Hello. Been going by Jeffery Mewtamer(a combination of my actual first name and a reference to a pure narrative, no mechanics role-play me and my highschool friends did at the school lunch table) on most forums for 20+ years, but went with a shorter version here because spaces aren’t allowed and I hate underscores.
Anyways, I was introduced to Zork and a few other text adventures in the late 90s, but I’ve been an avid gamer for most of my life, starting out with Super Mario Bros 1 and 3 and Duck Hunt on my Sister’s NES when I was 4 or 5, and at some point owning at least one version of every major Nintendo system from the NES to Wii and GameBoy to 3DS excluding the VirtualBoy. and the main reason I never got a WiiU or Switch is because I went blind in 2012(though the switch is at the top of my hardware to buy list if my vision were to be miraculously restored tomorrow, mainly because its the only dedicated Gaming Handheld from the current console generation(Ialso played the PSP heavily and got a launch Vita). Among my favorite gaming franchises before going blind were Mario, Sonic, Pokemon, Zelda, most of Nintendo’s other franchises, Disgaea, Golden Sun, Ys, and Tetris.
I’ve dabbled in text adventures a few times since going blind since they are one of the few game genres where blind accessibility is more or less guaranteed, though mostly knowing the names Zork and Infocom, I often ran into frustration due to all the guide dammit moments, unwinnable by mistake situations of the I should have reloaded that save I overwrote an hour ago variety, and how consulting a guide turns seemingly impossible into might as well read a transcript of someone else playing.
I have given thought to making my own games, and I do have a BS in Computer Science, but writing an IF engine from scratch in the language I’m most comfortable with(C++) is daunting, and the only existing framework I found at the time(Inform 7) had tools that left much to be desired(at the time, I was running a Linux setup that wouldn’t have let me use the GUI IDE for Inform, assuming it would work with Orca, and the output of the command-line inform 7 compiler was essentially useless for diagnosing problems in my code that prevented compilation even for the IF equivalent of Hello World… And it was venting about that in the comments section of a blog that got me directed to this forum.
Still trying to figure out this forum, which doesn’t act like any other forum I can remember joining… the new posts page doesn’t seem to work, threads have no pagenation controls I can find and it seems like the only way to access recent posts in a thread is if it’s a fairly recent thread or I’ve posted in it, and I’m not sure it’s even possible to bookmark the forum index…
Aside from video games and wishing I could find more I can actually enjoy with my useless eyeballs, I enjoy anime(I miss being able to read fansubs and Manga) and western animation, various types of mechanical puzzle, including twisty, packing, assembly/disassembly, sliding block, and puzzle boxes, dice(I am a dice dragon with a sizeable horde), Tabletop RPG(I wish I could find a D&D group to join, arts and crafts(I have a particular interest in tactile art for obvious reasons if you’re paying attention), maths(in particular, I like number theory(some of my favorite Integers are 3, 7, 13, 17, 23, 36, 37, 42, 49, 73, and 91) and geometry(I love me some polyhedra), and in addition to being a fan of the usual irrational celebrities like phi, pi, tau, and e, I’m quite fond of the Golden Trisection, which happens to be the ratio between edge length, lesser diagonal, and greater diagonal of a regular heptagon(and in case you don’t know… I don’t fully understand the reasoning, and there’s only like one web page I’ve found reference to it on, but the golden trisection supposedly fulfills for dividing into three unequal parts some of the properties the golden ratio does for dividing into two unequal parts… there’s also the golden qudrisection which can be found in the diagonals of a regular enneagon, but if memory serves, that isn’t supposedly proven to be a unique solution))… I also like building with construction toys, particularly Zome Tool and Polydron.