Hello, I'm IANRASE, which stands for "I Am Not Really A Software Engineer.
My Name is Matt and I'm 25, and from the US.
I'm a hobbyist programmer, gamer, off-and-on weight lifter, frequent daydreamer, amateur woodworker, master procrastinator, impulsive purchaser of shiny technology, former Arch Linux addict, compulsive micro-optimizer, and almost software engineer.
I studied Software Engineering for 3.5ish years in college (after switching majors from Chemistry and Physics in my first year and Computer Engineering partway through my second year) before realizing that I don't actually like the field itself.
But I still like programming as a hobby and want to keep at it.
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I'm long-winded and ramble-y when motivated to write, so here is the lightly edited long version:
I first learned Python, then C++, Java, C, JavaScript, SQL, C#, Scheme (great for expanding your perspective... but my god are LISPy languages hard to read), MIPS Assembly, and bits and pieces of a lot of other things.
I'm currently taking a break from school to take care of sick family and work on paying off my student loans so that I can return for a degree in Electronics Repair Tech.
So far I have no degree, 5 years of college, 2 more planned, and a strong understanding that indecision may or may not be my problem.
My favorite languages are C and MIPS Assembly for their lack of abstraction, where my constant consideration of the behavior behind the scenes and minute details doesn't get in the way.
My fascination with games and computers began when I was a kid and spent a lot of time playing my cousin's old playstation, NES, and SNES consoles when visiting my grandparents and experimenting with my parent's windows 98 machine when I was 6 or 8ish.
My interest and curiosity really took off after seeing The Matrix when I was 11 and being astounded by all the cool computer stuff - my first encounter with coding was following youtube tutorials for making the "falling code" effect with batch scripts.
I loved the look and feel of a command line interface, which resulted in a fascination obsession with Arch Linux and eventually developed into a general appreciation for minimalist operating systems and an unearned nostalgia for 80s and early 90s home computers.
My first major program was a game I wrote in Python in highschool; it was a side scrolling arcade shooter (like Super Earth Defense Force on SNES) that I made from scratch using MS Paint for sprite making, Audacity for sound effects, and the Python SDL library Pygame. It's a mess of mostly readable spaghetti code that remains a testament to fumbling around with less-than-well-suited tools and beginner mistakes.
I would talk about games, but no one has the time to read all that.
I'm super excited for what F4NS offers: a chance to make my own games on the Switch without risking my Nintendo account by hacking the console or applying to become a serious developer for the Switch platform.
There's a lot I want to do, but right now my two goals are a text based game along the lines of either C:DDA or Liberal Crime Squad, and a first person dungeon crawler.
I'm hoping most for the ability to texture 3D objects (or render images as manipulable planes at least) and am hoping for some kind of hardware acceleration in the future, although improving content sharing and creation features should probably be the highest priorities right now as I think that will facilitate growth of the userbase the greatest at the moment and prevent F4NS fizzling before it can reach any of its massive potential.
Nintendo has a (justifiably) tight grip on the Switch, but I hope that won't prevent Fuze from continuing to improve and evolve.
This is more of a bio than an introduction at this point so I'll stop here and wrap up by saying I'm really excited for F4NS!
