Introduce Yourself
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My Name is Jon Silvera / AKA Jonnyboy. FUZE started out in 2012 as a question. Could we recreate a coding environment in the same mould as the 1980s 8Bit micros that got everyone coding like there was no tomorrow. We originally started with out own coding workstation called the FUZE. The main idea was to have a version of BASIC at the forefront and back it up with plenty of learning material. We sold around 5,000 of them. Not many really. However we started running FUZE Coding Workshops up and down the country. This have been very popular and proved we had developed a method of teaching that produced excellent results.. every single time.
With this experience we approached Nintendo to ask for development rights on the Switch so we could bring our coding platform to the device.
The results are exactly what we intended in the beginning. Putting FUZE, a very advanced and modernised variation of BASIC, on the Switch simply turns it into a home computer just like the old days. In fact it is possible to get to your code even faster than we could then. Add a keyboard and a larger screen and it becomes a proper coding workstation. Undock it and carry on in the bedroom, bus, tube, toilet, plane, train and so on.
FUZE has been an incredible journey so far, a tough one too. Hopefully we will now reap the rewards, not financially, though that would be nice of course, but rather by bringing an easy to learn, very accessible and blazingly powerful programming environment to all generations of coders either at the very start of their adventure or the seasoned professionals wanting to flex their 1337 skilz1
Let me introduce you to the band..
Pianofire - as old as i am and from the same town back in the 1970s and 80s. Colin is a professional coder by trade and quite simply the nicest chap ever! Colin's work on the help content and underlying system has been invaluable.
MikeDX - Mike and I have been involved (together) in the game coding scene for almost 20 years. He is an incredible talent across all platforms and a all round dude
Martin - another one from Minehead and the same era as Colin and I. Martin is such a cool frood and has a heart of gold to boot! A true hard worker and another great bloke
Luke - Luke has written underlying engines that drive the 3D, 2D and audio functions in FUZE. His talent knows no bounds. For a 19 year old his abilities defy all laws
Kat - our in-house 3D graphics designer. Kat, quiet as a mouse but ferociously talented. Look out for our first DLC pack - it is all Kats work.
Dave - A fantastically talented musician and FUZE teacher. Dave has also written the tutorial section of the help system as well as a great deal more. Dave is also the son of Jonnyboy
Will - Our USA contingent. Will has quietly contributed to FUZE for the last 18 months. He is responsible for the user interface and quite a lot of the 2D functions. Will is a professional pixel artist and demonstrates this rather well in his asset collection in FUZE as well as in his included game Super Arena Mega Blaster!
Ben - just starting high school Ben is a great coder, presenter and quality control assistant - you'll see lots of Ben on the tutorial videos
We also have a few more part-time employees who have contributed along the way so huge thank yous go to Lizzie, Molly, Grace and Charlotte for all their support either testing FUZE and or working at our workshops.
There.. that was more than you bargained for wasn't it!
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Hello!
I am Ben.
I am 16 years old and am starting sixth form next month.I first met Jon at a presentation, that I spoke in, organised by my school, with a room of people in the education industry. Before the presentation, I spoke to Jon, and he told me about FUZE. One thing that really stuck with me after that conversation were the words: "Nintendo Switch".
A few months after that, my school started organising work experience. FUZE immediately came to mind! I made contact with Jon, and agreed to meet him at a holiday workshop to sign a form. This is also where I met Dave and Luke. I was amazed by the attitude of the kids and how much progress they were making; working on games that I didn't know where to begin with!
FUZE Basic provided a graphical output, which allowed for games to be made much easier than in Python, which is where I first started programming. Speaking of which, Python is a very good programming language, that can be used in a lot of ways. For this reason, I don't mean to put Python down, when I say; Fuze 4 Nintendo Switch is much more intuitive, and therefore easier to learn. F4NS makes it easier to understand the basics, and the foundations to programming, and computational thinking, but, beyond that, advanced programmers have the ability to play about with 3D, and other complicated things like that! (I know that this was less about me, but this is how I view FUZE as a language).
