So a little bit about my background. I have been programming since I was around 12. In my early days I loved to play games and I guess at some point in playing Nintendo, and games on the AOL channels, I found that you could make games. I look extensively for game making software to fuel make ambitions, but most were only paid or shareware. I was really into RPG, after watching my cousins playing Final Fantasy VII. They let me take a stab at it. I was instantly obsessed with characters and plot. I had never played anything quite like it. I want to make games like this. I then narrowed my search to RPG makers. At a little while I found a program called RPG Maker 2000. The screen shots were incredible. I wanted to use this software to make my dream game. This was back when dial up internet was a popular thing. I initiated the download… at 5MBs it took a while, but I finally had it. I installed it. I was finally going to make the next final fantasy vii. Nope, error need to install something called a run time package. Okay that is simple enough. Sure enough it is on the same site. Okay download… much to my dismay this file was much bigger than the actual program around 25MB. It was going to take hours. Thats okay I could wait. I would just leave the internet up. The one thing about dial up connections. If someone picks up the phone and the internet shares the same line you lose your internet connection. I didn’t calculate that my parents might need to use the phone while I was trying to let the download finish. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to download that RTP, only to have it fail halfway. It took years to actually get the full file and shortly after we got broadband internet.

I spent the next couple of years familiarizing myself with the program. It was fun, but difficult to understand sometimes. Often times I only had short evenings to play around with it. (My parents didn’t want me on the computers all evening.) I began to make games, none which were very weren’t very good, but the program became a lot easier to use. I still wasn’t sure entirely of what I was doing. I was introduced to a console version of RPG Maker from a friend, who had never seen the PC version. He played around with it and instantly fell in love with it. He introduced me the the RM2k community and their I began to learn the real aspects of programming, using the built in functions. I looked at example and game that had custom menus, battle systems, etc to see if I could recreate them. I didn’t even know what computer programming was at the time. I just knew that you needed customer functions to get customized systems in your game. conditional statements where just that. I knew what a loop did and how to write basic conditions. It wasn’t until years later that I learned what computer programming was. When I took the class in high school it was a breeze. I couldn’t believe there was a class for it! I learned about flash drives and many other things. Visual basic was the tool of choice for our class. It was the first time I had ever opened up Visual Studio, but it didn’t take any time for me to pick up concepts. I had been working with conditionals, variables, loops, and other things for years now. My customization of systems for my game became more advanced. I was able to easily create custom systems with ease. The only factor was time, and whether the effort was worth it or not. The crazy thing is once you learn one programming language, others come easily. The core fundamentals are still there. The only thing that changes is the way you have to use them.

Fast-forward to today. I am not employed as a developer, but I still code, and I can put something from nothing together rather quickly. I guess the title of this article is rather misleading. Maybe I’ll rename it in the future. One of the reasons I am using C# now is that I have had to come up with solutions to problems using code, and by far C# is the quickest and easiest to pick up and just run with. Visual Studio has been an immense help with project organization and workflow. I can remember the first time I opened up Visual Studio 2006, and Fast-forward to now. I could never imagine I would be working on a C# application for automation. Time flies huh?