Hello, I'm Talon

When I was younger I always had an interest in tech, but I never had the support nor the resources to really delve into the field until the 2nd last year of Highschool. My family didn't come from a background of software engineers or developers, so I didn't have a lot of exposure to the field until much later. A lot of what I was stepping into as a result was a path of my own making.

I did have a Minecraft account from an early age however, and one of the mechanics, Redstone, was an interest which stuck with me as I got older. In a way the game became my canvas for technical expression. A lot of players you'll talk to will say that Redstone creations often look terrible because of the mass of wires and other blocks in the fray. For me however there's a certain beauty in a redstone creation. It's an expression of creativity, not necessarily in an artistic form, but more in terms of mastery of the game.

In a way, it's ironic since there's always something new and unexpected to learn. It embodies the entirety of the game's mechanics and manipulates them in a way that even the developers themselves might not anticipate. I think this is what really drove me into an interest in redstone in the first place. It's always a learning process no matter what level you are at.

My first bit of real project experience was when I was starting off Gr.12 in 2019. I had taken ICS3U (Introduction to Computer Programming) in the previous year where we covered Java and that became my main programming language going out. A lot of my friends whom I knew played on the Minecraft Server Hypixel profusely, specifically one of the minigames called "Bedwars" where you and your team would defend your bed from enemy teams while also trying to eliminate other teams by destroying their beds.

I think one of the craziest ideas I had at the time was to try and re-create the minigame despite only having 1 year of programming experience under my belt, and it's funny cause I actually spent the next 2 years programming it out. It was probably one of the most eye-opening experiences I've had so far as well as one I was most proud of at the time since my replication of the minigame was near identical to the actual game according to play-testers and other players who tried playing with it. Hypixel has since updated the minigame on their servers so there are quite a few differences now, and looking back at the code... it's really messy and horribly unoptimized. But I think a more important thing to take away is what I've learned and how I've improved from an experience, and knowing this I can say that I've come a long way from my past code.

Fast forward a few other projects and years, in early 2024 I attended SerenityHacks which was a mental-health themed hackathon on TMU campus with a team of three other developers, two of which (me included) were enrolled in the Virtual Reality course. We got a bit resourceful by "hijacking" (with permission from faculty) the VR room on campus allowing us to use the VR headsets in the room for the hackathon. We walked away with the award for the Best Overall Solution from the event and I think that's been a bit of a driving force behind some passion of mine currently on both visual work and game development. Later that year I took a role as a developer in the Metropolitan Game Studios (Formerly Game Maker's Union) to create a game in Unity for LevelUp 2025. Although we didn't win anything, multiple executives recommended me as the Programming Producer Lead for next year due to my ability and commitment to the project, so I'm looking forward to that in the fall semester of 2025.