Shortly before the work experience week, I was invited to the FUZE office to help categorise the assets that you can use in FUZE 4 Nintendo Switch.
Now, I continue to help the Switch project, and with workshops. Dave and I are also working on a series of video tutorials for the Switch, that will be just another resource that you can use if you are struggling with some of the concepts. (As well as a bit of fun).
I have seen only a chunk of the whole FUZE 4 Nintendo Switch journey, but I am so proud to have been a part of it. Thank you Jon and the rest of FUZE for this incredulous opportunity.
I also cannot wait to see what this growing community can come up with.
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Hi! I'm Dan! I have a background in tech and have fiddled with bits of python and PICO-8, but never to much success. I've been super excited about the accessibility of FUZE⁴ Switch, and I'm hoping that the ability to use it away from a TV will mean I actually finish a project! I've been teaching my younger sister at home, so I'm looking forward to learning together. Here's hoping the community keeps growing after Friday!
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Hi, I'm Joe.
So programming experience - I did Maths in college & as part of that did C on first year & C++ in second year & completely sucked at both. Roll on around a decade later & after getting lost through the cracks in a major restructure my new manager drop a how to program vba in Excel book on my desk - worked through the book & next thing I know my job is mainly writing macros. Would soon learn a bit of SQL to use a Access Database with some of my vba. Since then with the help of Google I got a fair bit better. Have moved on to a SQL Server Database & last year got myself a book & took the leap to vb.net winforms which I've steadily improved at. It'd be a major exaggeration to call me a programmer or developer though.
In terms of video gaming as a kid of the 80s I started off with an Atari 2600 before moving on to the SNES which I loved! Also got a Mega Drive a bit later. Also got the 4 PlayStations, Wii, DS, 3DS & most recently the Switch although gotta admot that after PS2 & Wii I didn't really play the other consoles as much as I might like & probably have more unplayed games for them then played!
Not got a clue what I'm going to try make with this - my nephews might be able to give me ideas (& maybe even give it a go themselves when they get a bit bigger).
I've probably been one of the more negative people on the original forum & Facebook with the delays announcements - hopefully I won't be persona non grata here because of that 😉
I'm hoping to have a lot of fun & maybe make something that's functional - not going to aim any higher then that 😂
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I'm Karl, I work as a developer, and started with an Apple ][ way back when. I've been working with my two kids teaching them more about how computers actually work, using microbits, robots, and ucb logo. They both love the Switch, and I'm excited to show them how much fun it is to have a computer that you can hold in your hands and program on the device itself - I had a Casio FX-802P calculator that I used to program in basic on a 12-character LCD screen to make teeny tiny games.
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hi~
Programming languages I know: R16K1S60 Assembly, Lua, fuxj, @yBASIC, FALSE, CHIP-8
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Hello, I'm Steve, I'm in the high 50s (yes I'm THAT old!) and I'm a huge fan of the golden era of gaming (the 80's)
I started with a lowly 1kb ZX81 and started tinkering with basic on that and then quickly moved to the BBC Model B where I attempted to learn BBC basic and spent many happy years hammering away at the keyboard attempting to make games. After that I moved to the C64 and eventually Amiga where I fell in love with a programming language called Amos. Sadly I'm rather dumb and a slow learner so I never progressed beyond basic, something like machine code is utterly so far over my head that it's in earth orbit.I stumbled onto Fuze quite recently and it proved lucky as my Switch has been collecting dust for many months and I don't see any games coming that really appeal to me so I was considering selling the Switch. Then I saw Fuze and everything changed. I'm super excited for this now and even just ordered a usb keyboard from amazon just to use for it.
