Remember that interview I did under the influence of food poisoning? turns out I did great even though I don’t remember much of what happened :D
So you are now looking at the new Game Developer (aka. teh new guy) at Small World Interactive, still under evaluation so my job description will be specified at a later time. But this means my plans to leave Egypt are taking a backseat now, and frankly I only wanted to leave so I could work in my field of choice since my options were very limited here.
Well, it has been a very productive month, I successfully reviewed most of the relevant knowledge to my current professional direction diving in deeper and filling what gaps I have in these subjects:
Trigonometry
Calculus
Linear Algebra
C/C++
STL
Data Structures
Boost
Memory operations
Modularity
Portability
Multithreading principles and patterns
Windows API
Direct3D9
On the code front, I did some work on Zamron based on the beta feedback I got via FGL (Flash Game License, a dead website for selling Flash games to publishers) but I’m going too slow.. I’ll probably give it a little more focus this month, and I’ve also been writing a Windows API/Direct3D9 framework that I’ll be using and developing iteratively for my demos, today I’m implementing the Mesh class (D3DXMESH is mostly obsolete, completely removed in D3D11), handling window resizing and device lost state, and writing a Camera class.
Attention spans continue to get shorter, apps start selling for 10 cents, AAA game teams get bigger, but the single player game gets smaller, all become subscription based.
Everyone on the planet with access to electricity releases an indie game, each game sells one copy to the authors mum. (LOL)
PS4 comes out, it’s an uzi with hdmi output, only plays ww2 fps shooters.
This LD is more awesome than the one before it even though I didn’t think beating LD21 was possible, until now there are over 700 games made in 48 hours around the theme ‘Alone’! that’s just impressive.. its gotta be a world record.
As I’m checking the games now, I’m finding truly wonderful games, and since the theme ‘Alone’ is rather abstract, the ideas vary widely.. yes you can still find many generic side-scrollers, but also many innovative stylish games built around a deep concept.
So I woke up today at 6:00am, left the house and went to Google’s gegypt 2.0 Developers event, and here I am home again, only 16 hours of googley awesomeness later :D
On entering you see this, it was a little lonely, but stylish
Inside there are multiple “tracks” each containing different seminars and events, and in between there was the chill out zone, and many other activities, and you had to pass through this Google arc:
You don’t set out to build a wall. You don’t say ‘I’m going to build the biggest, baddest, greatest wall that’s ever been built.’ You don’t start there. You say, ‘I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid. You do that every single day. And soon you have a wall.
After taking a look at a few real WebGL demos including a quality platformer game, this thing is starting to look and feel even better than Flash Stage3D, and definitely faster since it doesn’t have the bloated Flash player underneath it. And because it’s based on OpenGL ES 2.0 it offers both a familiar API and a fully shader driven pipeline, it actually beats all past plug-in based approaches like O3D.
