Hi everyone, I'm Darakuu. I've found this community thanks to my good old friend @Bastion and after lurking for a while I've decided to finally make an account.
I'm an autodidact game developer from Sicily, living in the shadow of Etna. I've been decided to study game development right after playing Halo on the original Xbox after my 6-year-old mind was blown away by the 3D graphics (having only played Pokemon and Mario games up until then).
My first actual game was made on UE4, blueprints only... which of course was a terrible choice. Let's just say it never left the Alpha stage. So after failing that I've decided to try a simpler engine.
*cue the Source engine theme*
I've made a bunch of maps to learn Hammer and to hone my skills, two of which have been released on my Workshop. I am not particularly proud of these maps as they're full of rookie mistakes, and I've recently discovered that I'm not good with exterior environments, and those maps are basically just that. Furthermore, performance was a continuous worry, and that has made the maps worse in my opinion.
Right now I'm working on a full blown HL2EP2 mod, heavily inspired by Adam Foster's MINERVA, named "Xen Survivor", even though it won't feature any Xen levels. It will feature 4 levels, and right now I am working on the third. I will make a WIP thread about it soon enough, once I figure out a way to showoff WIP stuff that doesn't look like crap :P . Unless I find an easy-peasy way to release it on Steam I'm going to release it on Moddb, which will require users to install the 2013 SDK.
Once I'm done with that I'll probably go back to UE4 and resume my learning of C++ (bought a load of books on general C++, Clean coding and game programming patterns, and also on game design.), or install Unity and start learning C# from absolute scratch.
So that's it I guess, post's long enough. The only thing missing is the obligatory "I'm not English so my English might be off" warning, but other than that we should be good.