About
In the summer of 2003, I decided that I was going to go to college to learn how to program. I researched my options near my hometown, but nothing really seemed to be a great fit. I didn”t want to end up taking COBOL or Fortran programming classes mainly because I didn”t want to write applications for 1964…
One day while doing some reading on gamedev.com I found an article talking about Full Sail vs Digipen. Almost immediatly after finishing the article, I booked a flight to Orlando to check out Full Sail”s open house. I fell in love instantly and knew that was where I needed to go to school.
During the grueling 15 months there I learned more than I thought possible, met a lot of great people, and had one hell of a good time.
After graduating, I went out to California and worked at THQ for about 6 months, but between my salary and the cost of living plus my student loan payments I couldn”t afford to stay out there. So, I went back to Orlando…rnrnI found work as tech support and used my programming knowledge to create custom applications for my job duties. A year into my job and I had created an application that would do 90% of my duties for me, and it was all coded in notepad with HTML and Javascript 
A job opened at a company back in my hometown, and I decided to take it as I had been away from my friends and family for several years at this point. Just after nine months, I was moved to my own group where I develop specialized applications for internal company use worldwide.
Don”t get me wrong, I love what I do everyday. The fact of the matter is, I didn”t get a chance to program games…
I don”t know any 3d artists, especially that are willing to work for what I can afford right now. Additionally, I don”t have a lot of spare time to work on ”fun” projects. Those two reasons were major deciding factors for why I picked Flash as my platform of choice. I bought a copy of “ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University
I didn”t want to spend hundreds of dollars on Adobe”s Flash IDE. Plus, coding inside of Flash was probably the single most frustrating piece of any application I have ever worked with. After a few days of researching, I found FlashDevelop which is free, works similar to Visual Studio and has a great community. Any ActionScript tutorials posted on this site will be completed 100% in FlashDevelop, so anyone should be able to follow along without having to purchase Adobe Flash.
My main complaint with FlashDevelop was the lack of tutorials tailored specifically for it. I found I was always trying to find some workaround when reading an Adobe Flash IDE tutorial when trying to do it in FlashDevelop. So, I decided to create CatfaceGames.com in hopes of helping anyone that”s in the same situation.
My first ”game”, Space Command, is really more of a tech demo which is used for the continued development of my game framework. The game itself is not anything special and is just a cheap knockoff of Missile Command.
If you enjoy the tutorials, please drop me an email at brad@catfacegames.com and thanks for visiting CatfaceGames.com!
The one… the only… Catface!
