I admit that your comment about making a text-based game brought a smile to my face because, while studying Computer Science in college some eleven years ago, I was instructed in the absolute basics of Turbo Pascal 6 and proceeded to use the language to construct my magnum opus, 'The Castle of Deceit', a sprawling, path-branching, and doubtlessly crap, tale of swords and wizardry that, in essence, was a 'Choose Your Own Adventure Story' in digital format. This is, as best as I can remember, the only full game I have ever programmed, though I'm now going to try to put something together in StencylWorks in a bid to get the creative juices flowing again.
Thanks for the advice and good luck with your text-based adventure. I'm sure it'll turn out a hell of a lot better than mine did.
Hehe, no worries mate. It's not always about how great the product is, but what you learnt from it and how you can transfer those skills! And besides, PHP is a lot different to Turbo Pascal 6, I'd imagine.
With the website, may be you want to get a more flexible/modular blog script? I've never dealt with blogs so I can't help you there, but I'm sure there's a simple solution.
Reading your posts it sounds like you'd lend yourself well to some sort of production role. Look for associate producer positions. Having management and marketing experience would look great for an ass. prod. application. I do hope you're prepared to take a pay cut though, because ass. prod. is often an entry level position even with your experience.
Thanks for the advice here. Paycut is absolutely to be expected but as said, willing to anything to get into the industry.
By complete happenstance it turns out there is a video game developer in my home town. The town where I live. The town where I have lived for most of my life and somehow I never even heard of them despite the fact that they are literally - quite literally - on the opposite side of the road where I eat my lunch every single day, in a building I stare at from 40 feet away for thirty minute intervals, five days a week. As far as I'm aware, there are no developers in my whole country besides this one and it was sitting under my dysfunctional nose all this time.
So naturally I sent them a particularly impassioned e-mail about week ago and was called in for a fuller conversation. They've since agreed to take me on full time basis if I want it, but the salary is unfortunately unworkable for me (although this is the same salary that all its employees supposedly operate on, so it's proof, if proof was needed, of the challenges some might face when trying to get their foot in the door). Fortunately they seem to have taken a liking to me, so they’ve agreed to take me on with whatever time I can give them, so I’ll hopefully working with them a couple of days a week if I can convince my current employer to downgrade me to part time.
They're a small-time and reasonable young mobile phone game developer with six members of staff producing increasingly promising iphone and Adroid casual games. I'm excited beyond the telling of it and hope to learn a lot.
Thanks to those who contributed to this thread! Seems I managed to worm my way into the industry after all. Unfortunately for those looking to emulate my good fortunate, there's very little to learn from me. I just got incredibly bloody lucky.
