New Year New Website
Hello! Welcome to my first ever blog post. My name is Andrew Wilkinson, a gameplay programmer from western MA. I’ve always admired the people that were able to write and maintain blogs about the wonderful field of game development, and it feels like the right time to throw my hat into the blogging ring. I’ve been in need of a place to talk about my observations of the game industry, observations about game development, and most importantly a place to share updates about the work I’ve been doing for the past couple years.
This site began development last year by my friend, Jason Patrick, who had setup all these wonderful template and css tools for making my project pages mobile friendly. The first project of this year will be to finish updating the project pages of all the game development related things I’ve done. Some of these projects were in school, but most were at my current place of employment, HitPoint Inc (@hitpointinc).
Creating web content in some ways is easier than it ever was, but at the same time is far more complicated. When I first learned HTML and CSS several years ago the semantic web or, Web 3.0 to some, just started becoming a thing and it was mostly my stubbornness about using tools that made me want to make a website as simply as possible. Getting a page up and running was initially easy, however when it comes to managing and subsequently serving varied web content (like a blog), the code to do so was very abstract to me and clearly outside my interests. As a result I moved away from web development basically forever to focus on desktop applications and eventually game development. Last year was the first time in a long time I took a serious attempt at getting a modern website up and running. I chose a fairly well-known Content Management System (WordPress), and installed it to an Apache server that I set up on my virtual linux box hosted by Linode. Fortunately Linode offers a lot of tutorials on how to do this, but the process still felt involved. There’s a lot of pressure as a programmer to do things the “right” way. No matter what implementation you choose, you’ll be judged for it by everyone.
So here we are nearly a year later from the day I set up this wordpress, and now the gears are finally moving. I already have my three oldest project pages setup (L-Systems, Terrain Gen Visualizer, Voronoi Visualizer), and hope to finish the rest soon. Thanks for reading!
~Andrew W.