Diary of a Game Programmer Wannabe

Happy New Year!

2012-01-02T19:36:00.000-08:00

I think you can very easily guess what my goal is for this new year :). This is it. I will finish a game (at least) and put it out there in the world, whatever the outcome may be. This last month has been frustrating: Jose Luis had no internet access for weeks and some problems that prevented us from coordinating and making enough progress. But it is looking better now. Meanwhile, I have learned a thing or two about writing games for the iThings with Unity. For example, explosions and such, which are created with what is called "particle systems" are problematic on apple devices. Following some advice and some example scripts I found, I was able to create a tool to play these particle systems on my machine and record them in an animated image that can be used on an iThing without slowing it down too much. Also, after playing quite a few space shooter games on my iPhone, I think I've found my favorite way to control the space ship on a horizontal shooter. Basically you just place your finger on the screen and move it around and the spaceship mimics your movement. You can try these two little improvements on the very minimalistic game page on http://engelsanchez.net/shooter. We have also successfully created test builds for iPhone, which my friend Kieran and Jose Luis have installed and tried. If anybody else out there has an iPhone or iPad and feels like helping a brother out, please send me your device ID! If you don't know how to get it, here are some instructions.

The next steps will be to create a few background props and a couple of simple enemies to make the prototype feel more like a proper game. Also, this will help us build our pipeline. That is, figure out the programs and techniques we need to use to create game objects and add them to the game in the easiest way possible. Besides the technical aspects of the whole operation, the most important thing still is and will always be communication. We need to learn to work together, pass ideas back and forth and make sure each we are understanding each other. Luckily, Jose Luis and I have plenty of motivation to keep us going. 2012, here we come!

iPhone Game

2011-12-02T18:30:00.001-08:00

A lot has been going lately, but it has been hard to find time to blog about it. I continued toying with multiplayer turn-based games and Unity during August and September. The 4inline game I put online was rewritten using Erlang, an excellent language for massively parallel and distributed applications. If you want to check out what Erlang looks like, you can browse the source code on my github page. But the game is not up right now. Although I was expecting to work on multiplayer games with Jose Luis, things took another turn and he got involved with a group of people from his video game school and they had decided to work on a space shooter game. So, I tagged along, putting my multiplayer plans and the Alien Party project on hold to join the group. After finishing this simple prototype of an isometric level while trying to coordinate with the guys in the group, things took another turn.

Isometric Prototype

The group thing did not work out. There was no communication really, and it felt like it was just me working by myself on someone else's project without feedback. And in the end Jose Luis and I decided to just go it alone. That is, just the two of us. So in the last couple of weeks we have been trying to restart the project and find a new direction.

During that time, I bit the bullet and finally got an iPhone and started learning iPhone game development with Unity. I got a prototype working on the iPhone and even though it is just a first step it is absolutely exciting! You can play the web, PC and Mac version of this simple side scrolling prototype here. Hey, if you have an iPhone and do not mind doing some testing for me while I am learning, you can send me your device id and I can send you a link to download it for your phone.

But of course, nothing is easy on the path to finishing a video game. Jose Luis is struggling a bit, things are not all peachy in his life. I hope he pulls through. I have wanted to finish a game with him for so long now. We have got to make this work... Meanwhile, I keep toiling away at night and trying to make progress. Luckily my new job is truly great. I am very, very busy, but the people I am working with are all so nice, all the way to the company CEO, that I feel very stress free. My last year working with the scientists was not that great. I did not enjoy it, although I made a few very good friends. But I have moved on and things are good. Now I just HAVE TO FINISH A GAME!!!

2011-08-08T20:02:00.000-07:00

Multiplayer Games

Although the blog looks a bit abandoned, these have been very busy times in my ongoing search for game development Nirvana. It is just hard to find the time to blog. Time is a luxury. My latest experiment involves taking baby steps into the world of multi-player games with Unity. After finding out that you can have a free server in the Amazon cloud for a whole year and being motivated by my friend Luis to start hacking away together some small Unity game experiments together, I got it into my head that we should have our own multi-player game server. I just finished putting together a game of 4 in line running on my home server. It is not much to look at, but I have learned a lot in the process and hopefully that is just the beginning. You can see the code running behind it in Github. I have not published the code or assets for the Unity client yet. Unity makes it particularly hard to do this unless you buy a very expensive license. Oh well, that is the only real problem I have had with that otherwise wonderful game engine, so I will try not to complain. Anyway, checkers are next!

In the last few months, while trying to resurrect my Alien Party game idea in Unity, I have practiced 3D modeling in Blender quite a lot. And also got really involved in a newly formed local user group. It has been great so far. We have met a few times already and will try to keep getting together once a month. If you are interested in 3D modeling and animation in Blender, stop by! I am teaching the newbie workshop. I will take good care of you :)

I will try to post more about the little multi-player games and my progress with Alien Party later. Things are happening slowly, but they are happening. It is tough going working on games at night, and there is so much to learn when you are doing it alone. But it is all worth it. My goal for the rest of the year is to put my work out there and start a proper collaboration with my friend Luis. Just like me, he has a lot going on and not that much free time. But we both look forward to working together. It is something we have toyed with for too long. It is time to make it happen!

2010-10-21T07:24:00.000-07:00

Audio Adventures and Lost Kittens

While putting the finishing touches on the little Memory War Cubes prototype I had to face, again, one of my biggest handicaps in this game hobby business: Audio. It took me a while to find a suitable sound sample to play when you move the pieces or the cursor. What you hear in the prototype is an edited version of a free sound sample I found in the wonderful Open Game Art website. For that simple modification, I used the free and open source Audacity audio editor, which I had used in the past to slow down guitar songs I wanted to transcribe. The sample's description said that it was created using nothing but Audacity's generators: it was not recorded nor derived from a recorded sample. When I read that, this terrible itch started and would not go away: how do you create sounds from nothing? I have taught myself a lot of game programming skills, how to create 3D models in Blender or manipulate graphics in Photoshop. I can create most of the things I need for a simple game myself, which is great. Being able to do the same with sounds would be extremely valuable, I thought.

Audacity is a great free audio tool, and it comes bundled with Nyquist, a sound synthesis and composition language with Lisp syntax. Lisp is an old and venerable programming language that is popular and powerful, but is mostly known, loved and hated by its pervasive use of parentheses. Look at this sample plugin from the Audacity website:

(defun delays (s decay delay count)
    (if (= count 0) (cue s)
    (sim (cue s)
        (loud decay (at delay (delays s decay delay (- count 1)))))))
  (stretch-abs 1 (delays s (- 0 decay) delay count))

After learning quite a bit more about Audacity and Nyquist, I kept trolling the Internet looking for resources on creating sounds until I came across the book Designing Sound by Andy Farnell. That is when trouble really started. I got it from Amazon and have been absolutely under its spell ever since. This book is exactly what I was looking for. It has a detailed overview of the background, theory and tools you need to create sounds from nothing for music composition, interactive shows, film, animation and game development. The tool used in the book is the amazing free and open source Pure Data audio package. Pure Data has a visual language of boxes and connections you can use to create any kind of sound processing or sound generating machine you can imagine. Here is an example visual program from Wikipedia:

It looks deceptively simple, but it is incredibly powerful and is as addictive as crack cocaine. I have abandoned all other pursuits in life and neglected my family while learning this stuff. Audio programming is fascinating!! Quite some time will pass before my audio skills get to the point where I can create decent sound samples and effects for my games, but I think it will be worth it. Here is a little video of me messing with Pure Data trying to filter a noise signal to extract a more pleasant, harmonic sound out of it:

The only event that has been able to snap me from this current audio obsession was the disappearance of our beloved little kitty Thisbe the day of my daughter's 7th birthday. This was much worse than the last time something similar happened to us. I spent the afternoon and much of that evening looking around the neighborhood and Franklin Park. Our backyard leads to the park, and many animals who would love nothing more than a kitten snack live there, so the thought of our little one spending the night there was very troubling. I did find her at around 10:30pm that night thanks to the food we left out on our back porch (a good tip from a neighbor), a big flashlight and lots of patience. You can not imagine how hard that day was for the family, but happy endings are always welcome. Below is a picture of that little rascal. The first thing she did when I caught her was scratch my hand badly. Then she stole my pillow in the middle of the night and ruined my sleep. Oh well. All was forgiven very quickly.

2010-09-26T19:56:00.000-07:00

Vector Graphics
The only predictable property of life is how unpredictable it usually is. My newly formed partnership with my old friend Luis has gone through a bit of dry period. He just got a job after a period of unemployed, which is great, but it will take him a while to find a good balance that will allow him to spend time on our hobby. So, while our little project is on hiatus, I have been playing with a couple of things from my long list of cool technologies to try.

The idea of creating cool graphics and animations on the web for games and interactive sites has always been very appealing to me. But the games you play on the internet are usually developed in Adobe Flash, which is a proprietary technology. That means that, for the most part, you are forced to buy their products to develop Flash games and such. They do offer a free, open source alternative to develop Flash applications without their fancy tools: the free flex compiler. I have downloaded and studied it a bit, but I am frankly more interested in what is out there for the people who want to write games for the web using nothing but free standard technologies. The situation is not that great, to be honest, but there is hope in the horizon with the upcoming HTML 5 standard.

