Game Development, My gateway-drug to programming & UI/UX design
Hello! My name is Dimitris and I am 24 years old. Up until the summer of 2015 I was a student at Södertörns University where I studied game development with a programming orientation. For as long as I can remember, I have always been an avid gamer, and thus i began studying in order to one day become a game developer. During my education I got to partake in making a lot of different games, and the more games I worked on, the more I came to love becoming a developer. Even though I really love games, I realized that games wasn't the only thing I enjoyed developing. As I worked on different games due to assignments, I often caught myself thinking about how the user was going to interact with the game, and how to further improve this user-game-interaction rather than solely focusing on making the actual gameplay better. This new-found interest about the user, in combination with my good attention to details, made me want to work on, and focus more on, the interfaces and the menu-systems. Because that is one of the biggest way a game can provide the player with important information, for example such as the players health, or ability cooldowns.
When I later started my internship I got to work on the development of a game for handheld devices, rather than for PC as I had done up until that point. And what caught my interest was, once again, the user input. Due to the game being developed for handheld devices, one couldn't use a keyboard and a mouse, or a controller. Instead the interface had to be designed for a much smaller screen, but at the same time not limit the players field of view. This new way of thinking got me even more hooked on UI and UX design and programming.
After I graduated, I wanted to develop more things, not just games. So I started looking up web development, and signed up for a course at a university. At first it was just out of curiosity, but I quickly grew to really like HTML5 and CSS3. It allowed me to design and develop websites. And a website is pretty much an exchange of information. Information that the site wants to convey to the user, and ways that the site gives to the user for navigation purposes.
My current goal is to be able to program, and to be able to work as a UI/UX designer whether it be games, apps or websites.
I am still in the process of learning HTML5,CSS3 and Javascript, and thus this site will, in addition to being my portfolio site, be my experimental grounds as i grow as a developer.