Difference between revisions of "User:CodeMouse92"

Latest revision as of 03:55, 23 November 2014

My name is Jason C. McDonald. I'm the CEO and Lead Developer of MousePaw Games. We are dedicated to creating innovative solutions for education, especially educational games.

I have been programming for over six years, and specialize in what I call "offroad programming" - software development where there is little to no documentation. I designed a scripting language, Ratscript, the first version of which was built in ActionScript 3 to speed up testing of my Adobe Flash game project. My team is currently building Ratscript 2.0. I also designed and built the first few versions of our game engine, Trailcrest.

I'm a huge fan of open source, and an Ubuntu lover to boot. One of my favorite hobbies is to convert people from Windows to Linux, and then help them set up and learn their new Linux-based computers. I'm also an open-source gamer - Oolite, SuperTuxKart, and FreedroidRPG are three of my favorites.

I found Synfig Studio while browsing through the Ubuntu Software Center, and decided to give it a go as a possible replacement for Flash. It has been mentally flagged as the software we WOULD adopt in a couple of years (while making the next game), but circumstances led us to switch THIS game's platform to Synfig as well.

C++ and Python are my languages of choice. Before I started using Adobe Flash, I wrote code to simulate many of its capabilities (animation, movement, drag-and-drop functionality) in other GUI toolkits, including PyGTK, wxWidgets, and WinForms (Microsoft Visual .NET).

In addition to programming, I also write and speak on the topic of programming soft skills. (You can find me on YouTube if you look for "A Field Guide to Common Nerds") I tutor math and computer science at our local community college, and train my company's interns in various languages, technologies, and programming techniques.

As I mentioned in my other post, my company has just abandoned Adobe Flash as a platform, and we are looking at adopting Synfig in its place, and contributing our own skills to help add "Game Platform" to its feature set.

While my company's core technologies are closed source (educational software is a surprisingly hostile market, wherein opening that code could put us out of business overnight), I believe strongly in the open source movement. We work almost exclusively with open source software, and we contribute however we can. Some of our own open-source projects can be found on our Labs page.