My name is Julian Watzinger, and I was born in August 1992 in Salzburg, Austria. I still live there, and currently I’m visiting the FH Salzburg, taking the course called „MultiMediaArt“. I really enjoy the variety of subjects there, but my main focus in all this is still programming, specially games, thats why I’ve specialised in „Games & Augmented Reality“.

I’ve actually been a gamer for quite some time, I can remember starting with the Gameboy Color and the SNES as my first consoles. With this passion, I’ve also grown a passion for creating games myself. I used to draw out levels for games before I was even old enough to even comprehend how a game is being made.

I started with using C++ as my first programming language at the age of 15, starting with writing simple console programs. I was overwhelmed with the information once I’ve hit the chapters about classes, and dropped it for a while. A few years later I discovered the RPG-Maker, driven by the need to make a sequel to my favourite game of all time, Terranigma from the SNES area. This Rpg-Maker featured a scripting language called „RGSS“ based on Ruby, and there I learned the basics about classes, OOP, and so forth.

With that knowlegde, I got back to C++ when I decided to write a thesis about programming games with it for my graduation. It was a hit or miss : I didn’t know anything more than I did about C++ since I dropped it, and I didn’t know any of DirectX. But it worked out in the end, and I had gotten an understanding for the basics of „real“ game programming.

At some point I decided I want to realise a game idea in 3d, which should be titled „Dead mountains“. After some time I noticed that I lacked both content, and that my code got worse and horrible to use the further I progressed. I didn’t know much about design patterns back then, and so I dropped the project at some point.

Now I’ve finally come to a point where I got a solid code base I can use for my further game projects, that is my Acclimate engine. I’ve learned much about coding practices, patterns and so forth, and I’ve successfully used them to create a project I can work on. I’ve been working on the engine for about 9 months, and wish on continuing in my spare time, and possibly for further projects in my education. I however want to achieve a position in professional game developer at some time, and I don’t know if having a full time game job as well as working a lot on a personal game project will work out, but I’ll see about that.