Hello, I'm Jayenkai, and in 5 days time, I'll be adding the 300th game into my Archive.
300 games that I've single handedly created over the course of the past decade.

Today, I received the following email.



"No idea if you have written or tweeted about what you have studied, but I would like to know how you got where you are now like studies at Uni or took classes. Just for interest sake"

Hmmm.. You really want to know this stuff?
*sigh*
OK.. Let's go!

-=-=-

1995 I left school. I got crappy GCSE results. I didn't get along with the subject of "Information Technology"
I'd spent my youth learning how to write games, and when it came to doing a GCSE "about computers" it wound up being more about "How to use a Word Processor" than anything actually computery.
We learned how to combine Database and Word Processors together to create Mail Merges.
We pretended to set up a mythical company, and created fictional customers, then pretended to send them letters.

Oh, boy!
What a joy.

I gave up. I got sick of the mundane boringness of it all, and I pretty much flunked out of the subject.
I ended up with a D.

My mind gets bored very easily, and if I'm not finding something puzzling, or challenging, I typically give up with it. This has been proven time and time again with AGameAWeek projects, as I often get bored with ideas that aren't tapping into the great logic-puzzle of game making.
RetroRaiderark Secrets, is the most recent example of this.
A great idea, a good game, but one I couldn't be bothered to finish off.
I got bored with it, and once I'm bored with something, I tend not to care about it for much longer.

GCSE I.T. was one of those things, and .. well, that was that!

Other results were in the "OK" catagory. Maths B, French B, English 2 Cs, Science 2 Cs and Music.. E.
I wanted to do better in Music, but I can't perform anything.. My fingers don't work that way!
If they'd've let me use the computers to do my music, they'd've seen an entirely different result, but this was 1994/5, and that wasn't the way things were done in them days!
.. which is a shame, but that's the way things are, so.. whatever!

After that I went to college to do my A-Levels.
Maths, Business Studies and Computing.

Over the course of 2 years, I preceded to fall out of love with both Maths and Computing.
A-Level Maths wasn't the "Here's a maths puzzle, work out the solution" that it was at GCSE.
In GCSE maths, it was all about working out how to get from the question to the answer.
At A-Level, they gave you the question, gave you the method, and asked you to blindly push the buttons on your calculator to generate the end result.
This wasn't the maths I grew up with.
I likened it to doing an English Comprehension test, whereby it was more about "Can you read this?" than it was "Can you actually do any maths?"

I got bored with it after about 6 months, and never really managed to pull myself back in.
I left with an N for Maths, which is pretty much as bad as you can imagine, and you can really tell that, for someone who absolutely adores maths, puzzles, and solutions, my heart most definitely wasn't in it!

Computing, I ended up with a D. Terrible mark, should've gotten better, but again I lost interest.
I think it might've been something to do with Mr Green's insistence on teaching us all about binary for approximately 6 entire sodding months. Given that I'd learnt all about Binary from reading my Amstrad Computer Manual in the mid-late 80s, spending 6 months recapping this information was tantamount to sheer boredom.
Me and my mate Dave generally tended to sit at the back of the classroom playing "Squares" on pieces of paper.
.. That's how dull it was.

So, yeah, abysmal results. (For Business Studies, the teacher expected me to fail. I got a C. )

After that, I gave up on Education, settled into a local Off-License/Convenience Store job, and haven't budged a smegging inch, since.
My pay is minimal and my free-time is plenty.
AGameAWeek can only exist because I'm hardly* working, have so much free time.
This isn't the sort of lifestyle you should aim for.


Everybody says that "Education is important", and I'll reiterate that. Hell, there's no job out there anyway, so you might as well plod along with the education thing while you still can!

Keep learning, do your best, and try to get a decent job at the end of it all.
.. and if it all falls to pieces, you can be a penniless struggling Indie Developer, just like me.

-=-=-

* A year and a half ago, Doctors discovered a brain tumor and I spent half the year in hospital. I've yet to fully recover from this experience, and as such have actually been out of work ever since. Which sucks arse, because being stuck in the house every single day, has been somewhat detrimental to my imagination, let alone what little social life I used to have!