This area of my profile was looking stunningly blank, and leaving me horribly depressed. Hence, I begin:
I started modding, and game development off with Blizzard's Warcraft Three: The Frozen Throne. I played a few of the melee games, but never really got into them. The amount of custom content that has been built for the war3 engine is simply astonishing. This was something that I had never experienced before, and I was interested. I started off with just some basic little 'mapping' and using the GUI provided. From there, I got into the artistic, and coding side of the game. I learnt to model, and I made some skins. The language that War3 uses for it's scripting is a huge pain, but fortunatley there are some extensions to it, built by the community to add more OOP features (libraries, structs, scopes, ect).
After a while, just playing around (years?) I had picked up quite a few skills that would be applicable to modding other games, and making mine own. I learnt Python as my first *real* language, and fell in love with it. I wrote some arcade style games in it, as well as a few bots. From there, I was drawn into C(++), as a language that I was using to communicate with some specific hardware (National Instrument's CRIO, as the case may be), and am moderatley proficient in it now.
Artistically, I'm a devout GIMP, and Blender user ( Gimp.org and Blender.org ), rather than PS, or 3dsMax, basically because I'm just cheap. This aside, since I learnt on GIMP, I prefer it over photoshop, and would have a very hard time learning another modelling program, due to Blender's unique UI, and methods.
As to my gaming tastes, they are pretty wide. I enjoy RTS's such as Spring:BA, and Starcraft, RPG's such as Dungeon Lords, Diablo (I&II), Baldur's Gate, and of course Nethack. I won't bother to list all of the games I play, but those ones should cover the main basis. Another thing I'll mention is that I also enjoy many/adventure puzzle games, such as the Myst series, and Longest Journey & Dreamfall.
