This Is Battleganz Games

I have an associate degree from the now defunct IADT Chicago for Multimedia Production and Design. I have a certificate from Udacity for Machine Learning Foundations. I have also completed over 23 Udemy courses in everything from branding, to programming and business writing.

At around the age of 12, I fell in love with web programming. This was back in the mid-1990s and there were not that many schools on web programming, relative to today. I pieced my learning together from the various online tutorials I could find.

At 14, as an 8th grade graduation gift, my mom sent my brother and me to computer camp. We learned programming and played a lot of LAN games. That was when I came up with the gamer name, Battleganz. Battleganz is a combination of English and German and means "He who is made whole by battle."

IADT Chicago was constantly being advertised on TV. It offered exactly the education that I was looking for: Web programming. I was so fortunate to simply graduate from high school that I jumped at the opportunity to join this for-profit college. After joining IADT Chicago, I quickly fell in love with game design, film and animation, and sound design. Web design was put on the back burner. I completed my junior year, ran out of money, and then was promptly disowned by my family. 

Nowadays, most of my education comes from Youtube, Amazon, Udemy, Udacity, and the local library system. 

I really wanted to get my PhD in mathematics, due to my inherent math ability, but that is looking increasingly unlikely. 

I got my first job at the age of 16. It was part of a summer job program hosted at my high school in Chicago. I literally got paid to play computer games all day. 

My supervisor was a computer teacher who had a room full of old Macintosh computers. Each Macintosh computer had an "emulator" which allowed it to play Windows-based games. The irony was inescapable!

 It was the most fun job I've ever had! My first "real" job was at Walgreens, working as a cashier. I was desperate to get up enough money to pay my tuition at IADT Chicago in 2004 (I'm old) and I could not be denied. I was quickly moved to management training, even though I did not meet the requirements. Ultimately, I couldn't keep my grades up in school while keeping the job as well, so I decided to quit working at Walgreens in 2005. Due to my reading and math ability and my conscientiousness, I have been in management training for virtually every job I've ever had. My last full-time job was working at a warehouse and distribution center in Berkeley, Illinois. 

I don't enjoy working as an employee because of the lack of equity and creative control. I was accepted into the SSI Disability program in 2010 for schizophrenia. I am currently surviving on SSI Disability.

The hardest part of my life now is dealing with my ego. It took me about a decade to accept my diagnosis of schizophrenia. 

But after I decided to change my life and accepted treatment for my mental illness, everything improved. The amount of blessings that I've had, even without a job, are insurmountable. I live better than some people who have worked every year of their lives!