Daniel Beaty - Mini Autobiography

My name is Daniel Beaty, and I’m the one who has written every blog post for Team Autonomous, thus far. The point of this blog post is for me to share a little bit about myself, so lets get right to it.

I was born, raised, and still live in a town located in the Deep South called Albany, GA. I was home schooled until my 7th grade year. That is the year I started going to a public school. Talk about a massive wake up call. Going to a private school really opened my eyes to how the world really was. By that, I mean I realized how sheltered I had been. I was exposed to things that I knew about, but really didn’t have much experience with. For example, cursing was widely used, which is probably no big surprise or a big deal to most of you, but to someone who really hadn’t been exposed to this kind of environment; it was like hitting a ton of bricks. My mind was just flooded with all kinds of perverted talk and such.

Growing up, I really enjoyed creating things, so I was naturally drawn to things such as Legos and eventually to video games like Roller Coaster Tycoon. I started with games like Mario, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Frogger, and Golden Eye for the N64. After my brother bought a PS2, I really began to notice how much I enjoyed playing First Person Shooters. I really grew a liking to the TimeSplitters series. The multiplayer and single player in those games was just the best, in my opinion. To this day, I still play Time Splitters 2 and 3 from time to time, which I can’t say for any other game that I started playing 10+ years ago.

As I grew older, my obsession with video games increased. This obsession finally led me to wanting to create video games. I first dabbled in video game development with a program called FPS Creator. At the time, it seemed to be an amazing tool, and I really enjoyed messing around with it. I finally got bored with FPSC and went back to just playing video games.

A few years later, I graduate as a home schooler. Yep, I went back to home schooling in 10th grade. This was due to financial reasons that I will not discuss. Before graduating, I had already picked out a dream college. It was a college called Full Sail University. FSU is primarily known for its excellent filmography degree, but I wanted to go there for a different reason, to learn how to develop video games. FSU also has excellent online programs, so I decided I would give the school a shot. I started in the online program of Game Design back in July of 2011, and I am glad to say that I haven’t regretted that decision thus far. I have learned a lot so far, and that is one reason why I am already developing games with a team using the Unity 3D engine.

Are you a game developer or ever-dabbled in game development? Please share with a comment below.

Take it easy,

Daniel