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Hello! This is my first post on this new blog! In case you didn't read the short bio on the home page, I am José Rodriguez-Rivas. I am a student game developer from Southern California. I have made many games, and self publish them under the name of Tiny Country Games, a game company that I started and hope to grow as I get older. I am currently a Junior at Santa Susana High School, a magnet school for Performing Arts and Technology. Today I want to write about my life up to this point. I, of course, will only write about things that are relevant.

Immigrant

I was born in Gudalajara Jalisco, Mexico on December 28^th, 1998.When I was about a year and a half old, my dad got a work visa to the United States to come be a software engineer. Whenever I tell people that I am a Mexican immigrant, they always first assume that I am an illegal immigrant, which is simply not true. My family came here completely legally with all the paperwork on a Work Visa. I became a citizen in the fall of 2010. I grew up in the United States, in a Mexican household. My parents, who were born in raised in Mexico, usually speak in Spanish around the house. My siblings, my sister who is three years older than me, and my brother who is one year older than me, usually spoke in English when I was very young. Because of this, I grew up hearing and speaking both languages at the same time, so neither are my "first language", even though my English is far better than my Spanish.

Catholic School and How I got into Game Development

I was babtized as a Catholic when I was very young, before I even moved to the States. I still am a practicing Catholic to this day. For elementary and middle school, my parents sent me to Catholic school. From Kindergarten to 4^th grade, I went to St. Jude the Apostle Catholic School, located in Westlake Village, California. Even there, I always hung out with the kids who had the latest video game to talk about. I did not have many games growing up, I only had a few games on my GameCube and Gameboy Advanced, but I still loved talking about the games I liked with my friends at St. Jude. Before 5^th grade, I was told by my parents that I was transfering to St. Paschal Baylon school. SPB was no stranger to me, I had gone to church there (because they have a Spanish mass), my mom worked at the school as a Spanish teacher, and I even participated in the church's childrens choir. Because of that, although the transition was sad at first, I didn't feel like I was being thrown into a crowd I knew nothing about. I was able to talk to the kids I knew from choir, and quickly make friends with the others. It was also in my 5^th grade year that I realized that I want to make games for a living. I've always been pretty good with computers, and I knew that I wanted to work with them for a living. One day, I was looking at rom hacks for the Pokémon GBA games to play on my computer. I found videos on YouTube on how to make ROM hacks as well. I got the tools and made some very basic hacks, like changing the starters in Pokémon Ruby to Groudon, Kyogre, and Rayquaza. Looking more into the hacks, I saw a video titled "How to Make a Pokémon Game" which showed a program called "RPG Maker XP" with tools built for Pokémon Games. Altough the Pokémon stuff was a little complicated, I started messing with RPG Maker and made silly little games. It was then when I decided to be a game developer.

Fast foward several years to the summer before 8^th grade. I was looking at some stuff for RPG Maker when I saw that there was a new version of the program called "RPG Maker VX Ace" which I immediately downloaded. I decided to try to make a game that I could actually release using VX Ace. That is when I made "The Four Spirits" the first game I ever released. It wasn't a very good game, in fact, I took it down from my site, so only people who look at my resume can find where to download it. I later made "The Four Spirits 2" which was slightly better, but still pretty bad. When it came to chosing a high school, I was stuck between two options. Go with all my friends to Thousand Oaks High School, or go to Santa Susana, a high school with no sports, (good for me, because I do not like participating in sports), and a programming program (pun intended). I eventually fell in love with the idea with going to Santa Su because of all the offered. I also realized that it would be easiest for my parents if I went to the same school as my siblings.

