About

Hey, I'm Mike Hoskins, a designer and programmer located in Northwest Montana.

Contact

If you'd like to contact me about a project, or have a question about the content you see on this site, or just want to chat me up, I'm mostly available as time demands.

Email is probably the best way to get a hold of me, since I check it the most consistently. I can be reached at mike@pixelbath.com. I don't use a great deal of social networking sites for my professional life, but I can be found on the following:

Work

I'm currently not accepting freelance work, but am always open for discussion. You can reach me on my contact page.

Play

I've been a lover of video games for almost as long as I can remember, and an avid programmer for nearly as long. In elementary school, one of our classes had a TI-99/4A with a few games on it. From that moment on, I was captivated by the capabilities of computers and the potential they contained for entertainment.

The "Breadbox"

Sometime around third or fourth grade, I received a second-hand Commodore 64 (with disk and tape drives!), along with a couple programming manuals for the system. As it turned out, these would be instrumental in showing me the computer not just as a consumer device, but as something that could be commanded to carry out the user's will (provided you could learn the syntax). These manuals, along with the magazine 3-2-1 Contact, taught me the basics of BASIC which came in handy during the Apple IIe-era of school computing. I believe before the class even started, I'd already wowed the person next to me with my fancy:

10 PRINT "MICHAEL IS COOL."
20 GOTO 10

We learned to use LOGO, but the pen-based drawing didn't make much sense to me at the time. Why use such a slow method of drawing when you could just jam everything into a sprite and blit it anywhere you want?

I occasionally used a friend's Amiga 1000 (with RAM expansion and two floppy drives) as often as I could, checking out the newest games along with its thriving demo scene.

After high school I moved to Houston and began to learn HTML, and while helping others with websitessites, began to pick up some ASP, then PHP. I was tempted by the allure of Java and its "Write-Once-Run-Anywhere!" promise, but didn't understand what all those extra words meant: "Public static void main? That's ridiculous; why can't I just write the function name?"

Ultimately, after getting my feet wet in a few more semicolon-based languages, I finally understood Java's now-not-so-cryptic code, but had already graduated to a career in Flash ActionScript development. Fun graphics, easy framework, ubiquitous player... what's not to like? My career ended up in c#/.Net, Flash died, and here we are.

I mostly work in c# during the day, and my hobbies stay weird; showing up as homebrew game development: PSP and Wii games, TIC-80, and PICO-8. These game systems aren't Flash, but they run in browsers and most other platforms. I do occasional pixel art and Blender renders, sometimes picking up everyday streaks here and there.