Hello world!

Introduction

My name is Brandon, I go by Bran.
I live in Oregon with my partner and best friend, Kilee. Together we have a small family of pets. Three cats, three mice, and a ball python. The pets will be mentioned quite a bit more.

I try to be more of an outdoors person, but the truth is, unless its fall or winter I’m really not. Besides being quite pale, I’m pretty sure I have a sun allergy of some kind. With that in mind, I love spending time in the woods, and visiting various gardens. The Hoyt Arboretum and Portland Japanese Garden are two of my favorite places to visit.

When it comes to indoor hobbies, there’s a bit more to talk about. Video games are probably the hobby I spend the most time with, luckily Kilee enjoys gaming with me. I enjoy almost all single player and cooperative games, RPGs and sim games tend to be my most played. Final Fantasy, Dark Souls, Borderlands, and Bioshock tend to be my favorite. I find I enjoy games that have rich stories and deep lore. Over the past year I have been diving into Warhammer, which is it’s own beast. Again, it’s about the story and the beautiful world that is created. That’s what ultimately led me to game programming: story telling and beautiful art. I find that games can be a perfect medium between presenting and creating a story. Furthermore, with modern technology one can create amazing works of art. At the end of it all, I really just don’t want to spend my life doing something I am not passionate about.

Currently, I work for a smaller food manufacturing company as a Continuous Improvement Manufacturing specialist. In essence the job is mostly data collection and analysis, and implementing systems that make other peoples jobs easier. It involves a lot of automation within the Microsoft ecosystem. It can be fun at times, but mostly it just pays the bills.

As for projects, my proposal of launching a game was accepted, but if that wasn’t the case my favorite listed project is the Sim Firefighter. This project seems the most open ended, and there is so much that a developer can do to make this a fun project. One could set up a bunch of different mechanics: player heat, water, systemic weather systems, and so much more. It wouldn’t be difficult to have procedurally generated maps, and have fires pop up both randomly and based on other existing fires. There could also be a system for firefighting preparation like trench digging, clearing brush, and much more that I don’t know about. Of all the project I read that was the one that stuck out the most.

I believe I’ve been typing a bit too long here. Without too much of a topic besides introducing myself, its hard to have a definitive style of ending. Well either way, here’s to recording the developments of the next year and hopefully seeing a game release in June.