LÖVE

Hanging out on IRC I noticed a lot of people here is very knowledgeable, and most of the times can talk about stuff I only dream of getting good at (for now). So it got me curious: what kind of (educational or otherwise) background do you have? How did you learn all the awesome stuff you know?

radgeRayden wrote:Hanging out on IRC I noticed a lot of people here is very knowledgeable, and most of the times can talk about stuff I only dream of getting good at (for now). So it got me curious: what kind of (educational or otherwise) background do you have? How did you learn all the awesome stuff you know?

I'm a college student (18) studying Game Design in the first semester. Nearly all my programming and computer knowledge is self-taught through practicing and reading on the internet. I had some CS lessons in school but those were mostly behind what I knew at the time (except for the theoretical parts which I never was too interested in). I've been wanting to know how to program almost as long as I can remember (always wanted to be an "inventor") When I started out first I was frustrated pretty quickly and didn't continue until an uncle who knew some PHP spent some time doing stuff with me, and after that I was mostly on my own and just kept going.

radgeRayden wrote:Hanging out on IRC I noticed a lot of people here is very knowledgeable, and most of the times can talk about stuff I only dream of getting good at (for now). So it got me curious: what kind of (educational or otherwise) background do you have? How did you learn all the awesome stuff you know?

Most of what I know was self-taugh (via internet). I try to code since I was 10(i'm 19 years old now), and most of that time was just for learn C++:
In fact, the language itself is not so difficult, but i was in a kind of a cycle of try-and-give up. So, I lost a lot of time giving up. DON'T DO THAT.
I improved a lot when I entered in high school. Where I live, we study stuff of high school mixed with other cool stuff. In my case, a mini computer science course. It's pretty cool to have someone to guide you in learning.

So.. that's it.

I wanted to be an inventor myself when i was a kid, kinda still want to...

Learned some programming with the ZX spectrum when i was around 8, nothing too fancy though, just basic loops and conditionals... how to draw a flag, and stuff; my dad wrote a slow lightpen-tracer once, but hat had zero real usability.
Learned nothing relevant in elementary school, in middle/high school we had, in order, turtle graphics (logo), turbo pascal, delphi 6 or 7 (i always finished the assignments and the homework in the first 15 minutes of the class, so i had enough free time to experiment... i think one time, i accidentally coded a visualization of a crude neural net in turbopascal... ), and in university, i learned some c, c++, x86 assembly (intel syntax), smalltalk, haskell, prolog ,occam and sql while i was there.

Interestingly my favourite class was the assembly one. Not that i managed to get a degree, but i did get some experience and knowledge.

Nowadays, i look up stuff if i need to make sure i'm not abusing language syntax, and try to not over-optimize code early; that said, i do have a clear, ordered list of games/programs/libs i want to make. With time, i may finish it, though there are hard stuff at the end, like a digital audio workstation i'd actually want to use, a voice generator/synthesizer with multiple continuous automatable...automatizable? parameters to mimic/recreate speech and singing, and of course, a decent a.i.; i found it good to dream big, while also having some more down-to-earth goals; makes you not give up too early.

zorg wrote: Interestingly my favourite class was the assemly one.

assembly is a lot of fun to me too. I never really did anything outside very small experiments with "real" assembly (i386 or amd64), but I played around with DCPU16 for a long time after Notch released the specs for 0x10c and built quite a few rather complex projects with it. Assembly really puts everything else in perspective and makes it easy to think about optimization, but on the other hand makes it very easy to overoptimize prematurely aswell.

Who's reading my mind?

Wannabe inventor here too. I started with a ZX-81 that I borrowed from a friend, and given the limitations of that computer, assembler was really a must, so I learned assembler. Soon after the ZX Spectrum appeared and I got my own. In 1991, when emulators were something rarely heard of, I made a ZX Spectrum emulator in 8086 assembler and I rewrote it much later in Pentium assembler (RDTSC allowed me to make it really real time).

I am self-taught in about every language I know, except perhaps PLC ladder logic, of which I took a few classes first. Math was my favourite subject in college, followed by physics. After college I have kept learning more math by myself, especially geometry which is my favourite field, and I've been always keeping an eye on things of my interest, e.g.I recently learned about Verlet integration and incorporated it into Thrust II Reloaded to avoid the complications of using Box2D. During my demoscene times I also learned (GPU-less) real-time 3D shading techniques and others, mostly from talking with other coders.

Wow you guys are old
I don't hang around the IRC much. I don't know why, I just don't like the concept.

Anyways, I took active interest in programming at the age of 11 (I'm 16 now). I made a few games in Game Maker, not going beyond the drag-and-drop interface. Afterwards, I did some online courses with Stanford University, I think they were called EPGY or something. There I took 3 courses in Computer Science which taught my the concepts of, well, computer science and their implementations in C. Around that time I also picked up LOVE and began learning lua.
At highschool, where I still am, I learnt Java and even more computer science and next year we are starting C#.
That's basically it.

I'm 18 years old and I've been programming for almost 4 years now.
Started with C++.Stood with it for a while then moved to Java,C#,Lua,C(in that order). At school I'm doing no programming at all. But, in ~6 months I'll go to university where I'll learn more about how computers work(hopefully low level stuff) .

I'm 19 and learned programming (Lua only) by first starting an online Java course, then giving up on it, then using my programming logic knowledge to mod Mari0. From modding that game I learned pretty much everything about both Lua and LÖVE. I started programming roughly 2 years ago, but only now I started a Game Design course. Hoping to learn another programming language while also some more advanced concepts.

By the way, in a little over 2 years of Lua coding, I still don't know what either coroutine or metatable do, never used them in my code

Started programming because of the mod Computercraft for Minecraft; which allowed for programmable computers with lua inside the game; which was absolutely mind blowing for me.

I started of making a few basic calculators, and then tried to make a simple RPG, which didnt quite turn out so well.
I gave up quickly, blaming it on the limitations of Computercraft, while it mainly was because of my own silly noob code.

I quickly found out about Love, and I absolutely loved it; I tried making games, but always failed, so instead I just programmed interesting mechanics for games to teach me about programming. (I can clearly remember me trying to make a program in which you could put different kinds of machines on a tilegrid that interacted with each other, the code was extremely messy, but it thought me so much.)

From that point on I knew I wanted to be a game developer, so about 1 year ago, I went to programming school, called "Application Development", which is basically Web developers, game developers, and application developers all together in a room, programming all day.


So far it's been going really well; I am much more skilled at programming than I ever imagined I'd be, but I still have loooots to learn.
Currently I'm working on my Love IDE called Elide, after which I will finish and release my game "Chronobreak", a puzzle platformer in which you can rewind time.

After that I will either continue making a few games in Love, or get into C++.