Personal Bio
My name is Joshua Gilpatrick, I am a second year Masters student in Game Design and Development at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). At they offer two tracks for this program, the first track is a graphics track where students learn about programming 3D graphics for games and do fun stuff with shaders. I did not choose this track as in my undergrad I have done many of these things and develop games such as Bloxen. I choose the less traveled path of Artificial intelligence. This track teaches us about various development techniques and patterns from building a cooperative non-player character to building an emotion modeling system to create a feeling that grabs the player and brings them into the game.
I did my undergraduate here at RIT in Information Technology, with a minor in Marketing, and Communication. My first job was as a software tester for Ecora. This company builds software that will analyze the compliancy of the internal network. This job taught me that I do not want to be a software tester. While the company was nice, and the job was easy, it was too mind numbing. I couldn’t see myself eight hours a day in attempts to break the software, and analyze the results of the tables exported by the software.
My next job was a web development job, initially I loved this job. It was fun, the company was small and very friendly. As they grew they lost their initial grounds, management was messed up and things starting getting crazy. Even with all that the reason I left that job was because of the lack of challenges provided to me. The first few months were a great learning experience, and then things started to become repetitive. This thought me that, while I can program for eight, ten, twelve hours a day if I am not challenged it becomes hard to stay focused.
Finally a professor here at RIT convinced me to take on the Masters program, he promised me a challenge and it was just that. The hours were long and the payoffs were great. I once again enjoyed the work I have been doing, and I have enjoyed every minute of it for the past two years. Over the summer of 2008, I worked for a start up game development company named Ratatoskr. I was the tech lead of a team of ten developers. This was quite an experience, the hours were long and the milestones were strict. Then at the end of it all we had a game, to be presented to Microsoft to be accepted on the Xbox Live Arcade platform.
