I was born in the early 90's, live in beautiful Spokane, Washington USA, and the first video game I ever played was Sim City.
Warhammer 40k forever inspires imagination, Legend of Zelda continues to give me a sense of adventure, Dungeons and Dragons lets me laugh with friends, and the people in my life that I love; give me confidence and purpose.
I would call myself a jack of all trades and a master of none (but are often times better than a master of one), I know HTML, CSS, C#, Python, PHP, and GDScript. I'm competent with Photoshop/Affinity, Fruity Loops, Aesprite, Davinci Resolve, Excel, Unity, Godot, and Arduino; there's nothing I won't try on a computer.
I got over stage fright by doing stand up comedy at open mic's. My first computer was a grey/black Dell tower my grandma gave my mom, it became my computer because my mom seemed to never use it. In high school I lettered because of stage craft, all male choir, regular choir, and drama productions.
I've never said no to an opportunity and for the most part; always tried my best.
If you want to talk send me an email: → (Click Here) ←
Watched my cousin play Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time and lost my mind. Asked for it for my birthday and lo' and behold got an N64 with that game. I was so lucky to have a family purchase that for me.
The 3D landscape, the fantasy setting, the music, the characters, the puzzles, the open world, it blew my mind. This was not SimCity, it was a whole world I could run around in.
Playing Zelda wasn't my first foray into the world of electronics but it was the first memory burned into my brain related to it. I still remember using the manual to set up a SimCity map, first time building a village in Pharoh, but that first time seeing Legend Of Zelda set me on a life trajectory.
The year my mom let me play Halo at our family friends house with two adults. Not only was I blown away that I got to hang out with older folk but also play a co-op shooter!? The Sci-fi environment gripped me and I will never forget that night. Also the same year a friend showed me flash animations online (RIP Adobe Flash 1996 to 2021) (Also shoutout to the menu screen of Halo, what an iconic song and image of the Ring world in space...)
Played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons for the first time in my friends basement, on a ping pong table they owned with 4 friends. The idea that we essentially could do anything in this fantasy setting expanded my mind on what was possible when playing games. Having 1 person dedicated to running the universe while other players attempted to solve puzzles, beat monsters, and get into shinannigans; immediately hooked me.
Dungeons and Dragons at this time was of course well known, but the social zeitgiest was just starting to change. I remember not being afraid to say I play D&D but most people my age still considered it very nerdy. It would be a few more years before it became the popular standard it is today.
Insert zelda marathon photo
As a high schooler with a brand new dishwashing job I could finally afford a domain name and web space. A friend of mine helped me set up The Colin Experience; which at the time had my cringe podcast that thankfully no one listened to. The other thing The Colin Experience had was a pre-built flash game database. The school system we had didn't block it so you could hop on a school computer and play some flash games, which was a lot of fun for my group of friends at the time.
This was also the year I attempted a Zelda Marathon on Justin.tv (the pre-twitch streaming site). I set up a webcam looking towards the TV and a webcam looking at the room. My mom provided food and checked in on me, and we set up a donation page for Child's Play. We raised about $200, spent 52 hours playing through: NES Zelda, SNES A Link to the Past, N64 Ocarina of Time, N64 Majora's Mask, and got a little ways into GC Wind Waker when I had a medical emergency and had to stop playing.
It was a lot of fun even not sleeping for 52 hours, and even though I failed I wanted to try again the following year.
In the Summer of 2010 I attempted another Zelda Marathon. We set up the donation page again, and streamed on justin.tv again. This time I would sleep a little each night while a friend played the game to keep things moving. Ended up having a blast plowing through every Zelda game out at the time (minus the Game boy and DS games). It took 92 Hours but we rolled credits and made a lot of friends along the way as well as $500 bucks for Child's play. Afterwards I shut down The Colin Experience as I had better things to spend my money on and wasn't doing anything with the site.
The Colin Experience was back in action, but renamed to CS Projects. I started hosting pictures, a pdf cookbook of recipes I used, simple ActionScript programs, a link to a Minecraft server I hosted over the summer, etc.
Published my first app on the Google Play store. Roll That Dice which was a Dice rolling app where you can track up to thousands of actual digital dice rolls and not just randomly generated numbers.
Learned how to make a site from scratch with a Raspberry Pi. I also got to go to PAX West!
CS Projects switched from a generic host to one in which I control and set up. Years of armature web development lead to me finally just hosting my site on my own. Also learned a lesson about backups and lost years of blog posts and webpages. This is a fresh start for CSP.
Became a Dad.