Although not quite fit for games, there is a very cool library called Raphaël.js (Thank you Daiji for telling me about it!) that can be used to pimp your web site with interactive vector graphics. That is, graphics consisting of lines, circles and other shapes filled with solid colors, color gradients and the like. Google maps, for example, makes use of vector graphics to display lines on their maps and make it work on most browsers. Here is a little bouncing lines demo I just created. Since I am currently rebuilding my home page, I will probably be spicing it up with it. It does make your computer work hard just to display a few colored lines, so I better use it with care.

To create the vector graphics, I have been playing with Inkscape, a vector graphics creation program. It is not high art, but I recently created a little reward chart for my little girls with it. Here is a sample image from that chart. Enjoy! :)

2010-09-13T18:14:00.000-07:00

Goodbyes
Last Friday I saw my buddy Stephen Graham laying in a coffin. He was to be put to rest the next day. You could hear loud conversations and lots of laughter coming from his friends just a couple of rooms away. Life stops for nobody. He was an all around good guy and a very positive person. All I can think of now is of how much I will never get to learn about him, about the person he was. Farewell, Stephen. And yesterday, the beautiful young daughter of an ex-colleague passed away. Life is really full of pain, and yet it is so easy to forget it until you see it right in front of you again. We all do our best to survive it and keep moving until our time comes. I hope I stop forgetting to enjoy all those wonderful people in my life while I can.

2010-09-02T18:10:00.000-07:00

Still Here
It may seem that I am dead and gone from looking at this blog, but that is not the case. In fact I am more active in this game development business than I have been in a long time. Time... That is what I do not have much of. I am finding it difficult to spend any of the little time I have on the blog. There is so much to learn and do! But I will try to update more frequently from now on.

The problem I have had this year has been one of lack of focus. For example, I spent quite a bit of time studying and playing with the UDK, that beast of a game engine. But games made with that can really only run on newish computers with beefy video cards. Not a problem if I'm only doing this as a fun hobby, or if I want to put that in my resume to try to get into a game company in the future but, is that what I want to do with it? Where am I going with this? Do I want to work for a game company? Do I want to do it as a hobby only? Do I want to try to live off of making games? What is it that would bring me the most satisfaction. When your head is full of questions like this, you tend to meander and drift: You can not get anywhere like this.

Working for a game company is out of the question. If you read my blog entries back in October you know I chose a job I believed was the most interesting and funky among the offers I got while job hunting. The difference in salary between my lowest offer (the one I took) and the highest would make you cry or make you yell horrible words at me. I have no regret. Even if the salary was low, it was still pretty high compared to the game jobs I interviewed for. By a lot. And yet I am still struggling financially. It just would not have worked in the end.

The life of an independent game developer is not much better. Making a living as one is similar to becoming a rock star: it works out for only a selected few. It is a very long shot. Still, not trying it would bring me great grief. Life is too short.

I like what I do for a living. I let myself get stuck working in the wrong place once, and I will not let that happen to me again. But I like it. I was born to write software, tinker with databases, computer graphics, cryptic computer languages, obsess day and night about how to optimize programs and solve difficult problems with computers. What I like about games, especially large massively multiplayer games, is that they comprise all of the factors that make software development fun and quite an extra bit of art and creativity. When it comes to software, I want to do it all, learn it all. It would not be acceptable to ONLY work on games.

I had the fortune to recently reconnect with an old friend of mine who lives in Puerto Rico, where I went to college. We used to mess around with computer graphics back in the day dreaming of making cool games. Then I moved to a more work, less play university and slowly began taking a different path. So now we are trying to do what we never accomplished as young whippersnappers: finish a game. Right now, the focus is clear. We are working on a simple game to get our rusty skills up to par. The game will be free, but we are looking to get good at this and will try to sell games if we get there. We will think about the rest of the way when we finish our current project.

So I scrapped the UDK (for the moment) and learned to use a completely different game engine called Unity. This one is more appropriate for independent development. It runs on PCs and Macs, even on very old ones. The entry version is free and is widely used. It has a cheap version to write games for iThings, which is still the IN thing, and will be adding support for Android based phones too. I will be doing the coding, my friend Luis is the designer and we'll both probably do a it of the 3D art and modeling. We put together a little prototype and will be working on a basic but complete level soon. The prototype is here and included below. I would be interested to know how it works for you. It requires the Unity plugin to run, but it's a very easy install, so try it out!

<div align="center"> This content requires the Unity Web Player<br /><br /> <a href="http://www.unity3d.com/unity-web-player-2.x">Install the Unity Web Player today!</a> </div>

2010-04-14T17:41:00.000-07:00

First Video

Let's jump right into it. I just uploaded a video showing the results of my experiments with the UDK game engine. I am trying to learn the basic techniques I need to implement my little Alien Party game. It does not look like much. It would be impossible to tell how many late nights I spent googling, reading UDK source code and trolling their forums to get here. I could complain here about how impossible it is to find time to do anything in my busy life, but I have no time for that :). So here it is:

As soon as I finished that, I outlined my plan for the next prototype. One thing I have learned is that when resources are very limited, proper planning is key. What a boring life-lesson, but it is true. Work never eases up, and the family always needs you. I do not want to let anybody down and I can not be happy if I do not exercise the game development muscle, so I will just have to be a very sleep deprived guy. Hey, it is just like having a new baby! Hopefully I can make this progressively better until it finally resembles a real game.

2010-03-17T19:01:00.000-07:00

One Year
It is hard for me to believe that it was a whole year ago when I started working on my game demo the day after leaving that horrid job I had. What I am up against this time, however, is much harder. I am not unhappy about my job this time. In fact, I have to say that I am happier than I have ever been in my life. Absolutely. All the things that I have experienced and learned this year have definitely paid off. But I still have not made a game! Without the luxury of being unemployed, however, progress on this new project of mine will be very slow. A full time job and the responsibilities of a father of two young children do not leave you with heaps of spare time. Still, it is something I must do. I have been studying the UDK, a professional game engine that was recently made available to poor shmucks like me who could never afford to pay thousands dollars just to play with it. And my little daughter has given me an idea for a game. She is very much into aliens and outer space right now, so it will be a simple little game for children with tons of aliens. I am calling it Alien Party for the moment. And that is really all I have right now. Here we go again... Wish me luck!

2009-12-22T06:27:00.000-08:00

Dear Santa:
First off, thank you for last year's presents. I no longer spend most of my waking hours at a place that made me deeply unhappy. As much as I would like to take credit for that, I can not explain why, after feeling stuck there for so many years, I was able to just get up and go one day in the middle of the biggest economic crisis seen by this country's current generation. So it must have been you. I have not had to work in a gray, depressing cubicle for 9 months now. Yes, setting up the tray tables and laptop every morning is inconvenient and my nursing rocking chair and sofa might not be ergonomic, but I am used to all of it now. The secret is to be mindful of your posture at all times, which is good anyway. My little girls see their daddy a lot every day, although he is mostly in a trance typing away on the computer. And daddy can see them too. I hope I get to enjoy them as much in coming years. Even if things change, I still had this year, so thank you. And special thanks for those few months I spent working on my demo and Jonathan's game. I struggled and learned and loved every second of it. It was pure bliss. In the end I did not get what I thought I wanted, but I did get quite a lot. I have learned how important it is to pursue your dream, and that a lot of my previous unhappiness was due to my own bad habits and disposition. You have to fight every day to get rid of the old baggage dragging you down. And it takes time and patience. A lot of it.

BUT (you knew this was coming I am sure), could I ask for a bit more this year? Pretty please? It is not a lot I want, really. Could you help me catch up at my new job? It is unconventional, completely outside of my comfort zone and the wacky scientists I work with are wicked smart and funny, with an edge. Mostly everything I do now requires me to learn something new, and spending hours browsing the chemistry and physics pages of Wikipedia is a must if I even want to understand what the heck they are talking about. I struggle, but I love that part. Being able to do it from home is absolutely great too. All I want for Christmas is a little bit of help catching up so that I can spend some time, just a little time, on other things. I can not remember what holding my guitar feels like. I have not finished learning any new piano songs, studied any French or Portuguese or played more than the occasional chess game online. But most of all, I have not, in ages, written any code to make little interactive creatures move around on the computer screen. Yes, I know it sounds childish. But it is so rewarding! You understand the child in all of us, so I am sure YOU get it, right? What do you think? Is there anything you can do?

Thanks in advance for any help. Always grateful for all my blessings, yours truly,

Evil Engel Sanchez

Merry Christmas!

