NoJoMo #28

NoJoMo #28: What is the best birthday gift you ever received?

A: I think I’ll instead answer this with Christmas present. The best gift I ever got was my Super Nintendo. I was already a gamer by the time I got this gift, but it truly changed my life.

The Super Nintendo had the best games for it’s time, and it had a tough competitor with the Sega and all the great games that came out for it. After all the wonderful RPGs I played on the SNES… I knew that I wanted to learn how to make games. That became a passion of mine. Games became a passion of mine.

Games pushed my intellectual limits. I not only learned harder math at an earlier age… I actually CARED about understanding how it worked. Why did I learn how to convert from decimal to binary to hexadecimal? Not for the sake of learning! So I can finally hack that item into my Final Fantasy inventory! I HAVE TO KNOW IF THE PALADIN RING EXISTS! (It doesn’t).

How long will it take to level up to level 30? Well let’s see, at 250 experience per battle, for 10,000 experience needed per level… 5 more levels to go… Holy shit that’s going to take awhile! No thanks!

Games set me on a course of nerdly pursuits, which I feel paid off for me in the long run.

It took over a decade and a lot of hard work, but eventually I earned my Bachelor’s of Science in Game Development degree (as Salutatorian, no less), and now I can happily say it was the best choice I’ve made in my life so far.

Even though my job isn’t making games for a living, I am very happy being able to make games in my spare time as a hobby. And being a software engineer is awesome! I get to make things with code on a daily basis! The day I got the SNES was a day that changed the course of my life.

~Bruce

I finished another C++ Tutorial. This is #4.