Let the Games Begin

This blog has one simple purpose. To track my progress in starting a company from scratch. I will be honest, trying my best to explain all my successes and failures, in hopes that anyone else in a similar position can learn from this and do it better than me!

I'll start with as brief a background as I can.

My name is Ryan Engle and I've had a craving for invention ever since I could say "tool". I grew up as the son of a diplomat, so I moved around a lot as a child, kind of like the military. This gave me a wonderful opportunity to see the world at a young age, and experience some really cool cultures! I feel like that upbringing strongly influenced who I am today, in terms of accepting people different from myself.

We spent a lot of time in Africa while I was a child, which was great, but due to crime and distance between friends, I had a lot of time to fill by myself. Thank goodness for legos! They were so good to me, never causing fights, always there, and great at hide and go seek. I was a messy kid. Then I moved on to techniques and that opened up a whole new world of entertainment and invention. I'd follow the directions, then try to modify whatever it was I was making into something way cooler / much less likely to work.

Once I got my hands on a computer in middle school, it was over. I found my passion. Starting in High School I started taking programming classes and turned into a HUGE nerd. There were very few things as satisfying to me as writing code and creating a new world filled with colors and interactions right in front of me, for free! I first started fooling around with the Half-Life SDK, made a mod for the game called Explodeathon, which included some of my own artwork. I learned 3D Studio Max and Paint Shop Pro in order to make some models and skins for the game. It was a great learning experience.

From there I moved on to OpenGL, which, in my mind, was limitless in potential. I loved the ability to freely create whatever my mind could imagine and have it come to life through user interaction. I became very interested in the 3D side of OpenGL, starting with a terrain editor and moving towards a fully functional 3D engine with collision detection, and eventually per-pixel lighting and visual effects.

After high school I attended Virginia Tech, studying Computer Science. It was fun, challenging, but fun and very educational. I spent a lot of my free time working on my engine and got really into the lighting side of graphics. I was obsessed with creating shaders that would realistically or artistically give a 3D scene the feel of life. That bug is there for good.

After graduating from VA Tech I worked on a research project there, and then moved to Austin, Texas a year later to start my career in game development. It wasn't all I had imagined it could be. I worked for a company called Super Happy Fun Fun, it's real, I promise. There I helped develop games for mobile devices, aka, cell phone games. My first project was on Big Buck Hunter Pro for your typical cell phone, not smart phone. By the time I started, the game was pretty much finished and all we had left to do was port the game to about 140 devices, ranging from a resolution of 400x240 to 128x128 and with memory ranging from about 8mb to 128mb. It was pretty ridiculous and not very much fun. At that point I realized that I had to be doing something creative. Luckily, after that project finished, I was moved on to the iPhone. My love. What a cool freaking device! Like a super computer from 10 years ago in your pocket with a very slick display and functionality. So I was pretty excited about that for a couple months. Then I realized I was still doing work that wasn't really very creative. Programming engine features and such.

In order to keep myself up to snuff on what I was really passionate about, I decided to start a little project of my own, making iPhone apps. The first app I wanted to create was a yoga app for the iPhone that was a guided routine I learned from my parents, and used. That project got side tracked by an opportunity to work with John Assaraf, from The Secret with a company called i-Grasshopper. There, I was the sole developer and had a lot of fun creating applications from scratch, which allowed me to be very creative and use all the skills I had acquired over the last 10 years or so in programming and art. That lasted for about 10 months until I realized that I didn't want to work for a company, I wanted to start my own company.

And at last! Rengler Studios was born in mid October! I'm still in the process of finding my niche, but what I do know is that as long as I pursue my passion, I'll be happy. And really, happiness is all I need to keep going.

So that wasn't really brief, haha, but I tried to keep it as relevant as possible.