Hey! So, I’m Jack Sanders.

I’m currently student’ing, but consider programming, art, and game development to be my job/profession/pursuit/whateveryouwanttocallit. Making games is what I do, and I like to do it. If you want to get particular, I consider myself an indie game dev.

So, I should probably start by saying I’ve always had a great affinity for Japan. Since I was a kid it fascinated me, and here I am now finally learning the language. My first encounter with Japanese culture was watching the Pokemon anime when I was about 6 years old. I really liked it. The way the art style and story came together to create something much more… well… sophisticated than American cartoons enticed me.(not to say Pokemon was particularly sophisticated. But, compare that to “Ed, Edd, N Eddy” and you’ll get my angle.) Then I had my first taste of Japanese food when I was 8, along with watching “The Last Samurai”. It led to me wanting to learn more, and I did such. To my surprise I discovered that Japanese culture wasn’t exactly represented well in our society, so I went to “pursue the truth”, so to speak. I found the “reality” of Japanese society to be fascinating and, quite frankly, a welcome foil to what I was used to at home.

So with that, I am here to learn Japanese because I love their culture and want to further experience it. To that end, I’d like to make a nice long visit there someday, and perhaps even visit regularly as time goes on. Who knows? And finally, the reason which has finally pushed me over the edge to start learning Japanese is that I am interested in localizing the games I make to Japanese. As a lesser motivation, I’ll finally be able to read and watch untranslated manga and anime, and play imported video games without losing any of the experience.(and in fact, probably get a better experience since nothing will be lost in translation) It’d also be nice to make friends with some Japanese game developers.

And I shall now preemptively post a link to my website where you can find what I do: http://www.maninbluesweatshirt.com/

(Edit–)
BY THE WAY! I am so happy to have finally been able to pay for TextFugu. For the longest time I’ve wanted to get ahold of it, I think it’s actually been almost a year since I first heard of it and did the sample lessons. As a quick thank you, I think TextFugu is amazing and I feel like it was absolutely worth the buy. I can’t wait to dig deep into the material<3

• This topic was modified 13 years ago by  Jack Sanders. Reason: forgot to gush over how happy I am to finally have this