Welcome!
Welcome to the personal site of Gideon Gyabaah
This site is a mini portal into my activities, profession and interests.
Here you can browse game projects that I have worked on, art work that I have done, and a blog where I share my technical knonwledge with regards to game developement and design.
Thank you for visiting and feel free to contact me via the contacts page. Cheers!
BIO:
Born in Accra, Ghana July 1983, I moved to Abidjan, Ivory Coast with my Mother at the age of 9 months.
I spent the first 19 years of my life in Abidjan, occasionally visiting Accra, Ghana during the summer holidays.
During this time period I attend primary school, middle school and high school all at the International Community School of Abidjan (ICSA). It was a small private English school, and this is where I learnt my English in conjunction with already knowing and speaking French given that the Ivory Coast was a French speaking country.
I first discover my passion for video game development during 3rd grade. It start of as drawing comics and talking about the abilities of my characters (Similar to a table top dungeons and dragons game). I eventually learnt that to develop a game you not only need art but also had to know how to program. Starting from 6th grade I set myself on a personal path to not only learn how to program but also make my first game. Thanks to the resources at school and some C/C++ books that no one used I learnt to program the hard and long way. By 12th grade, I had develop my first demo game. It was a great moment, especially haven spent almost 5 years learning the ins and outs of programming.
After graduating from ICSA, I attended University at York University, Toronto, Canada. I was enrolled in the Computer Science program in a Bachelors of Art. During my 4 years at York, I learnt how to program with Java and other web technologies such as JSP, JavaScript, HTML and PHP. A lot of it, as usual, was self-thought, but I did get the best out of my Java courses. 4 years in I had to make decision with regards in the direction I wanted to go in my career. Still feeling very passionate about video games and wanting to be part of that industry (that along with some financial constrains), I transferred to the International Academy of Design Toronto (IADT). I will spend 18 months there culminating in a Diploma of Video Games with Honors. During my tenure there, I further made inroads into game developed, and end up with several game demos and a complete 3D game (developed from the ground up using C# and XNA)
Upon graduation I did several web development contracts remotely for 9 months whilst awaiting my Canadian permanent residency.
My first full professional job was that of a Video game Instructor at Trios college (first at Kitchener, On, Canada and then at Hamilton, ON Canada). There I thought video game development courses, covering programming languages and tools such as: C# with XNA, Action Script 3, Maya, Photoshop, etc....
From there I worked at GameTronics (an electronic casino slot machine game company) for a year before the company folded.
That led me to THQ where I have been working for the past 2 and half years as a Localization Engineer.
All in all I have been in the game industry for a full 4 years and have had over 6 years of web development (back-end and front end).
These are exciting times to be in the word of Technology and I eagerly look forward to what the future holds :).
