A Return from the Shadows

I am sorry. I have falied in the area of good second impressions by committing to a weekly blog and immediately disappearing after the first post. My wife and I have been struggling with depression silently for years and have just recently managed to work our way beyond that through lifestyle changes and support from friends and family. That depression was a huge strain on our marriage and our situation to where I ended up losing sight of my goals in life and runnning on autopilot.

The past year and a half has been eventful and stressful, and I want to give a brief overview of that period of silence. Our son Hezekiah was born in September last year. I was selected to serve in Korea for a year without my family. Soon after getting stable in Korea I was sent on a no-notice three-week training exercise where it was very difficult to communicate with anyone. Just after that exercise I was sponsored to have my family with me in Korea, and had to move out of the dorm, fly back to the states, move the family out of the house we had lived in for four years, and return to Korea within the span of three weeks. My wife and son returned to the States for a first birthday visit with family, and during that time some friends gave birth to their daughter. We have had a whirlwind of changes happen over the past two years and, looking back at it all now, we are able to see that it has been a positive outcome.

The future for our family is wide open. As it stands now, I will be looking to go into independent game development once I separate from the military in a few years. Over the past two months my focus has been on learning as much as I can about game design and the business of the gaming industry. I have started using GameMaker: Studio as my primary development platform to build up a portfolio of small complete games to gain experience. To accomplish this long term goal, I am committing to the OneGameAMonth challenge and recommitting to this weekly (at minimum) blog to remain accountable and get in touch with the community of gamers.

Who I am hasn’t changed at the core and I still want to bring joy through games to those that I can. I am looking forward to what the future holds. See you next Saturday!

Who am I?

2 Sa 7:18 Then David the king went in and sat before the LORD, and he said, “Who am I, O Lord GOD, and what is my house, that You have brought me this far?

New American Standard Bible: 1995 update.

LaHabra, CA: The Lockman Foundation.

After the prophet Nathan shared the words of God with King David declaring that his kingdom would last forever through his descendants, David’s humble nature immediately brought him to give thanks for all that God had done. A man at the heights of human power still acknowledged God as the source of all accomplishment made me realize just how much more I can grow in my own relationship with God. I have no delusions that I will become some great warrior for God, but I do desire that people will be reached through my life, faith, and actions, perhaps strengthening or awakening their own walk by faith.

For my first post I felt that it would only be natural to answer that question of who I am and look at my purpose. I’m a Christian, family-man, gamer, and member of the USAF learning about life, game programming, and business. The early years of my life, before I found my focus and faith, were largely spent without goals or dreams worth pursuing; however, I did meet the lady that would later become my wife during those years. Once I realized that my purpose was to serve, I joined the military to serve my country. After a few years I felt a greater call and invited God into my life. It has been a blast serving Him and I want to share that joy. This is my purpose behind game programming: to create games that are friendly to the Christian worldview and explore areas of the faith in new ways.

In the future my posts will be a weekly journal sharing my experiences, thoughts, accomplishments, and failures. I will discuss some of my goals and the plans to move towards those goals. I also hope have a conversation with you, the reader, about enjoying life through God, managing money, learning to program, love, and anything else that happens to come up that week. I look forward to hearing from you, and will have another post for you next Saturday.