Hi, I'm Jesse, from MA, USA.
My earliest memories as a child was using my father's computer magazines to type in BASIC games on my fathers Atari 800, then we upgraded to an ST, with one of the first external hard drives for the ST (I still remember my father telling us not to jump around the desk, lest the heads collide, or something to that effect, lol). I didn't know what I was typing, and wasn't trying to learn how to program at the time. But it was a great feeling to know that you could type in a few instructions and have a brand new game to play.
Fast forward 25+ years. Over the years I've dabbled with C/C++, Java, Visual Basic, Python PHP and Javascript, never mind a few proprietary languages I had to learn at my last place of employment.
I've taught myself enough about web dev and PHP to turn out a very complete app/site, and when ever I look into another language, the learning curve is that much smaller because of all of my past programming experiences.
I've been focusing more on languages that would allow me to create client/server and desktop apps lately, and have found that Python does most of what I need and want to do. I can use Python to create GUI's, client server software, and even 2D/3D games. And if I need it to do something it doesn't already do, or does too slowly, I can just extend it with C/C++.
I've decided that I've spent much too much time this past 5+ years of teaching myself how to program focusing on programming topics and theory that will make me more marketable, rather than focusing my programming time on subjects that I find interesting and enjoyable. This in turn has made the time I've been spending programming more of a chore than anything. To make a long story short, I've decided that I'm going to spend more time coding what I find fun, rather than what I think will bring in more money. And since I've done that, the thrill and enjoyment of making computers do what I want them to do has come back 10 fold.
I've always had a passion for gaming, all the way back to playing joust/archon/pit fall/etc, on the Atari ST's tape drive (the ones that have the cartridge that looked like an audio tape), up to the competitive league play in a CoD clan I was in, and the hours and hours spent grinding in WoW lol.
One of the saddest things I've seen in the gaming industry was the rise of better graphics. Don't get me wrong, I love eye candy and a great looking game, but it seemed that for a time, game companies focused more on eye candy than game play. One thing to say about games back in the day was, what they lacked in graphics, they made up for in game play and entertainment value. Although, I have noticed that things are coming back around full circle again. As high end graphics are not such a novelty these days, game companies are focusing more on game play again. Just look at the Wii.
Anyway, back to what brings me to Construct and this great community. I've been using the great FREE online ebook Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python, which is a great online book that teaches the very basics of python and programming games. The book also seems to leave off where the book Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame picks up.
While I was looking for online python game programming resources, I stumbled upon Game Maker 7. Thank goodness, but GM7 won't work on my computer. When it loads up, it asks if I want to use "Basic" or "Advanced" mode. Regardless of which option I choose, once I click a button, the dialog box closes and that's it, no program, no hanging process, nothing, even after updating graphics card drivers.
THANK GOODNESS!!! Because that led me to continue my search, which led me to Construct, an Open Source alternative, that seems to be competitive to GM7 even before hitting the v1.0 release (my opinion is based on reviews, blog posts and forums threads, as I haven't been able to get GM7 working). Man, what a find.
I'm really looking forward to a fully functional Python scripting feature set. From reading a few tutorials and discussions regarding the Construct way of doing things, I understand and appreciate the fact that a Python scripting interface is not absolutely needed (in fact, the most impressive thing about Construct, in my opinion, is all that can be done without typing one line of code), but it would be great to have the option to add custom scripts, for those of us that do have some coding experience, or those of us that would like to learn and dabble with a bit more code.
And I'm also really looking forward to the addition of SDL/OpenGL, and the removal of Prof-UIS that's mention in This Forum Thread. Just these two design decisions with be huge strides toward cross-platform development.
I am going to keep my eyes open around here, and I hope to be able to help port Construct to Linux in the near future. If I could, I'd love to pull a dev aside and ask a few questions regarding porting Construct, but I don't want to high-jack this thread to do so.
Well, this is much more of an intro of myself than I had planned . I am just so very excited about this project and it's potential. Keep up the good work folks, I know I'm not the only one that appreciates your hard work!