2009-10-29T10:28:00.000-07:00

My Choice

After a rather extensive and intense job search, I have finally taken a job. Obviously, the worst possible scenario would have been not finding one at all. But I was not quite prepared for the agony that finding too many of them turned out to be! It might be easy for a company to reject a candidate. I have been in countless meetings where that has happened. You go around the table and someone might point out how this person did not answer question X, or does not have enough experience with technology Y and so on. The votes are counted, the verdict is in and two minutes later you are back at your desk finishing whatever was interrupted by this meeting. From my point of view as a candidate, a lot more is going on. I have been meeting people with the potential to become my next mentors, coworkers, best friends and beer buddies. People who I might learn a lot of stuff from, potential brothers in arms (yeah, hardly any sisters in these companies). Some of them read my blog, many gave me advice on my job search and much more. Almost overwhelmingly they were all smart, interesting people with a lot of common interests and hobbies. We talked about game programming, music, the experience of working in the software field and much more. When it is time to choose, all of these potential relationships vanish. Most likely forever. I am really in a period of mourning now. I did not expect to meet so many good people. Pretty soon, they will all forget my name and I will theirs. Such is life.

And there have been many lessons learned too. I realize now more than ever how important it is that you show them who you really are. That includes your resume, web page, code samples and just about everywhere. It is important to be liked by the right people, but it is even more important to be disliked by the wrong people as soon as possible. If you care about being happy at work, that is, beyond the salary and position, you definitely do not want to end up working for incompatible people. I care, and I believe it is crucial for me to work with like minded, fun loving, smart and dedicated people with a sense of mission. The rigidity that is rampant in most corporations, big and small, is unbearable to me. When I show them exactly who I am, that rigidity will manifest itself in rejection. Such a thing happened with one of the companies I saw earlier on, which I liked in the interviews. I found out after asking for feedback on what had happened. I was very lucky.

But even if I was able to find great places to work and great people to work in multiple companies, in the end I chose one that had the clearest path to my independence. I will be working (from home!) for a group of wacky MIT material science professors helping them with a research project that quite likely could lead to a great technological innovation that would affect people worldwide in a positive way. This is definitely not a conventional job, and I will have to learn many new things and will be placed squarely outside of my comfort zone. But I am tired of conventional jobs. That is not what I am, and I feel this is being truer to myself. I even had to reject a big software architect role offer from a big company that included insane amounts of money. From the way I was treated, I knew I could not be happy there. But it was hard to say no. Anyway, in the coming weeks I will try to figure out my new schedule, which will change, but not by that much. On we go in the quest to find balance in my life. A balance that includes work, family life and personal satisfaction. And definitely a good amount of game programming!

2009-10-07T17:48:00.000-07:00

Wanted

My little one's best friend got lost last Friday afternoon. Percy Puppy (aka Oofie) was last seen somewhere between the library and the hair salon. What followed was a frantic search through the house and surroundings. When it was clear that our little stuffed friend never made it home, I headed to the library. It was already dark, it was raining, and of course that powerful flashlight you keep in the car for emergencies never works when you need it, so I went around like a madman, with a little pen flashlight in hand, looking for our friend. People did not appreciate seeing a brown guy looking around and under cars in the library parking lot. I am not positive, but I suspect a couple of them actually called the police on me. Oofie was nowhere to be seen, so I had to go back home empty handed. My poor little one had to go to bed without her best friend in the world. It really broke my heart. Armed with a bunch of flyers with his picture, I left next morning and went back searching for it. When I found it under a bunch of brown leaves on the grass, in the pouring rain, I was definitely the happiest daddy alive. If you are not a parent of a child who is completely attached to a little stuffed animal, you will never understand the intensity of the little adventure described above. The happy ending that seemed impossible the night before actually did happen. It was a happy, happy day.

As for my job hunt, I can only hope that the ending will be as happy. Already I have had two interviews, one on Friday and another one this Monday. At the first one I was interviewed by a couple of really, really young guys (one of them still in college) who are already working on their first startup company. This is their website: http://gtrot.com. Man, I just wanted a time machine at that moment. Monday I met the person who will now be overseeing this website http://www.ticketsforcharity.com and possibly other similar ones in the future. This is a for profit company that is trying to make money while making it easier for people to send a portion of the money they would spend anyway to a number of charities. That is a very noble idea indeed. After a couple of phone screenings this week, I have secured at least one more interview. This will obviously be a long process. I hope I find something good. Who knows what will happen. But hey, I found Oofie, so anything is possible!

2009-09-30T06:49:00.000-07:00

Job Hunting

I am officially in full job hunting mode. Just like everybody else, I regularly scan the Craigslist job listings and I just sent my information to a recruiter. And I am trying not to be too discriminating. If I find a good part-time position, I'll work on games part time. If I find a full-time position, I'll work on open source games as a hobby. If finding a job eludes me, I'll work on cool stuff of my own full-time. Sweet! Oh, wait. I need a salary. The lucky thing is that the few jobs out there are so absolutely impossible to get that I am guaranteed to work on something interesting if I make it. Yes, that is a good thing. That is just how delusional I am :). To round it up, I am researching how to start my own business. Pursuing the American Dream is a beautiful idea, but it looks 90 degrees uphill from here. Still, I believe that anything is possible. What will be, will be. I keep repeating in my head what has become my new mantra: Try your best, then leave it to fate and stop worrying.

There does not seem to be enough work for me to do in my part-time gig with my old company, so I am mostly spending my time getting my job search organized and working on a couple of web site ideas that I have had for a while, trying to make them finally a reality and get some experience with technologies that I have not used at work. Non computer geek types may find this hard to believe, but writing code is a great therapy for people like me. It cures anything. The trick is getting organized enough to finish your project or current task, which is hard when you have too many goals and too many ideas fighting for your brain time. But once something is finished and works... ahhhhhh!!!! Best feeling. Ever. Add a good dose of learning new, interesting things, and you reach pure bliss. Since I am not sure what direction I will be following, focusing is getting tricky. I need to work on that. More than ever, wish me luck! Please!

2009-09-10T18:02:00.000-07:00

Part-Time Life
I just started another contract with my old company, barely a week after they rather abruptly told me they would not be renewing it. So I am back to the part-time routine, but this time I need to do some things in a better way. For the past month and a half I have spent most of the time working from home, and the rest of the time learning some interesting technologies I had not touched before, hoping that this would help me prepare for a life of future of part-time grind work, part-time sweet, fun, rewarding game development. But I still have to perfect this and find the right balance. And some things have changed around the house. My 5 year old little angel is now going to school, which starts at the ungodly hour of 8am in the morning. That means that we now have to get up at 6am every weekday, which is not, by any means, something I have ever experienced before in my life. To make things more interesting, we also have a new addition to the family: Bluebell the cat. She is the pet that I promised to get for my five year old when daddy got a job, but since that ain't happening anytime soon, well... That little critter may be cute, but she is more than a handful. Instinctively realizing that I am the only non-cat person in the household, she makes sure to spend most of her time in my vicinity. And by vicinity I mean that the freaking thing is hanging out on my lap (and laptop) while I work, under my feet when I walk and on my head when I sleep, or rather when I try to sleep. Yes, she sleeps ON me. And her sandpaper tongue and purring wake me up at least once every morning before 5am. My wife believes that underneath my outward disdain for the little monster lies a soft spot in my heart for it. Baby, do not fool yourself: the answer is no, no, no.

My schedule right now:

6:00am	Get my butt off the bed, throw some water on my face
6:15am	Prepare breakfast
6:30am	Get the girls up
6:45am	Breakfast
7:15am	Clean the kitchen
7:45am	Shower and transform into a human being
8:15am	Work
12:15pm	Lunchtime
12:45pm	Clean the kitchen... again
1:15pm	Work
5:15pm	Start dinnertime routine
6:00pm	Clean the kitchen, prepare bath
6:30pm	Give the girls a bath, blow lots of bubbles
7:00pm	Book reading time
7:30pm	Put the girls to bed
7:45pm	Workout! Interleaved with cleaning the kitchen
8:20pm	Game development! :)
10:00pm	Get ready for bedtime :(
10:30pm	Lights out

If you look closely, you will notice the absence of any downtime or fun activities. Also absent is any time spent with my wife. Oops. I am only working up to 24 hours a week, which means sometimes those work hours during the day can be put to better use. Still, how on earth will I make this work? And how will I find a long-term part-time position? I need to solve this puzzle or it will be game over soon.

2009-09-02T07:53:00.000-07:00

Uncertainty
It amazes me how used to uncertainty I have become lately. It is a far cry from the person I was just a year ago. Here I am, pursuing my dream and without a job (my part-time gig with my old company just ended), with almost no money left and without a hint of what lays ahead. Working part-time with my old company was actually a very interesting experience. Although it was a bit frustrating at first, soon I actually learned to let go of the mindset that made it so hard to work there before. Learning how to treat a job like just a job and not be so emotionally involved is definitely a new experience for me. I worked from home, which was great, and the rest of the time I spent beefing up my resume by studying some (non-game) technologies that I had wanted to try for a while. Man, I have not worked in an office in 5 months and a half! It has been super sweet. Of course, that may change now, I do not know. What I do know is that I will try my best to find work that will leave me enough time to pursue my true interests. It is all down to fate. I hope she treats me nicely. And I am really, really dying to resolve this situation so I can finally spend some time working on games. But paying the bills is priority #1, so I will have to conjure up some patience!

Meanwhile, my friend Jonathan has been cooking up a special one year game project. How is that going, Jonathan?! I hope I can figure out my situation to join him. Boy, uncertainty is a bitch.

