About Me

My name is Priyesh Dixit, I moved to the US from Mumbai, India in February 1995 with my parents and younger brother. I have always had a passion for being creative and this eventually led me to the wonderful world of computer programming. I always knew that I wanted to program video games even before I knew how to program. I finally learned some programming when I took Intro to Programming in high school, which was Visual Basic. After rushing through the dull assignments in the book, I started working on my first computer game... Whack Ash! It started as Whack-a-box where you could click on the box that turns black for points, but then I decided to put a picture in there and who else but the annoying character Ash Ketchem (or as I like to call him.. "Kent" Ketchem). Eventually this evolved into a full blown game with an arcade mode, practice mode, bonus rounds (with Team Rocket) and a boss fight (MewTwo)! Then for Programming II I decided to do a short RPG, Revenge Respite and Retribution! It was supposed to be a team project but I did all the programming, though I thank Wes for providing the art! My placeholders are quite ugly (there are still some in there).

Once I was in college I started trying to learn computer graphics, and I finally got the chance when I took Intro to Graphics in my sophomore year. I was probably the youngest in the class but I had the pre-requisites so I took it right away. This is where I first started doing OpenGL programming and learning 3D graphics. I had the knowledge I needed to start implementing an idea that my friend and I had been working on. Not the whole thing, that would require art and writing.. but just the base engine for the puzzle game.. Pentomino was born.

Then my friend John and I took the Intro to Game Design and Development class. And of course, we decided we could make our own engine. Well, we did succeed at making a functional graphics rendering engine by the end of the semester.. but it was a long shot from being a game. That was our own fault, we spent more than a month on just a Quad-Tree based Terrain engine when we should have just made the ground flat and called it a day. But the rest of the team did a great job on their own parts of the project. Anyway, Wrath of Abaranare is the result and I have a video of the terrain engine in action.

Shortly thereafter, I took the Game AI course (and worked on Modabu) and met Dr. G. Michael Youngblood. I was now a full-time graduate student and was looking for a thesis project. Once he told me about his idea for a visualization tool that shows how a player interacted with the game, I knew this was it. It eventually became the Commons Game Understanding and Learning toolkit (CGUL) project. And I am extremely proud to have been a part of it.

The Game Design and Development program at UNCC was finalized just in time for me to graduate with the certificate. The final course was Game Design and Development Studio which consists of making a single game in a semester in a group of about five people. My team was (yet again) the over-zelous ones, but thats not necessarily a bad thing. Its good to be ambitious as long as you learn from your mistakes. At first we wanted to do an epic single player game with lots of levels and puzzles and astral projection. But we revised our pitch to a multiplayer only game where you use the elements to fight your opponents, EleMental. I think we managed to implement almost all the features we pitched. Our most prized feature was the ability to modify the terrain in real-time while playing so you could raise mountains or drop valleys as you fought. But we also ended up spending so much time on cool tech features that we didn't focus on the important things. The game ended up being so full of features that only we could play it, it was hard to pick up and understand. I think we learned a lot from the experience, and I am still proud of it.

So in May 2008, I graduated with my Masters of Science in Computer Science with a certificate in Game Design and Development. I landed a job at TimeGate Studios in Sugar Land, TX as a programmer. My dreams came true and I was on top of the world. But thats not the end of the story... what will happen next? I have no idea.. I guess we'll find out. :)