SSHS and Web Development

My first tech class at Santa Susana was a brand new course called "Exploring Computer Science" with Mark Sheinberg. Sheinberg was an amazing teacher. Once we started learning basic HTML/JS/CSS, I was able to understand everything pretty well. Later in freshman year, I started talking to Sheinberg more and more, and was decently close with him. During freshman year, I worked on a game called "The Crystals" which isn't anything special, but hey, its still on my website. I also wanted to start a company. At first, I had a Google Site for the "Jose Rivas Gaming Company" which was enough at the time. When I learned HTML and CSS, I realized that I could make my own website. I was pretty confident in my skills already beacuse I was one of only 3 people in my entire Exp Comp Sci class to get an A on the last HTML project. That winter break, I decided I wanted to go to Mexico to visit my family alone. Basically my imediate family stayed here while I flew to Mexico. While I was in Mexico, I turned 15, which is a huge deal in Mexican Culture. I didn't have a quinceañera or anything, but I got a bunch of cash. Over $800 to be specific. When I got back to the states, I was talking to my middle school buddy, James, about wanting to start a game company. I wanted to do away with the name of "Jose Rivas Gaming Company" because that name sucks. We used a random company name generator and at some point, "Tiny Country" popped up. I liked the sound of that for some reason, so I kept it. Thus, "TIny Country Games" was born. I quickly started designing a website for TCG. The first site wasn't necessarily professional looking, but I was proud of it. I have changed it since, but if you want a basic idea of what it looked like, go to http://oldsite.tinycountrygames.com/. In July of 2014, I released my first game as Tiny Country Games, The Crystals. In my freshman year, I also joined Santa Susana's brand new Game Development Club. There, Kiel Geiger taught me basic Java. OK, let's be honest, he wasn't a very good teacher. In fact, I hardly had any idea of how Java worked by the end of freshman year. All I knew was I needed libGDX to make games with Java. During the summer, however, I sat down and watched a lot of tutorials on Java and libGDX. I was also planning a new RPG, Orthographic. The more and more I programmed, the more I liked it over RPG Maker. The first game I coded and released was for both Desktop (PC/Mac/Linux) and Android. It was Terry's Coin Collector. From there, I coded a lot, and even became the Game Dev Club president. Sophmore year, I was only able to take the Robotics and Engineering class for tech, so any code I did was on my spare time. During winter break, a girl from my school, Annika, wanted to start a Young Entreprenuer Club. She contacted me to be her web master. I ended up doing much more, and was co-founder of the club. I built her website and maintained it. I used ASP.NET to build it, which was a new technology for me. Early builds of the site do not exist anywhere, unfortunately. Towards the end of the school year, Annika and I met with a web consult, Rob Campbell, from a local web design company, Thinking2, located in Simi Valley, California. He taught me the ways of Twitter's Bootstrap. From there, I made the YeaCal website beautiful and even the TIny Country Games site. Unfortunately, Annika and I had too many dissagreements over the site during the summer before Junior year, and I left, and the site now is made by Rob Campbell.

Santa Susana Web Master

This year I am in two tech classes, AP Computer Science, and CTE Web Design. Unfortunately, after freshman year, Sheinberg left and was eventually replaced with Darius Clarke. Clarke is... not the best of teachers. In fact, one could say he is the most hated teacher at Santa Susana. Most people in AP Comp Sci have no idea what they are doing, because he cant teach. I know Java very well so I have no trouble in that class. The CTE (Career Technical Education) Web Design class manages the school website, because Santa Susana does not use SchooLoop, the CMS that the rest of the district uses. The obvious advantage that a CMS has over hard coded sites is that any administrator can edit the site without having to know any HTML. Our system was very slow. How it would work, is someone would email Mr. Clarke, and he will eventually make an issue on our GitHub repository. The issue would be assigned to someone, they would make the change, submit it to our stanging branch. The pull requests would be open for almost full days becuase, like I said, Clarke is not good at what he does. After the staging PR was merged, we would have to wait for another PR so that we can push to the production branch for the change to go public. Our principal was sick of everything taking so long. One major thing we decided on was to make me the web master. I had only been in that class for a couple months, and even those who had been in the class agree that I was the best with web design. I had already done so much for the school website, and continue to be the #1 contributor to the site. The principal wanted us to make the website more like a CMS, but still being able to keep our unique design, because all SchoolLoop sites look the same. She also asked us what we though was best for our site. I said we need a more modern design with mobile responsiveness, which was achievable with Bootstrap. So that was when I started the SSHS Redesign. The new design took from October to January to complete. You can see what the new website looks like at https://www.santasusana.org/. The site was completely designed by yours truly. Another feature is behind the scenes. The site is mostly dictated by a MySQL database that admins can manage using admin pages that I built from scratch. This site works the same way. 

Senior Project and the Future

Every Santa Susana student must complete a Senior Project in the field they want to certify in. I didn't want to just code a game, or make a website, because I've done that tons of times before. The Senior Project has to have a learning stretch. Flash back to when I talked about Orthographic. I was supposed to write a script for that game and make it in VX Ace from there. However, after puting aside for so long, I dropped the project. Until now. RPG Maker MV came out the weekend of IndieCade this year and I was very excited by it. Mainly because the replaced the Ruby scripts with JavaScript plugins. I am no JavaScript expert, but I certainly know more JavaScript than Ruby, especially considering how similar JavaScript and Java are. I have basically no experience with Object Orient JavaScript, because I mainly use JS for the web. I decided to make Orthographic my Senior Project. For the project, I will write a script for the game, get voices, use only plugins that I code myself, and design the game in RPG Maker MV. I am very excited. I am also working on the first game I will sell, El Sueño Americano, which is a bilingual game about a boy who must make it to the United States. So, that's two games, a bunch of websites, including SSHS all lined up for me to work on in the future. 

Sorry that this post is so long, I had a lot to say about my life. I promise they won't be this long very often. I will try to get at least one post out a week, but don't quote me on that. Thank you so much for checking out my blog!

-José Rodriguez-Rivas