2009-07-22T14:24:00.000-07:00

No is the hardest word
The verdict is in. I will not be working for a game company. If I want to make games, I will have to make it on my own. There is something sort of comforting in not having a choice, but this is not easy for me by any means. The feedback I got from 2KBoston was awesome. Not that it did not hurt, but it is good to at least know why you have been rejected and what are the things that you need to get better at. And I will get better at them. Not to make it into the game industry, which is not going to happen anytime soon, but for myself. The awesome things that these people make, the way they work as a team and just how plainly freaking brilliant they are makes me admire them a lot. Those are all of the things I want to be, what I aspire to. It is just that I will have to somehow learn to be like them without working amongst them.

For now, there are more pressing things to worry about. The motivation to make games is intact. That will never leave me: it is just what I need to do and that is that. But I need to provide for my family, so I also need to do a lot of thinking to figure out how to do both at the same time. Currently, working part-time for my old employer is not going too bad. I do not know how long it will last, and I do not really enjoy it that much. There are so many things that are wrong with that company. But it affects me a lot less right now, or so I tell myself. And really, if I found a way to make this a long term arrangement and could work on indie games the rest of the time for a while, it would be absolutely great. So, I will postpone interviewing for jobs I do not want to do until the part-time contract is over. I will go with the flow.

Independent game developers are incredibly motivated people too, and perhaps more creative than their big company counterparts. But also extremely individualistic. It seems that every single one of them has The Great Idea and wants to work on it without any help. Many simply get bored with a project and drop it when it is close to being done. I think I am somewhere in between these two types of game developers. I would love to work on something that I care about, but I also would prefer to work cooperatively with a group of people that cares about it too. That is a very difficult trade-off. We will see what happens. I have no more plans, I do not know where I am going. I will do my best, work my hardest, put myself in the hands of fate and let go.

2009-07-15T17:47:00.000-07:00

Boston
The 2KBoston interview was today. It is unbelievable how these things drain you. At the moment it did not feel very stressful or particularly hard. I avoided thinking about it at all until today, and that helped me control my nerves. But the adrenaline was running all day anyway, and now I am crashing and feel like I am getting sick. I have no idea how it went, really. Mostly it felt like I was just talking to a bunch of guys about games and stuff. There were a few questions here and there, but not the type with an obviously right or wrong answer. And I have to say, looking back at both the California and Boston interviews, that the people in the game industry seem to be a lot nicer than I expected. I can not tell you how many a-holes I have met at interviews with "normal" companies. These guys are very different. Also, I was pleasantly surprised at how the 2KBoston team approaches the division of work. My main concern about working big companies is that you get pigeonholed and can only work within the confines of your "expertise" area. I find that repulsing. Yes, I am a hopeless dreamer and I am in a LOT of trouble.

So, what do I expect? I do not know how much of this is just a defense mechanism to avoid getting hurt by their rejection, but I really am not thinking about it right now. I will allow myself to give it some thought if they come back with an offer. All of my energy right now is being put into exploring the possibility of working as an independent game programmer. I just need to work on games, and I need to believe that being "accepted" by a big game company is not a requirement for that. I know I have the skills and the desire to do it and I know that I will be happier working on that and that is all.

And now, I need some rest. Tonight we will watch a movie and relax. It is not something that we have done very often since I quit my job, believe it or not. And I will spend the rest of the week doing some work for my old company. It should not be too bad, and I will be doing it from home. It is almost like taking a payed break, but luckily not a very long one. Later!

2009-07-13T17:26:00.000-07:00

California
Nope. No luck in getting an offer from Cryptic Studios in California. But after licking my wounds for a couple of days I feel a lot better. My wife still has nightmares in which she is googling like an insane maniac for apartment and schools in the Bay Area, where this company is located. She wakes up in a sweat and can now be comforted by the fact that it was only a dream and it is all over. She did nothing but research that extremely expensive area every waking hour of her day for weeks. The relocation would have been a complete nightmare and I had only sent the resume there for practice anyway. Still, they ruined it for me. The company is top-notch. They work in incredibly interesting multi-player games, their people are really nice, their interviews fair and extremely challenging and their culture is great. When it comes to hiring, they do not care whether you come from the game industry or not. I can not complain. I simply lost fair and square. It is by far the best software company I have ever been in touch with. And yet, they are still a big company. After doing a lot of thinking following the experience, suddenly I could see with clarity that this is not what I want. Being part of a big company is just not me. All of a sudden my dream becomes bigger and way harder to achieve: I need to work in a place where my contribution matters, and where I can do many different types of interesting things and not be confined to a single area for ever and ever. How the heck am I going to do that? Oh man...

In two days I will be interviewing with 2KBoston. At this point it is very hard to know what to expect. I can not seem to spend any time thinking or worrying about it. It will be what it will be. Meanwhile, I will start working part-time at my old company helping with a few tasks for at least a few weeks. The idea of finding enough part-time work to be able to spend the rest of the time working on games independently is extremely appealing right now. Working on my open source project and working with Jonathan in his game, Aztaka, was so much fun. I almost resent having to spend so much time sending resumes, doing coding assignments, phone interviews and all the preparation. But, it is not supposed to be easy. I have to try, though. For as long as I have the strength for the fight, I am shooting for the stars, damn it! :)

2009-07-08T08:38:00.001-07:00

Ready to fly
In a few hours I will be boarding a plane and heading to California for my first game programming interview. I have packed a few clothes, my nerves and my GPS navigation system with me. So much excitement and anxiety all mixed up! But all I can do is take a little step at a time. Wish me luck!

2009-06-29T08:12:00.000-07:00

Still in the game
So far so good. I heard back from both companies and the on-site interviews are being arranged. Sweet! It is such a long process, but I have to find some patience somewhere. I have not sent any resumes to any non-gaming companies yet for fear of that interfering with plan A (well, in a moment of weakness I did send one to Google, but who has not done that?). But I did talk to an exec from my old company about doing part-time contract work for a little while and that sounds promising. The plan is to spend the rest of this week helping Jonathan release a new version of his game Aztaka. My name will be in the credits! Check it out if you have not already. It is a beautiful side-scroller based on Aztec legend. Man, it is so much fun when the output of your work is part of something cool. I do not want this to stop!

So, all the paths into the future are still open. The only thing I can do is keep working and be patient, which is hard when the money clock is ticking away loudly. I wish I could just hit that thing with a giant hammer. That would take care of it.

2009-06-24T18:46:00.000-07:00

Check!
Two more phone interviews. Check! I am DRAINED. I do not know how I did in the Boston one. Actually, I can not say I feel good about it at all. The guy who talked to me has not even started there and would be my boss if I was hired by them. He did not seem very excited about me. Whereas I got a really good vibe from California. How did I find this company? They just seem to be perfect in every way. Except for the little fact of being thousands of miles away. It will be what it will be. Hopefully tomorrow I will learn the outcome. Even in the best case, I still have not been to any on-site interviews and those are brutal! How am I going to pull this off? It is better not to even think about it. Life, here I come!

2009-06-24T07:30:00.000-07:00

Crossroads
What is in my future? It is very hard to stop asking me that question these days. If only I could fast forward a few weeks into the future and find the answer. If only I could spend the day like I spent most days last month: coding like a maniac and teaching myself new things from dawn 'til dusk, happy as a duck and without a care in the world. If only this could be my future. I can see the beginning of a few paths down the distance. After this long marathon, I am just sitting here, unable to move for a moment and contemplating the crossroads. What will happen next?

(Insert beginning of dream sequence right here)

Engel #1 managed to stay independent. He is a lean (seriously lean) and mean contracting machine working part time for a bunch of soulless corporations. The rest of the time is spent working on games. Independent games with his partner in Canada and his own non-profit open source baby. Money is tight, but this guy is so happy that all of his friends have stopped talking to him because he has become so annoying in his happiness. Who needs friends anyway :)

Engel #2 managed to get into one of the many Boston game companies. Surrounded by a bunch of really smart and passionate guys, he spends his days soaking in the game development ways, sometimes working long hours but enjoying every minute of it. He does not have to spend any time working on stupid things that do not interest him. His brain is in constant overdrive. Life is good.

Engel #3 has left Boston. Yes, by pure happenstance he got into this really cool California game company and is now living in the Silicon Valley. The company could not be any more perfect for him, but moving and leaving everything behind will probably have its consequences. Hopefully the family will like the change...

Engel #4 went back to work at a "normal" company. Just like in the old days, he is now pouring his heart and soul into a product with no other purpose than to make the big heads some money. After spending the day surrounded by some smart people and some salary zombies, he puts the rest of his energy into his personal game project. He is tired and progress is slow, but at least he is still doing some of what he loves, limited only by the amount of energy already spent at work and with the family. The dream lives on...

Engel #5 got into some serious money trouble and is yet another victime of the economic recession and that is all I want to say about him.

