No, I'm not some strange new kid from a mysterious and remote land. Like Antarctica. Although that would be tight.

I've actually been around 64Digits for quite a while. I can't speak for sure, but I believe I joined the community right around the switch from V1 to V2. Some of you may remember me–and I would imaging rather poorly, if so. I used to be "Lukesterspy". If you want something to cringe at, go ahead and browse back through my old blog posts and comments. They annoy me, so they will probably be like a terrible sitcom for you. I almost deleted them after I got my username changed, but I figured that wouldn't be genuine of me.

Nonetheless, it has been a long time since I have had anything to do with this community! Years ago, when I was first beginning to play around with game design, web design, and all of the real computer science stuff in between, I loved it here. I desperately wanted to be someone here, but I wasn't experienced or mature enough (although I'm sure some would question our maturity now as well).

But I'm back with a new name, although not a new haircut–I'm trying to grow it out so I can jump on the last cart of the man bun train before it falls off its tracks into the abyss of embarrassment. Actually, my long-term goal is to get some dreads hanging, but I'm still a ways off from that.

To be honest, I haven't touched the likes of Game Maker in at least a year–probably longer. I have been busy going to college for my BS in CS, getting married halfway through because having a wife is way better than dorm life, working on software at an aerospace company, and doing more web development than my fingertips can take (which is ironic because I'm sure twisterghost can remember some dumb kid messaging him constantly to ask questions as to why his little PHP/MySQL blog project wasn't working–that was me man, and I'm sorry).

As for that last point, I was brought on with a non-profit early on in university to build a custom CMS that they wanted to, and since have, deployed in numerous locations (I suppose that Wordpress had security issues that they didn't want to deal with? Nah, it was more than that, but that was part of it…). They then wanted a custom analytics system because Google Analytics was too cluttered for them, so I whipped that up–which took a long time. And now, I still do some work on the side for them as needed.

I'm still in school. I probably have another year left because I pulled back the amount of credits that I am taking by a ton (three classes is way better than like six). I feel like so far I have gotten some pretty well-rounded experience in the industry, and, although I have enjoyed everything I have worked on in one way or another, I desperately want to get back to the creativeness of computers. You know–the stuff that got you (at least me) excited when you were younger.

Which is why I am back. I am slowly trying to get back into game design and development as a hobby. But I want to do it from the ground up. In high school, I built an HTML5 game engine from scratch, and that was a blast. Now, years later, I am building a game engine from scratch using C++ and SDL. It's not going to be best engine out there by any means, but it will be mine to play with and make into what I want it to be. I plan to add Python scripting (not Lua, it feels "old" to me) to the engine down the road, and I have been thinking of what it would take to develop and implement my own physics engine into it as well. I also have a level editor and an object editor planned for it. If anyone is interested in checking it out at some later point when it is worth something (although probable not much), I can possibly throw it up on GitHub or Bitbucket.

In developing my own game engine, I am realizing how much influence Game Maker had on how I think about video game development. My game loops, my abstraction, my everything–it all seems very similar to what the first game engine I ever used must have done behind the scenes. Granted, it is a video game–there is a pretty set way of how to create the most basic engine, and it has been the same for decades.

Well, enough of all that. If you want to chat about life, or talk about projects, or make fun the Seahawks (I live in Washington, and the people up here have one–and one thing only–in common: they all worship a football team like it will smite them if they don't), you can hit me up here or on IRC. I finally got ZNC set up on my server, so I am idling on the channel and will get any messages you send me eventually.

Anyways, I'm sorry for the wall of text! I hope that wasn't terribly boring. I suppose that if you got to this point, it must not have been. But who knows, maybe you were more bored than this blog post was boring in the first place.

I'm stoked to be back! I'm very busy right now, but I'm going to be around as much as possible and would love to participate and/or help with anything possible.