My personal aims in Fuze are twofold, first I'd like to create some simple 4 player games for me and my family to enjoy and secondly I'm a huge arcade fan and I'd love to recreate some of my fave games of all time: Berzerk, Galaxian, Mr Do, Dig Dug, Wizard of Wor, Missile Command, Tempest, Robotron, Gyruss. etc
Unfortunately I'm rather dim and uneducated so I might be asking for a help a lot.
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Hi, I'm Lewis. I'm just going into third year of a degree in CS and Maths, and while I have a fair bit of experience in programming (mainly in working with data - I've been doing quite a bit lately with sports analytics), I wanted to gain some more experience with some hardware.
I'm a big fan of board games, in part because of their tactility - you can really feel the tiles being placed, the money being gathered, and the board taking shape. I want to bring some of those feelings to the digital world, and with the capabilities of the JoyCons, coupled with their small form factor, I think there's a lot of potential in using Fuze to blend physical and digital games together. In particular, I'd like to make a game which doesn't require a screen at all!
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Hi. I am Levent. Originally from Turkey, lived in the UK in the 80s and now in Silicon Valley thanks to the ZX-81 computer that introduced me to computing. Owned ZX Spectrum, Grundy Newbrain, Tatung Einstein, Acorn Electron and Commodore Amiga. Like most people here I was amazed by AMOS on Amiga and spent many hours writing simple games. Hopefully Fuze will bring some memories back;)
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Hi All
I'm Jim aged 55 from NW England.
My first experience with a computer / coding was on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum way back in 1982, and I also owned most of the 8 bit computers from that era, my favourite is probably the Tatung Einstein.
In more recent years I came across FUZE BASIC for Raspberry PI / Windows whilst trying to relive my youth, that in turn brings me here as we have a Nintendo Switch in the house and I shall be picking up a copy of F4NS once it launches in the UK.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to wish all THE FUZE team the best of luck and hope everything goes well during the launch and the future.
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Hello fellow coders
My name is Britton, 31 years old, web developer from Wisconsin. I consider my self a bit of a swiss army knife programming wise, as I'm pretty good at solving problems even when I have no background info or knowledge of the topic at hand. Most of my work experience is in a C#, MVC, JQuery stack but over the years I've touched everything from Assembly to PHP.
I have definitely been looking forward to FUZE for at least the past year, as I don't get much free time to code my own personal projects so having the convenience of a coding environment on my switch will help with that tremendously. No major projects in mind at the moment, but I will definitely dabble with some game programming, perhaps try to generate some fractals with the 3D graphics library.
I look forward to being a part of this community, best of luck to all.
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Hello, i'm doumdoum from France.
I started learning Basic on a Sharp PC1211 calculator. That was before "Back to the future".
Then I've coded with many languages :
C64 Basic, Amos, BlitzBasic, Div, DarkBasic, Blitz 3D, Lua Love2d, Pico8, AGK, Smile Basic, and Monkey 2 (my favourite).
The Nintendo Switch can be our creative showroom.
Let's have fun with F4NS. -
Hello. My introduction to programming was the DSiWare called Petit Computer MkII (which is not available anymore, unfortunately) and it brought many great memories of me making games on car trips and spending days and nights staying up finishing my projects (which admittedly, most of them are now deleted). I don't quite do that as much anymore, but I think it will be fun to see how people are introduced to programming with Fuze Basic like how I was with Petit Computer.
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Cut my teeth on Petit Computer.
Familiar with: SmileBASIC, Kotlin, Ruby, JavaScript
Favorite:
Video game: Super Mario World
Sound chip: YM2612
ASCII character: @
Assembly instruction: vsync -
Hi, I'm Michael. I'm a '80s computer kid and member of the 'Generation C64'. The Nintendo Switch is my first game console. I always had computers. I know Fuze from the Raspberry Pi. After reading about F4NS two years ago I immediately bought a Nintendo Switch. I came for programming and stayed for the good games! And now I'm waiting for the launch! :-)
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Hi,
I've been interested in Fuze4 Switch since it was announced and I hope that it does well :)
I've been trying to get into programming for a long time and have recently turned the PC into a "creativity only" device - no more Steam games :)
So the Switch is kind of joining that ethos for myself and my youngest (though there will be games on the Switch!) and I'm really looking forward to seeing what people come up with :) We're both beginners so we'll be at the back of the bus.
