Forward:
Where it all began...
The year was...unimportant, 1994, I think. A time when the internet was not the commodity it is today...
It wasn't built into every new cell phone, car, milk carton and household pet. It was like your own secret zero-point information tractor beam. For myself anyway.
Online gaming consisted mostly of internet solitaire (which still sounds oxymoronic) and similarly lame games.
People had to play via serial connections or dial-up head to head.
But who cares? Why do I mention this?
Enter Duke Nukem 3D. A revolution in game-play and content as far as games of its era went. But the fun didn't stop after three episodes of throwing cash at strippers and sh*tting down the neck of a freshly decapitated enemy. No sir, another hidden feature would soon take the spot light. BUILD by ken Silverman quickly became my favourite feature of the game.
So maybe I should have gotten out more often, but...
It was a fully capable level editor for the Duke game engine and even came with support documentation...Wow man! There it was just sitting in everyone's Duke3D folder only waiting to be discovered by eager wannabee game developers like myself.
At the not so tender age of...oh about...13, I began testing my artistic hand on the keyboard. No I wasn't composing restaurant music. My level creations were an instant hit with my friends and my hipster computer junkie uncle.
Now over ten years later I'm still at it. Principles of design are the same. But it's a whole new 3D ball game now. The power that is given to the end-users today eclipses even what NASA was using back then. From Quake based engines, to Unreal, LithTech, and the Half-Life 2 Source engine there are virtually no limits to what a Level Junkie like myself can spend the better part of their adolescent years creating.
My next step, which I will be taking next month is formal training to do what I love most...A two year full time program in Game Design and Development complete with a scholarship I believe I have earned over years of labouring in front of Level editors.
My hope is to pass on to you, the reader, whatever information I absorb to help you and others achieve their Game design goals.