Hello, world! (Starting a gamedev blog)

Hi there! My name is Ben Morris, and I'm a graduate student in Biology, a developer, and a hobbyist indie game developer.

I began programming as a kid. The thing that drew me to programming was and has always been making my own games. I've been developing games since I could type at about age 7. I started out making modifications to the iconic Nibbles and Gorillas QBasic programs that came with DOS, trying to change the Nibbles snakes to lizards and the gorillas in Gorillas to dinosaurs. As a kid, I ran a popular online Pokemon "sim" (a very 90's term, a web-based game involving finding and battling Pokemon) and developed some Pokemon fighting games in QBasic and Visual Basic. Most of the games I created in the old Basic days never saw the light of day beyond my room, school, and my local circle of friends. (By the way, if you ever played Charmander's Lost Forest back in the 90's, give me a shout! I bet I can still remember your username.)

My coding chops have come a long way since - I have a B.S. now in computational biology and am working on a PhD that involves computational data analysis and synthesis. I use about a dozen languages with some level of proficiency. In my spare time, I continue to develop games. A few years ago, I released my first game professionally (Summoner on Android - related blog post on my personal blog) on the Android market. While the game is fun and brought in some nice "take the wife out to dinner" money, it wasn't something I could quit my day job over (and to be fair, that was never the goal.) I learned a lot from the release process, and realize that if I had put a little more time and effort into the game before and after release, particularly into the social aspects of developing a game and building up a community, I could've seen more success, possibly a lot more. I have a couple other projects currently in progress.

With that in mind, I'm starting a new development blog where I'm going to post updates and technical overviews of my current projects. I used to post intermittently about game development on my personal blog, but now I'm reserving that for more academia- or life-related posts and am creating this blog exclusively for game dev content.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned! I'd like to generate content that the readers, either indie developers or indie game enthusiasts, will enjoy. Please shoot me an e-mail at ben [at] bendmorris.com if you'd like to chat or have any suggestions or questions - I'd genuinely love to hear from you.