GUIs > Command prompts ;)
Speccy > C64 (Obvs)
Amiga FTW :)Ade.
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Hi folks! I'm David, the FUZE Technologies lead tutor, writer of the tutorial content and son of the big boss man, JonBoy. I started working for FUZE after I finished university, initially just to build the FUZE computers.
I have loved video games for as long as I can remember. Dad put an Atari Lynx in my hands when I was just about old enough to press the buttons! Despite being so enamored with games, I never really had a hankering to understand how they worked on a mechanical level. I was content to play, and play them as best as I could.
However. This all changed when I was down at my Dad's one day and we got talking about text adventure games. I think I had just found out about "Zork" and wanted to know what was going on. Dad got the ol' BBC Micro out of the loft, and he showed me a bunch of things. My mind was summarily blown, and I realised then just how much I didn't know. This hooked me.
I began becoming more and more interested in how games work, and wanted to be more involved in the FUZE workshops. I started to design some worksheet projects, and then with a few changes in the company happening, I became the person who drives all over the country, taking our equipment and teaching young people about the basic programming concepts.
I have learned to code entirely through FUZE. First, in FUZE Basic and now with FUZE4 Nintendo Switch. It's been one of the most empowering experiences of my life. As someone who tends to think a lot about quite abstract questions, learning to code has fascinated me at every turn in the road. Communicating these ideas and concepts to people who want to learn is one of the most (perhaps the most) fulfilling things I've ever done with my life. Being able to honestly say you've made a positive difference in a student's life, however small, is one of the best feelings without a doubt.
My academic background is in music. When I was 12, I picked up a guitar and learned Smoke on the Water (of course). The feeling this gave me was instantly addictive, and 15 years later composing music is my main passion, alongside playing games. At 16 I decided to go to aim for university where I could study music formally. I learned a lot, worked hard and met some incredible people. You can hear some of my compositions in the FUZE media section. I hope to create more music for FUZE in the future.
This has all been frankly, unreal. It's awesome beyond belief to see this community begin and I hope with all my heart that this becomes the place we dream it can be.
What a journey... And to think it's only just beginning.
See you round.
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Hello! My name is Josh, aka Dogemon, coming in from the good ol' USA. I love playing games as well as coming up with ideas for new ones!
I've been working on trying to develop games since I was relatively little. Relatively speaking since I am 21. Anyways, I've always wanted to try out some game development for consoles, and F4NS was an absolute shocker to me when I first saw it on the eShop. Needless to say, I am excited for F4NS and hope to learn something good while making games for everyone to enjoy! :)
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I have some experience in C/C++, Java, Lua, json, and a flavor of BASIC. I also wrote an assembler for an assembly language which I made up, which I use to write programs for an emulator I wrote. I might port it to fuze after I try something funky with an Arduino..
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Hi, I'm Kat! I've been working at FUZE Technologies as a 3D artist for just under a year.
I grew up with two older brothers who loved gaming, which was handed down to me, naturally. I never had the opportunity to learn coding at school so never gave it much thought, but upon realising that it was someone's job to create the worlds and characters in the games that I loved, I set my sights on learning 3D art.
At University I had a couple of lessons on python, but jumping right into it with no previous experience was daunting and it didn't seem all that helpful to me at the time. It wasn't until I began working at FUZE that I discovered how easy and fun it can be to get started with coding. When I went along to a workshop for the first time I was taken aback by how quickly the kids could get a simple program running and how much joy it gave them to learn.
I'm incredibly envious as I never had that as a kid, but at the same time I wouldn't change a thing as it all led me here. I'm so excited to see what everyone here can create, and very excited to continue developing my coding skills too! :)
