Today it occurred to me that if I had to place a dot on the spot where I wanted my life to be, and where it currently is, I wouldn't be able to place both dots on the same planet. I wanted, since I was a young kid to be a game designer. By 9th grade, when most of the people in my school were playing games on their TI-83+ calculators that were the equivalent of choose your own adventure books that someone else made, I had made a game using the overly simplistic programing language on the calculator to make an RPG with weapons, armor, magic, items, leveling up, randomized damage ranges for attacks, and various areas to travel between.
Since then it's seemed like my lack of money has completely blocked me from entering the gaming industry though. Any books I managed to save up for to buy to learn from would result in massive disappointment, either coming with completely dysfunctional software without spending another few hundred on the full version, or only teaching the extreme basics but then cutting off before teaching enough that I could actually do anything with it.
Free online tutorials are even worse, when I started trying to learn flash; which was hard as hell to find a freeware compiler for since the official version costs hundreds, I went with tutorials and i'm now fairly certain I know less about flash now than I did before I started. One tutorial tells me to put everything on the screen and refer to it in code in the time line then another says not to put anything out and make various classes, the next one more advanced tells me to make pseudo-classes within the main class inside the time line. Every single tutorial ever seems to be so vastly different from each other in technique that anything I learn from one is absolutely incompatible with anything else, even using the same technique I often end up with most tutorials having examples of code that only functions in exactly that one particular use, and using the same kind of code in anything else at all causes horrible crashes and errors.
It would be a million times easier to learn something with a teacher, but again my lack of funds stabs me in the face, I can't even afford to imagine going to a college to learn to program.
At this point, I'm working in waste management, earning barely enough to pay rent and almost not starve. I have had hundreds of great ideas come and go, many ideas come to me that while I was unable to act on, some company other company would eventually come up with the same idea and be successful with it.
Yet even after getting past that, whatever language I can eventually learn, I still can't afford to hire people to do music, sound, graphics, and everything so I'd have to try to get a job in it. Unfortunately I live in the middle of literally nowhere so anything I'd get would have to be telecommuting, which puts me in competition with every programmer looking for work in the world.
At least if I was poor but in a larger city I might have been able to go to conventions and try to make friends and network my way into like an internship or something to learn and work on into the industry. As it is now though it feels like there's a wall that won't let me pass until I've earned enough money first.
Is there any way to get moving into the the game industry without needing to drop a ton of cash first that I haven't considered?
Since then it's seemed like my lack of money has completely blocked me from entering the gaming industry though. Any books I managed to save up for to buy to learn from would result in massive disappointment, either coming with completely dysfunctional software without spending another few hundred on the full version, or only teaching the extreme basics but then cutting off before teaching enough that I could actually do anything with it.
Free online tutorials are even worse, when I started trying to learn flash; which was hard as hell to find a freeware compiler for since the official version costs hundreds, I went with tutorials and i'm now fairly certain I know less about flash now than I did before I started. One tutorial tells me to put everything on the screen and refer to it in code in the time line then another says not to put anything out and make various classes, the next one more advanced tells me to make pseudo-classes within the main class inside the time line. Every single tutorial ever seems to be so vastly different from each other in technique that anything I learn from one is absolutely incompatible with anything else, even using the same technique I often end up with most tutorials having examples of code that only functions in exactly that one particular use, and using the same kind of code in anything else at all causes horrible crashes and errors.
It would be a million times easier to learn something with a teacher, but again my lack of funds stabs me in the face, I can't even afford to imagine going to a college to learn to program.
At this point, I'm working in waste management, earning barely enough to pay rent and almost not starve. I have had hundreds of great ideas come and go, many ideas come to me that while I was unable to act on, some company other company would eventually come up with the same idea and be successful with it.
Yet even after getting past that, whatever language I can eventually learn, I still can't afford to hire people to do music, sound, graphics, and everything so I'd have to try to get a job in it. Unfortunately I live in the middle of literally nowhere so anything I'd get would have to be telecommuting, which puts me in competition with every programmer looking for work in the world.
At least if I was poor but in a larger city I might have been able to go to conventions and try to make friends and network my way into like an internship or something to learn and work on into the industry. As it is now though it feels like there's a wall that won't let me pass until I've earned enough money first.
Is there any way to get moving into the the game industry without needing to drop a ton of cash first that I haven't considered?
