Welcome to My Website!

Who I am

My name is Tom Sharp, I'm a programmer, game developer dancer, and musician. I'm currently studying computer science and music at OSU. This website is meant to be a sort of portfolio for my projects and achievements, etc. Here's a little but about me:

I'm a game developer: I have been an independent game developer since around 2020. However, I started creating games back when I was only around 12 years old. I started in a programmer you may or may not be aware of called Scratch. It was a simple drag and drop block coding type engine, but I found a lot of enjoyment making my things in there. I started by making little animations with drawings I made, but eventually went into creating entire games. I dove into learning this engine and became pretty good at it, but eventually I ran out of time to continue doing this. It wasn't until my Junior year of high school that I started to get back into the idea of game development. But instead of going back to scratch, I decided to try something a little more advances. Unity. I still remember being shell shocked seeing the Unity workspace for the first time. It was not like anything I had worked with before, it was way more complex and strange. But I was still determined. I wanted to create games again and I was going to learn how to do it. About 2 years after I started messing with Unity, I released my first game, Smiley's Starship (which you can play yourself under the projects tab). Since then I've been continuing to improve my skills and release better and better games, and I hope to continue doing so for a long, long time.

I'm a dancer: I started dancing back in 2010 when I was 6 years old. I wasn't the original dancer in my family, actually my sister was. She was taking some sort of ballet or jazz class and I was sitting bored in the lobby when the owner of the studio asked me if I wanted to try a tap class. Being curious I said yes, and that was the greatest choice I could have made. From then on I became engrossed into tap dance, spending every free minute I had practicing my technique, trying to get better, faster, and cleaner. A year after I started dancing, I started competing in dance as well. Those were some of the best years of my early life. I had a lot of fun competing, making friends, performing, winning. I became a force to be reckoned with in the dance world. It was good fun. My dance partner Naomi was super huge in my life back then too. We were unstoppable together, and grew a reputation as a power duo. I've heard stories of people asking if we were performing because they didn't want to compete with us, and even years after I left the competitive dance scene, I still hear stories from people taking about us. I was also very very stubborn when it came to performing. I've had everything that could go wrong go wrong at some point when I was on stage. Costume malfunctions, forgetting routines, injuries and illness, but I never let that slow me down. In my later years as I was beginning to phase myself out of the competition scene, I started taking up teaching more seriously. I had been doing some teaching things here and there throughout my time as a dancer, I'd TA for every class I could, choreographed competitively and recreationally, and even won some competitions with said choreography. But it wasn't until 2018 when I was offered my first class, and then even later (around 2022) until I ran my own tap program. Now, I continue to keep up with my skills and my teaching. I've taken over tap dance at Oregon State University, and am now the youngest faculty member / teacher there. I may be good at computer science and school stuff, but my passion has always lied in the performing arts, and if I could, I would ditch all the CS stuff to become a full time performer.

I'm a musician: I started music around the same time many of my peers did, playing recorder in elementary school. They had this "recorder karate" system where you would be able to move up a belt, (white, yellow, ..., black) if you could perform the song they provided. I had a lot of fun with this system, and took pride in my ability to move up the ranks, until I eventually made it to a black belt in recorder. The song we had to play was Ode to Joy, incredibly simple for me now, but back then it was a big achievement for me. After elementary school, I moved on to middle where I had the opportunity to play an actual instrument for the first time. I picked up the tenor saxophone and became pretty good at it. But it started to bore me. I was always stuck playing the boring parts or the background, and I wanted to be in the foreground. So I ditched the tenor saxophone and began playing oboe. Now I'm playing oboe for OSU and am a minor in music performance, and it's good fun. I've played other instruments along the way, drum kit was an especially big one, but now I'm just an oboe man.