Oh man. What will it be? Today I have two more technical interviews over the phone. One with 2KBoston (the third one with them!) and one with Cryptic Studios in California. The other leads have gone cold or as good as cold. As soon as tomorrow I could learn whether any or both of these paths close up and disappear. If things go well, there should be an on-site interview soon, and those are brutal. How I got to talk to a company in California, I am not sure. It was not my plan, it just happened. Despite the giant relocation hurdle, so far they sound nearly perfect in terms of culture and way of thinking. Salary will be an issue anyway. They all gasp when I let them know how much I used to earn. Today I was contacted by my old company about some form of consulting work. That could be the start of another path. Ah, life...

2009-06-18T12:29:00.000-07:00

Nerves, nerves
I can not stay in one place right now. My body is unable to relax and I keep pacing around the house. At around noon today I was on the phone with some of the people from 2KBoston. I did a coding assignment for them this Tuesday and my solution was not quite what they expected, so I do not know which way it is going to go. If they like my way of thinking, then they would finally have me come in person for an interview, so this is not even the end of this process. Ah, the nerves! The amount of work you have to put in before they even consider seeing you in the flesh is amazing. I have completed 3 coding assignments so far. Two of those companies have contacted me for a follow up. The third (Linden Lab) is apparently notorious for their slow, unresponsive recruiting process, or so tells me my friend Dylan who works there. The waiting game is killing me! My Indie game developer friend from Canada has many plans of his own and is looking for his next project. Ah, if I could just follow him without thinking, but there are many questions unanswered (Hi Jonathan!). Not that I question my decision to resign from my job and pursue this crazy dream of mine, but I am worried sick about being able to provide for my family while doing it.

Last week I spent much of two days doing something completely unrelated to any of this. It was silly and incredibly boring, but nonetheless nerve wracking. The deadline to exercise the stock options that I was given by my old company was last Friday. You do not know what a stock option is? Neither did I (really) until last Friday. I had to google, call people and ask around to figure out what to do. It turns out that exercising them (which does not make you any money at all, really) could cost you dearly in taxes. The laws are very weird and many people have been hit with unexpected and extremely large taxes when they do it. You can imagine how nervous I was. If I did exercise them, then perhaps one day my old company would be sold and I would at least see some money from giving my life away for 8 years to them. If I did nothing, then I could miss out big time. If they go down, nothing is gained, nothing is lost. What a silly game, and such a waste of time. In the end I did exercise them and now own some of their shares. Of course, now I am constantly fantasizing about them selling the damn thing and making me rich, so I can spend the rest of my days making games from my rocking chair in our bedroom. And also having nightmares about Uncle Sam pushing me into bankruptcy next April. Ah, life.

And I have not touched my game in weeks. That makes me very sad, but it is necessary right now. The rest of the time I have spent it working with Jonathan on more fixes for his game. I hope the selling of it goes well. The amount of work and dedication he put into it really inspire me every day. We all need heroes :).

2009-06-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

Newer developments
Baby steps, baby steps. This week has been quite interesting. The Hunter game got another upgrade with several fixes and improvements, and I worked on a couple of tasks for my new Québécois friend and he has expressed interest in working with me in a follow up to his beautiful game (Hi Jonathan if you are reading this!). Linden labs (the Second Life people) sent me a coding assignment which I spent quite a number of hours on. That stuff was hard. They had better be building rockets in there! Anyway, it is finished and has been sent back. My fingers are crossed waiting for the next step. Meanwhile, I heard from 2KBoston (formerly Irrational Games and makers of BioShock) and a phone screening is scheduled for next tuesday. These are only small achievements, but they represent little steps in the right direction. I am trying to control my nerves and prepare my mind for interviews. The odds are stacked against me, but my will is strong. I keep getting flashbacks of that movie, "The Pursuit of Happyness" (If you think the title has a typo, you obviously have not seen the movie). Poor Will Smith had to spend a few weeks sleeping in a homeless shelter right before he finally landed his dream job and the credits rolled. Those thoughts are enough to make my teeth grind non-stop at night. Why I decided to watch that movie right after quitting my job to pursue my dream while putting my family at risk, I will never know. But if my story has a similar ending, I am going to be the most annoyingly happy man you will ever meet! For a little while, at least :)

2009-06-03T11:09:00.000-07:00

A new development
While waiting for all of those game companies to flood my inbox with job offers I have been hard at work improving the little hunter game. But also I have been talking to this guy from Québec who spent 3 years making his game and is now selling it. He posted asking for help on an online forum and I replied out of curiosity. So now I am giving him a hand, fixing some problems that his users have reported while hopefully giving him a bit more time to spend selling the game instead of programming. The game is beautiful by the way. Check it out at http://aztaka.citeremis.com. He did it with the help of his brother and contributions from a number of people. It is very inspirational. Maybe if he gets rich from it he can help a brother out :). I hope something rubs off while hanging out with him.

2009-05-28T07:06:00.000-07:00

And I'm all spent
There. I have sent all the resumes out. Now, where are those job offers? Fine, I will give them another year or two to reply. They are all busy people after all. Now, seriously, from talking to a few other people in a similar position last week I have to think that the most likely scenario is complete and utter silence. Well, all companies are good enough to set up automatic "thank you" messages when you post your resume. It feels so good to open them and realize that at least they are not automatic "no thank you, do not pester me" messages. Yes, I am lowering expectations already :)

Now I can go back to working on the game and learn more stuff. At least for the moment. Plan B will be set in motion soon. That is, apply for non-game, non-exciting, just-for-the-paycheck jobs. Oh, if you happen to be from one of these not-so-exciting companies, please do not read the last two lines. In the Plan B possible universe I will have to assuage my tears by working on my Hunter game at night after the girls go to bed, whenever my wife collapses in the sofa and does not need my ear to unload a day's worth of absolutely-definitely-not-game-programming stuff. Oh, Baby: please do not read that last line.

Back to (not) work!

2009-05-26T13:00:00.000-07:00

Wiped out
Wiped out. That is how I felt most of this last weekend. Let me explain why. You know that you are a true computer geek if you can spend day after day and night after night stuck to your computer, furiously typing away cryptic computer code, doing vector math, finding and fixing evermore exotic problems in your program and still wake up every morning refreshed and ready for more. But you spend just a few hours socializing, meeting new people and making eye contact and it feels like bench-pressing 500 lbs. I went to three game development events last week and talked to quite a few people ranging from industry veterans, recent grads hunting for a job and hobbyists working on games just for fun. After that, I seriously could not even move a muscle after putting the girls to bed on Saturday and Sunday. A couple of evening naps and a nice outing on memorial day seem to have done the trick and I am feeling more like a person again. Right on time, because the scary part starts now.

Yes, the resumes have to go out. And yes, I would be shaking in my little cowboy boots if I still had them. A new version of the game-to-be has just been wrapped up, with little wolfies looking more like living creatures and not dummies on skates. It would be nice to have more time to polish everything (like, a year, or maybe five), but that ain't happening. It is hard to avoid the cliché and talk about all the "lessons learned". But it is true: I have learned quite a lot, and I do not mean just coding tricks, math formulas and the like. To truly learn how to make something, you have to go and make it. Perhaps I spent too much time learning about too many things at once and ending up using just a handful of them. But all those things I learned but did not use are burning a hole through my skull and just want to get out and create stuff. Now I NEED to use them. I NEED to practice them and get better. I do not want to stop doing this. Programming games is absolutely awesome! (Taking a deep breath and relaxing now, I'm OK, I'm OK).

Reality has a really annoying sobering quality. My wife and daughters are growing impatient. That little cat I promised to get after finding a job had better arrive soon! The car engine check light is on again. My first ever tooth filling is doing some really funny stuff. Holes are appearing in all of our clothes at alarming rates. Stuff is breaking left and right. Dude, I need a paycheck. So here goes nothing. The odds are tough, the economy a joke, and here goes the little game programmer wannabe on a mission. Game companies around Boston: get ready to be seriously spammed!

2009-05-19T13:42:00.000-07:00

Networking
I spent most of today working on my resume instead of writing code. That is a bit sad, but necessary. I wrote a first version a few days ago following advice from a number of articles I found online. It fit nicely in one page and said absolutely nothing about me, except that I do software. So today I threw all that sage advice out the window and just changed it until I felt it had a little bit of me spread all over the page. No obscenities, though. I am saving those for the actual interviews. Hopefully now I will stop with that and go back to the business of learning game programming. But knowing that the interviews may be just around the corner makes me nervous and I feel the urge to start googling around and study all of those things that are asked in interviews and that you never, ever really see or use in your actual work. Having interviewed many people myself through the years, I can assure you of one thing: it is an absolute crapshoot. I guess that should make me feel better. I can only do my thing and hope for the best. Oh well.

Last night I went to a small event for indie games people. You know, doing that "networking" thing that you are supposed to do as if you were not really doing it. But it turned out OK. There were plenty of interesting people, but most importantly beer and pizza. I did not touch the pizza, but the beer really helped me loosen up. I met a few other game industry hopefuls and some people lucky and hard working enough to have their own small game companies. That would be the life! They all looked like normal people, which was reassuring. I mean, like normal geeks, of course. There is another similar event on Wednesday attended by people from bigger companies and plenty of recent grads. And they will have more free beer, so I am definitely showing up. I even printed my own crappy business cards to hand out, which I did not even think about doing yesterday. I had some old greeting card printing paper, a butcher's block and a sharp knife. It was a primitive operation. They are ugly and I realized I did not even put my phone number or email on them. Oh well. That should do this time. If that does not scream ballsy all over the place (or stupid) I do not know what will. Now back to work.

