My name is Abel Beekink. I am 30 years old and am currently studying computer science at the Rotterdam School of Applied Sciences.

Ever since my father brought home a Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1999, I’ve been a huge fan of video games. Even back then I was constantly coming up with new ideas for games. I still have several old drawing books full of drawings about those game ideas. Somewhere around 2006, I discovered Game Maker. I spent a lot of time experimenting with the program by editing existing games. Eventually I started to learn how to make my own games, and that was my first experience with programming. That interest in programming convinced me to start studying computer science.

In those years of stuying, I never really lost that interest in game development. It was always something I’d love to do as a job, but never really felt like I could get there. That is, until I enrolled in a game development minor at school. There I really manage to reconnect with that childhood passion for making games. That, combined with learning that the game industry is much larger in the Netherlands that I previously thought, convinced me that game development truly is the ideal job for me. I just enjoy the design and programming involved and like to challenge myself to come up with new ideas. It’d be my dream to make a career out of it.