Hello to everyone

Since this is my first entry, I guess I should say Welcome Everyone! My name is Bruce Merz and I am an Independent Game Developer on the East Coast. I have been interested in game development since I played my first video game of Pong. That was 20 years ago. That's when I got my first computer, a TRS 80 Pocket Computer with 1.5 Kb of memory. Wow! It even had a thermal printer that printed on ribbon paper. I started learning to program on it. My first program was a dice roller for Dungeons & Dragons. Then this sample dice roller started growing into a Player Character Creator. These first programs were written in BASIC. I could load the program into memory from a tape, randomly create a PC, print it out, and then play the game. Did that amaze my friends.

After the TRS 80 Pocket Computer, I got a TRS Micro Color Computer. Now, I could program in color. I still remember my first program that moved a block figure of a man around the screen. I laughed for about 10 minutes. It took me a week to figure out how to get it to do that. At that time, there was no Internet and no books to read about Game Programming.

I decided then that I wanted to be a game programmer. I went back to school and took classes in programming, system design, and got an Associate Degree. Then I got hired by the school and started working with computer networks. The real world took over and I worked on the school's network for 16 years and my dreams had to be put on hold.

I was in an automobile accident this past November and got injured. Nothing serious, I will be going for surgery to repair a ruptured Quad this week. I wouldn't be able to return to work until March, 2008. I'm going to able to get back to an idea of a game. I'll talk about this in my next blog.