2009-05-17T17:17:00.000-07:00

Grown Men and Video Games
What?! I haven't posted anything in almost two weeks?! Wow, I did not even notice. Right now, I am a man with a deadline. In a week my resume is going to spam every single game company in the area (and beyond!). Am I ready for this? Hell no. It is just like having children. You can never be ready. You just do it (or they do it to you, whatever). It has been two months already, reality is knocking on my door. I have stopped my daily workouts and all other non-essential activities. I talk to the wife and kids because they will all walk around wailing and crying if I did not, otherwise... I am stuck to my computer. My mission: to make my crappy little demo look more like a game both inside and outside. I can not think of a time in my life when I have put so much effort into something or tried to squeeze as much juice out of my brain. It has not been easy by any standard. And yet, my little mini-game will not be anything more than a simple bow and arrow wolf hunt. Move around with the cursor keys, point at the wolves with the mouse and click to shoot. When they are all dead (and they deserve it, but please do not ask why), you win. The poor things can not even fight back. I know, it will not change anybody's life. Except perhaps mine if I get lucky. One thing is for sure, I have learned to appreciate the amount of work that goes into professional games. It is an awe inspiring feat.

Meanwhile, my poor wife did not get much in the way of gifts for mother's day. Normally I let her loose on a shopping rampage while I keep the kids safe, then pay the bill. This time the old clothes will have to do for a bit longer. What have I done to her? :( She got some good stuff, however. My five year old spent days making a book for her. She taped some construction paper pages together and drew and wrote her heart out. She spent every waking moment at her art table, skipping all of her typical games and activities and just worked and worked until it was finished. Nobody told her to do it. It was her own original idea. The title of the book is "Things" because, she said, she still does not know how to write a proper story. It is full of original drawings and original word spellings, let me tell you. It is just beautiful. If I had a tenth of the drive and creative energy my daughter has, I would be done with this thing already. I hope I grow up to be like her.

By the way, if you have a bunch of coin filled jars in your pantry, you should consider cashing them in. My wife and the kids did just that at the local Stop and Shop and came back home with over two hundred dollars. Not too shabby! That's grocery money for two weeks. Man, you do look at everything under a different light when you are poor! :)

So, what is left to do? The project now has its own web page (check it out here http://hunter.sf.net) and a version of my resume is online. I actually already sent it to one company (Harmonix) through a friend of mine (name starts with A, ends in urelio). He actually harassed me for more than a week to get it. I certainly did not feel I was ready for that yet, but yielded under pressure. I hope it was a good idea, but anyway, it has been done. My friend Kieran, a UI designer (among other things) and ex-colleague, shed a couple of tears when he saw my menus and buttons and offered to help me. The game now has a spanking new skin. Thank you Kieran!!! Now I need to make it feel like a game as much as I can in a week. I am not planning to stop working on it anytime soon, whether I get the job I want or not. And then, interviews (or total rejection and plan B, who knows). It would not be a lie to say that my stomach is in a constant giant knot. Can I actually do this? Can I really? Stay tuned and wish me luck! And download the game and hunt some wolves if you have a minute! (click on the "Download the demo" link at the top of the page on the right)

2009-05-05T19:19:00.000-07:00

I Got Myself Some Wolves

Boy, it has been tough. Even working day and night on this project I am still not satisfied with the progress. Yes, nobody said it would be easy. And I am still having lots of fun. I can not imagine how people actually get paid to do this every day! Anyway, I am not about to give up. To make sure that I stay on track, I even created a roadmap page in the SourceForge project site here. Having the rest of the work layed out like that gives you the focus you need to cross the finish line, or so the theory says. Basically I want to at least make it into a complete mini-game instead of spending too much time polishing the graphics or any other particular area. Once it gets there, I will start interviewing and will keep adding more eye candy and experimenting with the creatures and forest 3D models. I am tired, but I can smell sweet victory around the corner! Or perhaps I am just dellusional...

My little 5 year old girl has been so supportive of her daddy and so patient and understanding. It breaks my shriveled old heart. Recently she asked us if, in order to have a sleepover with a couple of her friends, we needed to use up money. She was relieved to find out the answer was no. Her list of things that perhaps she could ask for when daddy gets a job keeps growing. And that is why I gave in and finally agreed to get a cat, something she has always wanted. That sweet little girl loves animals more than anything in this world. I, on the other hand, have been known to joke here and there about how much I love cats (they are delicious!). I do not expect to enjoy the addition of yet another little critter to feed and take care of, but what could I do? So now she has something to look forward and a lot of planning to do. That should keep her a little bit less stressed about our situation. She knows it is just a matter of time. I hope it is. Also, I told her daddy would have to work on weekends too to finish his project, but that made her so sad that I could not bring myself to do it. I just worked at night after putting the kids to bed as usual. Ah, children.

Anyway, the latest version of the mini-game has (ugly looking) menus and buttons, little fade transitions here and there, a bunch of wolves and a mini-map on the top right corner where you can see the location of the wolves around the game world. I thought I would have to create one of those furry animals myself, but in the end I found a cheap 3D model from turbosquid.com. Not bad, except it was supposed to come with a number of animations (walking, attacking, etc) but I could not import those into my game. Even to get the basic model in I had to spend a day with their customer service and other online forums trying to figure out what was wrong with it. In the end I managed to hack it and make at least the model work. I will have to get my puppeteer hat soon to create the missing animations. That stuff is hard, dudes. And without much ado to bed I go. My eyelids are heavy and my flesh is weak. Wish me luck!

2009-04-27T18:47:00.000-07:00

Still Alive
No, I have not disappeared from the face of the earth. I have been doing my thing as usual, working day and night on my project. Today, though, I had to take the day off. My wife had a colonoscopy in the morning and I had to take care of the girls for basically the whole day. The procedure was not too bad in itself, but the preparation the day before was actually pretty scary. To completely clean your stomach and intestines they make you drink four liters of a really nasty liquid medicine. I will not describe the entire process, but you can imagine how so not fun the whole thing is. (Sorry Baby, but I am a blogger now. I will embarrass you like this once in a while.) Her doctor wanted to rule out the possibility of colon cancer, and luckily that was the outcome. We were a little nervous for a moment there. At least for now the only drama in the family revolves around the unemployed father who just does not seem to be in any hurry to find a job. Hopefully that one will have a happy ending too.

And what exactly am I doing now? The plan is to focus on finishing an actual mini-game. It does not have to look fantastic and use absolutely every game programming technique that I have learned during these weeks, but it has to be complete. I believe a finished product will be more useful in helping me find a job in a game company than a bunch of disconnected little experiments. Once it is complete, I will send out the resumes. While I wait in agony for the inevitable rejection notes and possible interviews, I will try to add the cool stuff that I would rather be working on right now. Such is life. Finishing projects is an art in itself. And for many people interested in game development, it is a rather boring one. If you search the internet for games made by hobbyists, you usually find hundreds of them abandoned after a furious initial effort and very few seen to the end. I MUST make sure that this does not happen to me. But part of that involves some not very glamorous tasks. I took all the demo code, which was based in a sample program that came with the graphics library I am using (Ogre3D), and reassembled it in a more polished form that I can actually show to people without shame. You can now click on the "Browse the source code" link on the right and take a peek if you feel like it (but I know you don't, of course). The project now has a name: "Hunter", and is now hosted in sourceforge.net. Sourceforge is a free hosting service for open source projects that provides you with a number of useful tools and web space for your project. My hope is that the project will continue even when my quest is done. I will either get a game programming job and be happy and satisfied and somebody else can use it to get started in their own game, or I will not make it and continue to work on it as a hobby while I spend my days toiling away generating useless reports. Preparing the project page will also consume a bunch of my time. So much to do...

I did spend about a week becoming an entry level 3d artist. The game will need a few animated characters and I have nobody to help me with it. Plus it is fun. You should try it one day! Hopefully you will have money to buy a decent 3D modeling program, unlike me. I love Blender3D, the free program I am using. It is very powerful, but was written all backwards. Learning to use it is like training with a kung fu master who will occassionally punch you in the ribs so you do not forget what pain really means. I even brought my laptop and brand new pen tablet with me to jury duty. People even asked me about it. I got to pretend to be a 3D artist for a day. I was cool!

The next version of the demo, I mean, of the Hunter game, will be out soon. It will mostly look to you like the last one plus a few menus. But, ah, all the sweat and tears that went into learning to make those. It is a bit discouraging sometimes the amount of effort that goes into programming things that do not look like much. Computers are so dumb.

