I can't imagine why your interested enough in me to read this, but I also can't count the number of times I read someone's bio just for the sake of doing so. Thus I'll indulge in this bit of self-importance. As it's said "people are really only interested in people."

I live in the Nebraska, USA, land of of the great dusty nothingness. My first discipline is as a student and my greater joys are in learning things. As such I have a difficult time completing projects which aren't rigidly defined, and an even harder time completing ones that are. The wicked combination of my own spastic nature and the utter lack of similarly inclined people in my area has prevented me from completing most of the many projects which I have embarked upon.

In my few years I've studied computer science, photography, computer graphics, philosophy, game development, programming, writing, history, filmmaking, musical composition, linguistics, psychology, business, networking, etc. At one point or another I have had serious plans to be a professional game designer, 3D modeler, programmer, author, director, musician, and, most recently (and probably most seriously) a teacher. It took me many years to recognize a consistent thread in these projects, that is, teaching.

My longest running, and too a great extent continuous, passion (other than teaching) is that for game development. I had long (five years) planned to be a professional game designer, up until about a year ago. I find the games industry to be one of the strangest around. It's the only professional endeavor I can note that is not only disrespected by the population at large, but really has no understanding of it's own potential value. In fact, the number of developers in the industry truly pushing games onward as any sort of artistic endeavor can be counted on a non-disfigured person's fingers, and half of them do not themselves believe that games can ever have artistic value.

My own hippocracy is, of course, that I've done nothing independantly to prove that such progression is possible. And while I can come up with dozens of reasons for this, there aren't any that don't sound at least a little self- serving. The most valid reason I can sight, is that games of substance are really never going to be possible as a one-man-band. My experiances with internet "teams" have quite thoroughly discouraged me from tackling things in that way. Maybe one of these days I'll run across some people who are serious, talented, and willing to invest a lot of time, but for the moment I'll keep making pong demos.

Then again Pong isn't all I make. A few years ago I completed a small, but robust Scorched Earth clone for the Gameboy Advance, titled FallingStar. Seeing a game you made run on an actual console is the ultimate trip, and thanks to crafty Asian bootleggers I was able to set up a fully functional GBA development studio in my bedroom for about 200 USD.

More recently I've become a devotee of the Ogre rendering engine, a phenomenal piece of software, maintained by one of most skilled coders I've seen in the open- source games sector. The raw power of that engine has lead me to once again think I can complete a project. I have a lot of good ideas, but I'm spending most of my time maintaining the OgreTok library, which adds Tokamak physics to Ogre. This has been a remarkebly enjoyable project, if incredibly frustrating in places. Hopefully I'll get to see it used in at least one or two quality independant projects.

More to come when I feel the need...

My Resume.