About Me...

Hi, my name is Kevin Phillips and I am for all purposes a big, old nerd.  I've got a scattered history when it comes to gaming, starting out writing games as soon as I got my hands on my first home computer, exchanging that for the 3D animation industry - and now that games development fire seems to be coming back again.

As they say, history has a habit of repeating - or in this case looping around.

My roots

Back in 1981, I got my first home computer...  A Sinclair ZX81, with 1k of memory, black and white display, no sound, membrane keyboard (well, more of a keypad if you think about it) and very little graphics capability.

However what that inspired was the need to learn to program.  In fact, you couldn't use home computers without a little knowledge of computer programming - even if you never wanted to program, you did need to know at least the LOAD command to let you load up games... from cassette tape!

Programming is way more fun when its more then drawing graphs or solving equations, so the natural path to take for many kids back then was to design and write computer games.  And that's where it all started...

A couple of years later, I upgraded to a ZX Spectrum, the machine that is  known for being one of the 'big names' in 80's home computing (competing alongside machines like the Commodore 64).  The ZX Spectrum had color, high res graphics, sound (well, a "beeper" that could play different notes (one at a time - not multiple)) and rubber keys rather then a membrane keypad.  It also came with 16k of memory!  Yes!  Now we were playing with power.

A few months later it didn't take long to need to upgrade to 48k of memory.  Most the best games required it (Manic Miner, all the way!), and well, you can fit so much more in for your own programs too!

Its where a lot of my interest in game development really kicked started - with 1k just not 'doing it' for me, nor the 16k memory expansion I eventually got for the ZX81 (which was flakey at best when the machine was knocked and it would crash everything).

The development years

The tough part of the 80's was that you were not just limited by the hardware, but the knowledge how to write games was something you had to learn - somehow, and from someone.  One very important part of the 80's was the home computing magazine market.  Unlike today's magazines, a majority of home computing magazines dedicated at least 30-50% of the pages to game listings.  That's right. No easy downloading of games - you got a magazine and typed the games in by hand!

Magazines, along with the many "Programming your computer" books were the education that everybody needed.  Its hard to imagine having no access to information like we do today where everything can be found in 30 seconds through an online search or a YouTube video.  But its how it was...

I can't even recall just how many games I would have written back then (though I really wished I still had more of the cassettes containing them).  I did a bit of everything, from personal ideas to trying to develop clones of arcade games.  It was not just to play the game, it was the challenge to be able to prove that I could create the game myself and make the code optimized for speed and memory usage.  Exciting, if somewhat nerdy adventures!

Oh, and one last thing worth mentioning after having someone recently mention how 'unbelievable' it was that I wrote code on paper...  Yes, writing and drawing pixels on graph paper is how we did it.

Today

Today - I work in the 3D graphics side of computing. I've worked for over 5 years at a local animation studio, ran a user group (since 1997 - and its still running today!  Please feel free to click this link and RSVP!  It'd be great to say hello), worked on two books, and now I'm teaching 3D.

Back in the 80's, I would never have imagined this is the direction I would take, but like programming its got its own problem-solving challenges as well.  As far as 3D goes, I'd been mildly interested in it back in the mid 80's - mostly through a few games, as well as a 3D software program for the spectrum called Vu3D.  I eventually coded a few very simple 3D programs that drew, ahem, cubes and sine wave graphs on screen...  It was more out of code curiosity then anything (ie. wanting to work out how to program that kind of thing) but it wasn't until years later that I would discover it was going to be my passion.

Now

There's been a huge resurgence in independent game development.  In the past, game development was about learning to make the most out of the primitive hardware of the day, it was the challenge to write a game itself and understand all the algorithms that went on behind it.

Today its about game development tools, fast hardware and more the creative side to produce games that are fun and look very slick.  The distribution is instant (online), free resources are literally scatter across the internet and the tools have all the hard bits covered (ie. you don't need to hand-code a 'sprite routine' to draw a block on the monitor before you can write that game)

Plus you can play your games 'on the run' through mobile devices.

The excitement of seeing what can be done these days, the tools, the platforms and performance...  And with a quickly growing gaming industry and community here in New Zealand, the thought of coming back to my roots is too much to ignore!