2009-04-16T06:53:00.000-07:00

A Month
Tomorrow is the first mensiversary of my little quest. Many things have changed around here. Living on a tight budget has had some interesting effects on the life of my family. My wife has absolutely perfected her meal plans. We are eating food from all over the globe these days. We have had Moroccan stews and Indian curries, and she has been making fresh breads of all kinds in our bread machine and oven. She is a vegetarian, and if you know anything about me, you know I love my meat. I love my meat and I love my beer, neither of which I have had too much of lately. As a side effect of this diet, I have lost about ten pounds in this time. My face looks thinner and I can no longer do my favorite relaxation pose: sitting with fingers interlocked and resting on top of my belly. Now my hands just slide right down to my waist. It makes me sad. There is one dream of mine that will have to be postponed for a while (see picture on right). Luckily some very good friends have been kind enough to provide me with weekly unemployment beers. Dudes, I love you! Also, we have experienced the triumphant return of the Wine Fairy. You see, our nice neighbor from upstairs used to work in the wine import industry. After many of the wine tastings she used to host, she would bring a few opened wine bottles and leave them just outside our back door. There is nothing more magical than opening your door and finding free wine, let me tell you! Now she is contracting with her old company again and the Wine Fairy is back, at least temporarily.

My wife is a rare mix of a complete technophobe and an avid technophile. She resists trying new technologies out of some unexplained fear, but once she takes the plunge, she fully embraces it and can no longer live without it. Budget or not, we have two small children and there is a lot of shopping of clothes, books and toys that has to happen. In her search for bargains, she has become a fan of thrift stores and taken full advantage of the public library system. She has also joined the FreeCycle network and became a latecomer to the addictive world of eBay. It is simply amazing the amount of free or nearly free stuff you can get your hands on with a little effort. It is also a very good thing that she only found eBay during a time when we have no spare money to spend on random things. She checks those websites constantly, and her mood goes up and down according to the bids she is winning or losing and the free things she finds. I am scared of what could happen if I finally land a job. Oh boy...

The one thing that I am not too happy with is the state of the demo. I am very proud of all the things that I have learned this month. I no longer feel totally lost when reading the many articles and white papers on computer graphics and games. But I need to make the demo into something that truly shows what I have learned and what I am capable of, and that is not the case right now. I need to strike the right balance between proving my potential to a game company and actually writing a game myself. The latter is not an option. We have done well, but I can not remain unemployed for much longer. I need to do a little meditation and thinking right now. And lots and lots of coding!

2009-04-07T18:13:00.000-07:00

Time Flies
I have been working on my demo for more than three weeks now. Time sure does fly! I suppose that means that I have been having a lot of fun. And I have, but time is running out and I can not help but feeling that I should be able to show more for my efforts. There is nothing I can do but put my head down and keep going.

The little virtual world is looking better, and yesterday I had the opportunity of hacking the trees library to fix a limitation it has. We computer programmers love using that verb, by the way. To hack a program or a library means, more or less, that you go into the hundreds, or possibly thousands of lines of code in that piece of software, axe in hand, and find the few lines that are getting in your way. A little chop-chop, hack-hack, and there! It now does what you wanted it to do. You drop your axe right then and there, possibly breaking something very important in the process, and just leave without looking back. If you now passed the software on for others to use it would probably break, crash and burn. But by George, it works for you!

I found the problem while playing with time. In the demo, as in my life, time is now running faster than usual. Let it run for about a little more than a minute and you will see the sun go down, the moon come up and darkness fall over the forest. But trees in the distance refused to change color, holding on to a sun drenched version of themselves. Naughty, naughty trees... But it is all fine now. Take a look it:

At noon

Sunset

Midnight

Instead of adding lakes, which I was planning on doing next, I will have to switch my attention to the virtual creatures of the world. It has been fun playing with the graphics side of this, but without a few entities roaming around and a main character interacting with the world and other beings, this would not be a game demo. And I know just how complicated that part is. You can find dozens of white papers and a lot of research on the web aimed at making little virtual people walk in a believable way. I will have to find a way to do it just well enough for my demo not to look like a worthless exercise in coding. The challenge is on. I am not scared (repeat that 10 times). Here we go!

2009-04-06T11:45:00.000-07:00

Nothing but Clear Skies
There are good days and there are bad days. And some days are just plain gray, like today. After a stunningly beautiful spring weekend, clouds and rain have now taken over. Coming from a hot and sunny caribbean country, I always get a serious case of the blues on days like this. And I wonder if at some unconscious level that is why I decided to work on the sky of my demo this morning. Your brain plays funny tricks on you like that. And so, in my silly little virtual world the sky is clear, the sun is shining and just a few clouds float happily and freely in the distance. Take a look at it:

All courtesy of a nice little library called Caelum. That is more or less latin for sky. A more precise translation would be 'heavens'. Learning the library and adding it was not too painful. I hope that means I am getting the hang of this. It takes care of the sun, clouds, rain, the moon and the stars for you. This is just what I needed to improve my day. I am happy now :)

2009-04-03T06:32:00.000-07:00

Trees, Trees and More Trees

I might be developing an unhealthy obsession with trees. And by "might" what I really mean is that it is way past the point of no return. My goal is to make the little demo world look a little bit like the New England outdoors. Here in Jamaica Plain you can find plenty of inspiration in places like the Forest Hills cemetery and the Arnold Arboretum just a few minutes away. But to even remotely approximate the beauty of those locations you need lots and LOTS of trees. So, I have been trying to figure out what it takes to handle a good number of them in a game. Trees are serious business! A single 3D model of a tree may require thousands of triangles (the basic unit in the 3D modeling world) and drawing just a few of them on the screen might make your computer sweat a little. I am playing with a free library that uses a few tricks to be able to handle large numbers of non moving objects like trees, bushes, rocks and grass. It is called PagedGeometry, although originally it was named Forests. But of course, we computer geeks always prefer technical sounding, cryptic names. They just make things seem so much sexier and complex, right?

If you think I am making too big a deal of a little vegetation, you should know that there are entire companies who do nothing but this. If I were to use the software produced by SpeedTree in my demo, for example, I would have to come up with around ten thousand dollars pretty soon. Since I would rather not choose between my daughter's school and the trees, I will have to go hardcore on this free library and try to squeeze as much performance out of it as I can. Making game software run fast is most certainly a black art, and I am doing my best to find articles and white papers out there to help me burn the knowledge into my poor, tired game programmer wannabe brain.

Both to relax and to help me with my tree quest I will be taking a walk around the Forest Hills cemetery with my 5 year old daughter and take some pictures. You see, while the trees are still naked you can see their branch structure really well, which is great if you need to model a few trees on my own. I can't let the leaves ruin that, so I better hurry! And, by the way, if you download the latest version of the demo (look in the links section on the right of this page) and run it, let me know how it goes.

2009-03-30T18:03:00.000-07:00

A Piece of Land

Week 2, I am sure you had a good amount of fun trying to kick my chunky behind around. Perhaps it is the typical transition from winter to spring, or simply a manifestation of Murphy's law. I did sort of encourage you to bring it on, didn't I? I really did not mean it like that. Please Fate, be nicer to me from now on, Ok? Do we have a deal?

Yes, I am by nature very dramatic and prone to exaggeration. But it has been a very rough 7 days. The whole family has been sick most of that time. I have a cough and my first chest congestion in at least 10 years, so I could not work out more than 2 or 3 times this week. It did not help that I spent a good few days trolling the internet fruitlessly searching for the right libraries and programs to help me create a little world for my demo. I swear I was not trying to get too fancy for my boots. All that this poor little game programmer wannabe wanted to do was create a little hilly landscape with some grass, perhaps a few trees here and there, some rocks. That does not sound like much, right?

People in the industry like to call this terrain rendering. For the outdoorsy scene that I was planning I needed to somehow create a few virtual acres of land with some nice little hills. It would be hard to manually create three dimensional models of the land and the hills for even the smallest of game worlds, so a few techniques have been developed to create these landscapes with a lot less work. The graphics library that I am using (Ogre3d) can take a grayscale image (that is, an image with no colors, just white, black and shades of gray) and display it as terrain. Light areas become peaks and hills, dark areas become valleys. On top of that I wrote a little code to take additional images and in a similar way use them to represent different attributes of the land (grass, dirt, rocks, etc). In a way, the world is created from the map, and not the usual way around. Computer people are backwards like that. A nice explanation of how these images are used to render the terrain can be found here. And by nice, I mean computer geek friendly, of course.

And finally, the terrain generated from this map looks like this on the screen:

I tried and tried to find a good free program to help me shape the landscape. A lot of people start writing free software, but very few are really inclined to finish them. No surprise there. So you end up with many unfinished, useless almost-programs out there and a lot of people (like me) fooled into trying them and ending up frustrated and screaming. A few spend a little more time on theirs and sell them for very cheap. Some of these just crashed after a few seconds of playing around and none would let me really figure out if they would work for me without paying first. That was a lot of wasted time. In the end, good ol' Photoshop came to the rescue. It's not fancy, but it was enough for now.

Download the demo if you dare try it. If you have done it before, first uninstall the previous version. Finally writing some game related code was fun, in a very geeky way. I needed it. At some point I spent a couple of hours chasing down and fixing a strange problem: If you got too close to the world's edge you would be shot into space and pitch darkness. Quickly after verifying that it was indeed fixed, I realized my big mistake: That little glitch was the only fun part of the demo. Oh well.

Coming up next: trees and plants. And hopefully some nice weather and good health!

