
The Answer I Was Always Looking For
Thanks to the magic of timing and luck - something I'm still yet to understand about the mystery of the universe, UDK came along just at the right time, turns out all the big game developers working on games like Bioshock and Borderlands were using Unreal Engine 3, my mind was blown, i was using (close to) the same tool sets as these massive developers. It empowered me to focus forthrightly on learning unreal and I loved every moment of it. And then, to top it off a new version of unreal engine 4 had just come out and was a revolutionary jump in quality, but it was a bit out of my price range, so thanks to some amazing folks at Epic Games, I was able to get my hands on an early UE4 key. Only for it to become completely free a short time later.
I still vividly remember waiting all night for Unreal Engine 4 to download and opening up the engine for the first time and playing around with the starter content. With UE5 recently I was able to relive that feeling and I'm so excited to get into all that that brings with it.
I wanted to be as verbose as possible so i've included a TLDR; version, click below to read it instead.