The beginning
This is the begining of what I’m striving to continue running for quite some time. My initial reason for starting this was to hopefully get more interest from potential employers. After thinking about it some, I want to make it something more. I want this to be a place for discussion about programming, game development, tech news, whatever. A learning environment. The world is full of negativity, and if I can foster one little area of positivity, I will.
I also want to push myself. I was diagnosed with ADHD last year and I want to push myself to put coherent thoughts down and put them out where people can read and criticize them. I want to improve my technical writing skills (or maybe just learn some of those). I want to write tutorials to help people learn, even if there are hundreds of the same thing already out there. Maybe I’ll explain something slightly differently than someone else and it’ll click for someone.
With that, here’s a brief introduction:
My name is Corbin Staaben and, as of this writing, I am 30 years old. I enjoy reading, coding, and playing video games. I spend way too much money supporting new and exciting tabletop RPGs and services for those games that I never really get to play. I work as a software engineer. I’ve been married for 10 years and have two wonderfully rambunctious daughters. My ADHD has caused me to pick up and drop a plethora of hobbies and activities, and I’m hoping to make maintaining this site and writing posts here stick.
The plan
I think my first thing to pursue is writing my own rogue-like. I’ve seen a couple, and worked on a couple of similar projects, but I’ve never dived into the deep end of procedurally generated content and taken a good, hard look at game development. Initially, I think I’ll just follow a tutorial, probably for Python since I’m pretty familiar with that, and write it in Go. Each post will contain things I learned, things I struggled with, and the end result of the progress I made. Who knows, maybe by the end of it I’ll have an idea of what to write for my own tutorial series.
I would also like to pursue learning some GoDot (I think that’s what it’s called). A couple of work friends have published a game or two using it, and it sounds intriguing. I have had a project one of my college professors gave us stuck in my head for quite some time as a learning exercise in Python and Rust. He called it “Heroes vs. Monsters”, and in CS 101 it was a simple text-based battle. You could attack, you could heal, or you could do a special attack. The monster would do the same. He made it more challenging in CS 201: now, there was a dungeon, you had to fight your way to the end, and now you had a party of heroes fighting a group of monsters. Not a very complex game or project, but one I would enjoy recreating. I’ve even thought about giving a bit of a silly spin to make it something my kids could play.
Wish me luck!
Until next time,
Corbin