Tim Fuqua

Tim Fuqua played his first video game when he was 6 years old: Super Mario Bros on his cousin's NES. The first video game he called his own was Commander Keen. He saved up 2 years worth of birthday and Christmas money to buy a Sega Genesis and some games when he was 9. He mastered Sonic the Hedgehog 3 shortly after that.

Tim has always loved video games, and he excelled in Math in school, but he didn't know they were so closely related until 8th grade when he saw a story run on the local news about a school called DigiPen Institute of Technology, located in a town not far from where he grew up. He knew he wanted to make games, and now he knew how to make it a career.

He started making games on a TI-83 calculator in 9th grade, with his first game being a menu based Dragon Ball Z RPG, complete with hand entered graphics. He shared the game peer-to-peer amongst friends at school, and he thought it was pretty cool to see people he didn't know playing a game he made. The spark was now a flame.

In 2004, Tim began his Freshmen year at DigiPen, but after the first semester he had doubts as to whether it was really what he wanted with his life. He filed a leave of absence and took more time to think about it. Over the next summer, he reaffirmed that it was what he wanted to do and enrolled again in the Fall of 2005.

In the summer of 2008, at the end of his Junior year at DigiPen, like many of his peers, Tim wanted to get an internship or summer job to help pay for tuition. He received a contract offer from local tech giant Microsoft to work as a Build Engineer supporting Windows Vista and the still unreleased Windows 7. However, the contract needed to be a full year. Tim made the decision to delay returning for his Senior year at DigiPen to instead spend a year working at Microsoft. After his 1-year contract was up, he declined a second contract to instead return to DigiPen to finish his degree. He graduated in 2010 with a Bachelor of Science in Real-Time Interactive Simulation.

In November of 2010, Tim landed a job at a local game company, PopCap Games, Inc., as a Build Engineer. He spent a total of 3 years with PopCap. In the last 6 months at PopCap, in addition to his role as the Build Engineer, he also joined the Platform Services team as a Software Engineer. He helped to implement features and fix bugs on the core platform, which games like Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time would eventually be built on. He left PopCap in July of 2013.

After leaving PopCap, Tim found himself again back at Microsoft. He was still passionate about video games, but the long hours and crunch times that occurred from most game projects didn't suite him. Even though it wasn't video games, he started working on a top-secret project which would eventually release in the fall of 2014. The project was the Microsoft Band. Tim worked as a Software Engineer, creating the application that would run on the device. He received 1 patent from his work on the Microsoft Band, for "Remote management of a graphical user interface". It was during this time that he started personal projects learning Apple's iOS framework.

In January of 2015, Tim joined a Kirkland, WA based tech consulting firm and worked for a year on 2 different in-house iOS applications. Both projects were created from the ground up, natively using Apple's new Swift programming language, and both projects were enterprise applications for large, Fortune 500 companies.

Tim joined Stella & Dot in as an iOS Developer in Feb of 2016, and had a lot of fun working on their e-commerce platform application. However much fun it was, though, he left Stella & Dot 6 months later to join a fresh new company with an interesting product in the IoT field.

Tim came on to Wally Labs, LLC (owned by Sears Holdings Corporation) as an iOS Developer in August of 2016, and still works there now. He was drawn to the company by his manager, whom he had previously worked with while working on the enterprise applications a year earlier.

While Tim has moved away from making games professionally, he hasn't stopped making them recreationally. One thing he has learned over the years is that his gaming passion isn't as much for real-time interactive games, but rather for turn-based games that can be played physically, such as Trading Card Games like Magic the Gathering and The Pokemon Card Game. His personal game passion is now centered around creating his own card games and creating utility applications for iOS that support the card games he plays.