Logan Kincaid

The Short Version (TL;DR)

I am a graduate student at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy in Orlando, Florida.  I have had a passion for creating video games, for about as long as I can remember, and am currently looking for a job to start in early August.

The Long Version

The Early Years

I have loved computers for about as long as I can remember. In second grade, I helped troubleshoot our classroom computers, which my dad helped set up, that ran on 5.25″ Floppy Disks, rather than having a hard drive. In third through fifth grades, I made all sorts of projects using HyperStudio. About this time, I discovered the MS-DOS game creation systems known as ZZT and MegaZeux, and used both extensively.

In fourth grade, I created my first webpage. During middle school, I taught myself C using C for Dummies, and explained the concept of pointers to my dad. About this time, I realized that programming was my career path of choice — the only question was whether it would be game programming, or if that would be strictly a hobby.

High School

As I continued into high school, I dabbled a bit with C++ on my own, as I struggled with the utter boredom that characterized the vast majority of my classes. I could rant for hours about the horrendous quality of the South Carolina public school system, but that is a topic for another time.

My sophomore year, I managed to amuse myself somewhat in a C programming class by helping all of the other students understand their assignments and how to approach them mentally, without bothering to start mine until the due date. My junior year, I got my first taste of Java, the very first year that the AP Computer Science AB exam switched from C++ to Java. Missing out on C++ was unfortunate, and to this day I feel that Java is an inferior language for most applications, but I still managed my 5 on the exam, and thus exempted two semesters worth of college Computer Science.

During my senior year, I got a chance to start exploring the idea of game programming with a senior project I dubbed “High School RPG”, which was meant to be a Final Fantasy style RPG set in a high school, with typical stereotypes taking the place of traditional classes. This was primarily an exercise in planning, however, since the majority of the programming was done several days before the due date. Of course, it did not help much that I was attempting to create a game using C# long before XNA was around. At the time, C# was still a new language.

This was, in some ways, a happy accident. The non-technical faculty assumed that making the jump from writing console applications in C to using DirectX for graphics programming, as well as figure out all of the other aspects of game programming, is a fairly trivial matter. As such, to ensure that the project was enough of a “learning stretch,” I was required to learn a new language at the same time. On the plus side, it introduced me to a language that I have come to enjoy as much as C++, and is still the de facto standard for tools programming.

Undergraduate Studies

After high school, I moved on to Clemson University’s Computer Science program. For the first time in my education, classes were interesting. Due to exempting the first year of the CS curriculum, I managed a surprisingly short ramp up time before hitting completely new and fascinating material.

I enjoyed several opportunities to go outside of the typical curriculum. Dr. Brian Malloy taught several courses involving game programming, ranging from 2D games using SDL, to 3D games in XNA using the Nintendo Wii Remote, to educational games for the Nintendo DS using homebrew libraries such as PAlib. Dr. Malloy also advised me as I completed my honors thesis on design patterns in game programming.

Dr. D. E. Stevenson also taught out of the box with a creative inquiry that was an essentially student run, non-profit, open source software company. While we did not get a ton done during the time I participated, it provided an insightful view of development methodologies and what it takes to actually get things done in the real world, as opposed to the sterile environment provided by most college classes.

Graduate Studies

As I graduated from Clemson in Spring of 2009, I had several choices for graduate studies. UCLA accepted me to their Graduate Computer Science program, and Clemson did the same. However, when I learned about the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, I realized I had found my calling. Rather than taking a primarily theoretical graduate education, and spending my free time determining how to translate theory into practice, I could learn practical knowledge from experienced game developers.

The last few semesters have been extremely demanding, but equally rewarding. There is nothing more exciting than working with artists, producers, designers, and other programmers to achieve the shared goal of creating a fun game. We sprinted through several two week prototypes to get our creativity flowing and realize just how hard making a game actually is. Since January, we have been working in teams of about sixteen on larger games that will go into alpha in early July. There has been little time to slow down and dig into the fine details of a topic, but I can honestly say that I never expected to learn as much about so many topics as I have.

The Next Page?

Starting in the second week of August, all FIEA students will be available for jobs an internships, despite not graduating until December. Right now, as I work hard to finish my capstone project, I am also working to find a solid job opportunity to start my non-academic career. Any interested parties should consult my resume.