My background, my future.

I've established this blog after being inspired by my friend and colleague +James Macleod and hope that I can inspire him to keep blogging because honestly I think I'd have gone insane without him to keep me on track the past few years.

Lets have a look at where I started out and where I am now before looking at what I plan on doing in future.

I worked for an International insurance company straight from completing sixth form, spent roughly 9 years moving from being a general admin bod through to running department wide training schemes and managing my own small team of people along side this I was the guy who you came to when a problem needed fixing.

I then moved to Scotland to move in with my then partner at the time however the job market crashed and i found myself in a low pay high burnout job that wasn't cutting it, my relationship also kinda went sour leaving me with little choice but to move back in with the parents and contemplate my next move. my choices at this time were relativly straightforward, sign on and look for work or use the opportunity to learn to do something that I'd wanted to do since leaving sixth form, just never knew how.

In 2010 I started an NC in Games Development, followed by a HNC, HND and i'm nearly finished and will be graduating this year with a bachelors in Computer Games Development. Some time in late 2010 / early 2011 I Co-Founded a 'Proto-Games Studio' under the title of Prickly Productions. +Prickly Productions was initially a blank canvas whereby we could showcase our work and start a portfolio. As our confidence, ability and knowledge grew we began to realise that theonlything stopping us from establishing Prickly as an actual games studio was our own lack of understanding of the market and a lack of finances. We have since gone on to publish our first games title, Nightmare Island.

I have since gone on to publish a few free to play titles and have several projects that i am currently working on which I will begin to document properly over the course of the next few blogs to create a more structured approach to creating these games.

As my degree is now nearly over it's about time I actually focused properly on not just making games and publishing them, but actively trying to make money from them so that I can sustain myself and my family I will also use this blog to document my progress in this regard.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and if this sounds like something you'd be interested in following then please do like / follow / +1 etc.

Thanks

John