Biography
I’ll tell you a bit about what I’ve been doing last semester, why I wasn’t in school and how I ended up here at INHolland.
After I got my Havo diploma in june 2007, I was not sure about what I wanted to do after. I and one of my best friends, Tim, still had the plan to end up in gamedevelopment together. We’d had this plan since our childhood, but neither of us had a good idea on how to get there. We had been looking around for a while, and we found a Game Design course in a college, highly respected for their artistic courses. The school had scheduled a pre-training of ten weeks, starting in october 2007. From then on, Tim and I focussed on that course. We first visited an open day of the HKU, after which we made a decision. We would both take the pre-training later that year, to start the real course in the following semester. We would find a job to keep up busy for the rest of the year. So we signed up. During the period that I finished my high school exams and got my diploma, I talked to a few people that had also taken a course at the HKU (some did over 25 years ago). They all thought I had made an excellent decision.
Things changed in September that year. Tim and I got a letter from the HKU, explaining that they had dropped the pre-training. Instead, the HKU would offer a workshop of a single day in February 2008. This bummed us out, both feeling like we had wasted a full year because of this. Ofcourse, both of us being gamers, we did enjoy the lack of school.
It was around that time that I joined team Pre-Mind, with which my gaming carreer got a massive boost. Practically, playing for Pre-Mind was the job I had planned on finding, since I spent so much time on it daily. Because of a lack of a normal daily schedule, my day/night rythm slowly shifted about 90°. I would go to bed around 4am and get up around noon. This kept up for about 6 months, pretty much spending all my time behind my PC.
Ofcourse, my parents didn’t really encourage me to do this. Because I didn’t go to school anymore, they charged me €250 a month. This caused my fortune (relatively) I had built up with my paper job a year earlier to slowly drain. And around the end of January, it was depleted. Obviously, I had to find a job, which I did. I was hired as a contruction worker for Hoogeboom Zeilmakerij BV. It was terrible. 40 hours a week. It is the toughest and most straining job I have ever had. The working standards were far below the national Arbo standards. I frequently had to carry around heavy rolls (+/-30kg) of plastic sail, breathe toxic smoke (from welding the sails), use unsafe machines and do dangerous manouvers to get work done. On top of that, it turned out I was allergic to some type of glue that was in the most common type of sail. The skin on my hands pretty much fell of my hand. The skin on my fingertips reminded me of a dried out lake bed in the desert. It was really painful. I had to start using a cream to soften my skin a bit. Working with gloves was out of the question. The work required much precision, which was undoable with any type of gloves. Most of my colleagues there (all but two) weren’t too fond on new guys, and since I was the youngest one there, that didn’t really turn into any type of friendship. As soon as I had enough money to pay off my parents for the rest of the semester, I was out of there. That was three months later.
Just after I got my job, Tim and I went to the workshop of the HKU. It was a 6 hour schedule, in which we would do a project, much like the projects we would be doing in the Game Design course. Tim and I were put into different groups that day. This wasn’t according to plan, but it turned out to be fine, seeing that we got to tell eachother the different findings and experiences of that day. I was disappointed though. The workshop confirmed my fears that this course would focus most of the effort onto the artistic side of designing games, not so much on the technical aspects of developing the game. The school selected which students to accept into the course, by judging them from a portfolio, in which they were looking for artistic qualities. For me, this was the final nail in the coffin. Never in my life had I made much art, or wanted to make any. Tim also decided not to go, for less clear reasons. To this day, he’s still living at home, working.
After I had quit my job, I quickly fell back into my daily 4am/1pm nighttime routine and fulltime service in Pre-Mind. From this point on, I really didn’t know what to do. I decided not to go to the only course that originally interested me. It was time to start looking again. This was when I approached Erik, my best friend, to ask what his future plans were. He was still in highschool, as he didn’t graduate the year before (I was his classmate). He told me that he didn’t really have plans on what to do after he graduated. But, he told me, the only course that really interested him was Technical computer science (freely translated). After he had told me about it, my focus shifted to finding a good college that offered that course. We eventually made plans to go into this together, and the first school of choice was INHolland Alkmaar, since it was really close to our homes.
Erik and I went to an open day in March of 2008, where we had a really good conversation with Dick Schrama. In this conversation, we talked about the contents of the course, and the focus of what we would be learning. I asked him about how this relates to game development, and he was optimistic. This course would offer lots of programming and development. Not games perse, but the next best thing. There even was a game-like application that we would build at the end of the second semester. Strangely though, he didn’t recommend me to take this course specifically to get into game development. But that didn’t matter. Erik and I were already conviced that this course would satisfy our interest more than any other course we could think of. So we signed up, and we started in September 2008. Ten weeks later, this is where I stand right now.