About Me
My name is Philip Fox and I was born May 17th, 1982 in the great state of Illinois. Growing up I always played many different sports, I loved hockey but also played baseball, soccer, and football. One thing I loved more however was video games. I started playing them at the young age of 5, the first system I ever played was the Atari. Of course through the years I also ended up owning a NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Gameboy, Game Gear, Playstation 1 and 2, Dreamcast, and an Xbox360.
But I wouldn’t be where I am at just by having a great love for playing games, when i was about 10 years old or so I was introduced to the amazing world of computers. Computers were always a fascination to me, the first one i was exposed to was my cousins. He had such a wide variety of games, from Waynes World to Maniac Mansion to Indiana Jones. A couple years later when I was about 14 my parents got their own computer and then my buddy introduced me to a program called Visual Basic in which you could make your own applications for the computer.
So I went through highschool living two lives essentially, the life of the normal high school teenager who went out drank and hung out at parties, and of course the nerdy side of sitting around developing different applications using Visual Basic. With my thrill for programming I decided to attend college for a Computer Science degree and study C programming. After a couple courses i got very bored with what i was doing, there was always the thought in the back of my head “Would I be happy doing this for the rest of my life?”. My answer to that question was nope, so I ended up dropping out of college.
I ended up going back to college a year later, but this time it wasn’t for computer science. It was going to be for criminal justice instead. I knew a couple people who had ties in the FBI, so of course me being young i thought to myself, man it would be awesome if i became an FBI agent. That dream kept me going for a little bit longer, but once again I asked myself the same question, “Would I be happy doing this for the rest of my life?”. So i ended up dropping out again and got a job as a fulltime bartender. Did the bartender thing for a few years when I thought about Full Sail. Now over the years I always wanted to go to school at Full Sail for Game Development but always thought “Wow that school is way too expensive!” so I always just shrugged off the idea.
So after my grandpa ended up passing away my stepdad Jeff ended up coming up to me one day and asking me what it would take for me to go to Full Sail. I said “I don’t know it costs alot of money.” So he offered to pay my initial application cost of 500 dollars, and that put the wind in my sails. I moved home for a couple months to save up money and ended up moving down to Florida to attend my dream college Full Sail.
So ever since I started here i have to say I have met some amazing people. Back home I used to feel nerdy talking about video games or computers, but at Full Sail I felt at home and accepted the passion I have for video games. Full Sail isn’t really tough, but it also isn’t really easy. The basic schedule for Game Development at Full Sail is two classes per month, one usually relates directly to Game Development and you go to that one 3 days a week. The other is usually a general ed class of some sort in which you go to maybe 2 times a week. A day consists of about 3-4 hours of lecture and 3-4 hours of lab that corresponds to what you learned that day from lecture. So as you can tell the schedule can be very overwhelming, but when you accept the schedule things get really easy.
So to anyone who ends up reading this, make sure in the end you are doing something that makes you happy, not doing something that makes other people happy.
Philip Fox
Game Developer
