Hello, My name is Joe Garlick. I am a software/game developer from Sheffield, UK. I have been programming since the age of 13. I was inspired to start coding because of a game named Minecraft. Me and a friend would play most days and decided we wanted to setup our own server. At the time the server software was called Bukkit. As a part of the servers you could add plugins, these were server side addons which could be written in Java. I decided that I wanted to make custom plugins for our server to make it stand out from the rest. From here I taught myself how to program in Java, this was mainly from YouTube videos. From here our server got bigger and bigger and I branched out into other areas like web design. This is where I learnt HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL, I used these to create websites for our different Minecraft servers. I had also created a shop where people could purchase in game items using PayPal.

Once I finished high school I went to college to study game design, the first year was mainly 2D games and using engines like Construct 2. Year 2 was where it got really interesting, we were taught how to use 3DS Max and Maya then using these to make models that could be used Unreal Engine 2. This sparked my love for game development and for my final year project ended up making a multiplayer shooter game. It didn’t have much in terms of looks but was more focused on the backend design. The game would allow multiple players to join a single game over LAN. As college was coming to an end there was two options in terms of university, game design or computer science. I loved programming and it excited me and I knew this is what I wanted to do for a career. Inevitably decided to go and study computer science for games.