Hello! I am Loki, more formally known as Nicholas Sanguine. I am grateful for the opportunities I have been granted in life finding myself pursuing programming. If you’re reading this you certainly already knew that much though, so who am I, how did we get here? Let’s find out.
As a kid I worked with my father in the garage quite a bit building various things. This then would leak into playing video games when it was too cold to be out there my favorites still being Halo 2, Fable the Lost Chapters, and Castlevania Curse of Darkness. I really found myself immersed in these worlds as we shared back and forth working through the stories and replaying individual levels. I understood how long it took to build something in the real world to play with so at the time the idea of building these entire worlds was completely magical to me.
The process of creation within these worlds I find is quite similar though. We draft a blueprint (design document), gather our tools (plugins), and set to work building our framework (grayboxing the scene), and continue to refine the project until we have the blueprint actualized(set dressings in). These processes of hand crafting these things can be incredibly satisfying. Much like architectural design is revered as a form of artistry in some cases I believe Video Games to also be art.
Let’s skip over to highschool I was going to Oppenheim Ephratah Saint Johnsville, more specifically sophomore year, I am looking at colleges. I knew I wanted to work on something of importance to me. Be it beneficial for people by completing a task or simply an escape. Through this process I was working with my father. Continuing to build with my hands and enjoy working with customers and bringing joy to their lives through something of my own creation. Not long into this process I found Champlain, RPI, and RIT for various programs and knew I wanted to go to one of them but wasn’t certain where yet.
Junior year of high school I am going to BOCES part time learning the Intro to Cybersecurity. I found this interesting alongside the other base skills of hardware and software but wasn’t super enthusiastic about it. During this I was on the schools bowling team and was in love with Cross Fit as a way of doing better by myself. Alongside embracing band wholeheartedly as I had been playing Saxophone since the fourth grade.
Senior year rolls around, I have an internship with the school that became me being our only IT guy. So I had to manage old documentation, getting it up to date, fixing day to day computer problems for faculty, and preparing computers for state testing. I found myself wanting to make something more with computers for people. So I decided I wanted to go to Champlain for Game Programming as the logic of the computers meshes best with my mind and the overall artistry of crafting these games.
Through college I have found many issues with the systems with which we are taught and in a later endeavor I would like to discuss my ideas for how to fix these. For now what have I gained in this? A love for rugby, a love for interdisciplinary work and thinking, and appreciation for the history of this craft. There is an incredibly rich history of solving complex problems within very tight confines that we can spend months and months exploring. It really is quite interesting. Alongside looking into competitive games I stumbled into shout casting from time to time.
In this blog I wish to focus on those learning moments I have in some projects and making a platform for those to come to answer questions that they may have. Art is for everyone and even programming can be a beautiful artform as you find the soul of your fellow developer as you explore a code base. Being for everyone I am attempting to be as industrial jargon free as possible so as many people can find these useful as possible. Using my father as one of the testers on the posts as I make several renditions and relentlessly update these posts so he, as a Civil Engineer who hasn’t touched code in ages, can read and understand the high level premises of why a post has importance. Alongside maybe a couple write ups on some of the games that make up the industry’s history.
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