Monkeys No More

I've mentioned it here before, but now it's official: Monkeys in the Playground is shutting down.  There's currently a link on the main page directing people here, and when the contract expires in August, I won't be renewing.  Of the three games on the site, Clueball will be moved to another server and will soon be accessible from a link on this blog.  The other two games, an art program and a simplistic platformer, remain unfinished and will disappear when the blog does.

Monkeys in the Playground was created to be a site of educational games that helped kids have fun while learning. The end goal was to have everything on the site, even the link buttons, be fun and interactive.  This can be seen in the sites logo, which has two monkeys on a teeter-tooter that you can play with using the mouse cursor.  I was very proud of the site at the time, and I still am.  So why shut it down?  The reasons are three-fold:

1) Getting the site to where I wanted it, and maintaining it, required me to be a full time website designer.  Full time website designer is a great profession, but it's not the career I'm pursuing, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to concentrate my portfolio on that.

2) My dream job is to be an educational game designer.  To that end, it seemed to make sense to focus my portfolio on designing educational games.  Problem is, websites dedicated to educational games tend to focus on small, simple games that teach a simple concept.  Those games are terrific, don't get me wrong; my dream job is to design them.  But it occurred to me that only pumping out a ton of small simple games probably isn't the best for my portfolio.

3) This goes hand-in-hand with the second reason, but I don't want to pigeon-hole myself.  Educational game design might be my dream job, but it's not the only thing I'm interested in.  My goal right now is to develop as many interesting applications for my portfolio as possible while I finish school, and confining them all to one narrow category seems unwise.

So there you go.  This blog is currently the main headquarters for my programming work, and will soon be home to multiple projects I've completed.  Thanks for stopping by, and be sure to  keep checking back for news, updates, and announcements!