My programming journey at Gotland.

Lets write a blog post about programming as a variation to all my writings about game design.

Before I started studying at Gotland University (which was merged into Uppsala University earlier this summer), I had programmed in high-school for two years in Java. Among the things I wrote there was an Asteroids game, a game of the Swedish card game Vändåtta with network code (although you had to know the IP for that, so no MMO game) and a game where you where moving a ball towards your mouse and the primary goal was to kill other balls with it.

However at Gotland University, we was going to work with C++. Even though I know that Java is based on C++, I was still unsure of how things were going to go for me programming in C++. And it went a lot better than I expected. Aside from dynamic memory allocation and pointers, both languages are essentially the same with a few syntax differences and different names for methods.

At the end of my first semester, I had not only managed to learn a new programming language (C++), a new Integrated Development Environment (Visual Studio) and a new multimedia library (SDL), I had also managed to use those things to re-create the ball game I wrote in high-school (although with less features, as I had more time to do the initial game in high-school). By the end of next semester, I had managed to program in another new multimedia library (SFML) and learned lots of new things on the way there (mostly things that only programmers can appriciate, but that’s another discussion).

There is two important reasons to as of why I learned so much so quickly. The first one is my motivation, I want to learn to program. There is always something to learn and there are always a million and one ways to improve the code that you’ve already written. The Game Design and Programming program was the best programming program I could find in Sweden (although Game Design is very interesting as well).

The second factor is that I had two really awesome teachers at Gotland University; Rikard Jaksch and Ted Wikman. Both of them where really good and helpful to me when I had those as teachers. Long story short, I don’t think I could’ve asked for any better teachers to have during my first year at University. Once again big thanks to both of you.

So the next time you question that think among the lines of “I will never be able to learn something that quickly” I want to say this for you. You can achieve a lot more in short time than you might think as long as you are motivated to learn it. And it doesn’t apply to just programming either, it applies to art, game design, music creation, cooking or just about anything else in life.