2009-03-23T07:53:00.000-07:00

Week One Tally
Today marks the end of my first week of unemployment (My last day was a Monday, a Friday would have been too obvious). Let's see what has been accomplished so far:

The budget is in place, with a spreadsheet and everything (fancy, fancy). The meal plan is working and making my wife very happy, which is great, but worries me in the long term. She is liking this regime a bit too much. I am NOT one who likes budgets, but hey, it is all for the dream. Hopefully lattes, ice cream and beer will come back into our lives soon.
A first release of the demo. It is nothing but an empty shell, but the setup is ready to add more content and publish it on the internet. No reports of it crashing my friends' computers yet, but somehow I think that will not be the case for much longer.
I survived a whole week of doom and gloom headlines in virtually every news source out there. It is hard not letting this constant stream of bad news get you down, but hope still prevails.
Did you really take in the first bullet? NO BEER FOR A WEEK PEOPLE!! My liver had better not get used to this.
My wife and I worked out every day after putting the girls to bed. It definitely helps your mood and energy level. Like I said above, I am worried that my body will get too used to this healthier lifestyle.

There are less tangible accomplishments, like settling into the new daily routine. Instead of my fancy ergonomic chair, I am using the yellow rocking chair that we bought for late night breastfeeding sessions. A couple of small foldaway tray tables play the part of a computer desk (One for the laptop, one for the tea, of course). But the biggest victory this week must be the fact that I have been able to do all of this under the constant terrorizing of a small creature I prefer to call Threat Number One (seen here on the right in full attack mode). And let me tell you, this mischievous little critter is hard to ignore when she is hanging out by your leg ALL of the time. And with that cute little face!! At least she naps once a day.

Week two, whatever you bring, here we go!!

2009-03-20T13:34:00.000-07:00

Empty Shells
The amount of work that goes into creating computer programs borders on ridiculous. You might have seen hundreds of snazzy applications, fancy web pages and cool games out there. Computers have made all of that possible, but the fact remains: computers are dumb, dumb, dumb. All they can really do is handle numbers. They can do math with those numbers and they can move them around from one place to another. That's it! When a computer plays music, it is just sending a long list of numbers to the sound device. If the value of the numbers goes up and down quickly, you get a high pitched sound. If they go up and down slowly, the pitch is lower. Every little colored dot that you see on your computer screen is there because a program has moved 3 little numbers (amount of red, green and blue) into a place in the video memory. Programmers spend most of their time trying to find a way to translate ideas that sound very simple in plain human language (i.e. "find the number of people who frequently go shopping for skiing equipment") into the limited, retarded instructions that a computer can deal with.

You hear us talking an awful lot about libraries. Our libraries have little to do with books. They are the work of some poor soul who took the time to write the code needed to make the computer understand instructions that resemble human language. With the right one, you can simply tell the computer to "play Beethoven's fifth symphony" or "draw a sphere". And we're always looking for programs to help us with our work, hopefully without annoying us to the point of making us kick our laptop out the window. It's a never ending quest.

And why all that useless rant? Well, I spent most of the last few days doing a lot of preparation work for my game demo. I did not do anything too interesting, just a lot of stuff that has to be in place before I get to the meaty part. It would be beautiful if I could just instruct my dumb little laptop to create a bunch of monsters and let them run around so I can shoot them, but that is just not how it works. It does not bother me, really. I am, after all, a natural born software geek. I LIKE it! (yes, pity me). So, after setting up my programming environment, laying the basic foundation of my demo and learning how to create a program you can install over the internet, here is my first release. It does not do absolutely anything, but if you can install it and run it, you will make me a happy little man. Click on EngelDemo.msi to install. Sorry mac and linux people, it will not work for you. If you have not downloaded or played any games in your computer and you get an error with some mention of "direct" something, something in it, try to download DirectX, the windows game and multimedia library most games use. If everything goes well, you will find two icons on your computer desktop. One runs the demo and the other uninstalls it. If you run it successfully, just press the 'Esc' key to exit and click on the uninstall icon right away. No harm done. Hopefully...

Please, please, let me know if you have any problems with it. I would greatly appreciate any help testing this. Add a comment here or email me at _@yahoo.com.

Maybe next week I can finally get to work on those screaming monsters... :)

2009-03-17T10:06:00.000-07:00

My Last Day at Work
Well, that was it. Yesterday was my last day at work. Things did not turn out quite the way I was expecting. For one, I did not send that nasty email to management I have fantasized about for months. Perhaps that was for the better... There was a little goodbye party at my desk and we had lots, lots of beer. Now THAT was a proper farewell! The sad truth remains that, once you leave a job, there will be a number of people you will probably not see again. The very same people whose faces you saw for years every day, talked to in the kitchen and hallways, joked with and argued with. Such is life. But the pressure is on, and I can not dwell on that for very long.

Less than three hours into my first morning of unemployment and already things became more "interesting". My wife's doctor recommended surgery. It is a simple procedure and her health is not really at risk and it would not be a extremely big deal normally, but we have not sorted out our health insurance yet. It worries me to no end that we live in a country where something like this, in the worse case scenario, could send us into bankruptcy. I believe that we will be OK, but this is a clear reminder that there is no time to waste. And with that said, let's get to work on my project!

2009-03-10T17:55:00.000-07:00

The Demo
Now, I did not really just wake up one day and decide to drop it all and get a game programming job. The decision to follow this path was taken sometime last November. But I decided to take it easy and prepare myself. Night after night I would be browsing the web looking for information about all aspects of video game programming, trying to figure the state of the art in the industry. (geek alert!)* I revisited old friends, like Blender, a program to create 3D models and animations. I spent some time learning Python, a scripting language used to extend Blender, create games with libraries like Panda3D and all sorts of other things. After brief looks at several free game and graphics libraries out there (TrueVision3D, Panda3D, Crystal Space ) I settled on using Ogre3D. I became a member of AIGameDev.com, an incredibly cool website with tons of information about Game Artificial Intelligence (or AI for short). I have also spent a bit of money in books about game and animation, not to mention the many white papers freely available on the web about innumerous techniques used to create believable characters and cool graphic effects in games. Lately I have played quite a bit with Shaders and the computer languages used to create them. It's easy to start feeling like Johnny 5 from that movie, Short Circuit. I just need more input!!!

It's been a fun few months and I have learned lots of great things. I probably would have continued like that, filling up my "spare" time studying and experimenting until I felt I was ready to make the jump. But life at work (which is where you spend most of your life) just got worse and worse. I was not bored. Not at all. I do not need external motivation and there is plenty of challenging work to be done in my company. But I have felt like a little fish against the current for a while. And it became harder and harder to make sense of my being in this company where I do not really fit, working on a product I do not believe in. It is not like I woke up that day on February 25th and decided to drop it all and follow my dreams. It is just that, at some random point in the middle of that day I got up and said to myself: "It happens today."

And so the idea took form in my head: Instead of continuing my training at nights, I would spend a solid month putting what I have learned to use and create a demo, then use it to try to open some tightly closed doors in the video game industry. It's a long shot, I know. But I have to try. It is not like I could stand working in the same place anymore. If plan A fails, I shall find something else. I believe in my skills (although not so much in my ability to sell them...) and I have waited long enough. May God have mercy on this poor fool!

* I promise to add this geek alert whenever I am about to start rambling referencing computer related stuff. But be warned that entire posts might be peppered with it when I'm working on my demo full time!

2009-03-04T18:51:00.000-08:00

Money, Money
My beautiful 5 year old daughter is missing two teeth now! I can not believe how she has grown so quickly. Neiher can I believe how that set us back 250 dollars. Oh, that hurts! She went to the dentist this morning and only a few hours later I was handing our mechanic 370 bucks more. And that was only because the guy was nice enough to advice me to postpone other fixes to the car that could perhaps wait a few months. In the 10 years and a half that I have had this car, it never gave me any trouble. I changed the battery once and that was that. But of course, I paid 700 dollars for a ten year extended warranty. Murphy's law unequivocally guarantees that the car would break down around now, just a few months after the warranty expired. Oh money, money. Stay with me just a bit longer!

The real money countdown starts on March 17, my first day of unemployment. I was nice enough to give my company two weeks and one day notice. Actually, I was not nice. I just did not know I could have done less. I am just dying to start working on my demo full time! But I must be patient now. I will tie loose ends as well as I can at work and prepare my mind and body for what is coming.

My wife and I started working out after putting the girls to bed just two weeks ago. It helps tremendously. We have more energy and it really helps with our mood. That combined with our new diet should do wonders. If I do not get my dream job after this is over, I will at least be ripped like Jesus!

2009-03-02T19:00:00.000-08:00

Preparing for unemployment

Well, the trigger has been pulled and there is no way back. It is time to prepare for what is coming. My family will have to survive for (hopefully just) a few months without income, and let's just say that saving money is not my forté. It seems everybody in the family understands that it will be necessary to scale back and only spend money on things we really need. My 5 year old girl certainly does. All good, except for one thing: My wife did not like the idea of saving money by buying 24 packs of beer from Costco. Apparently alcohol is not a basic human need! First snag on the road. Things may have happened very differently if I had known I would be on the wagon until I got a new job.

Anyway, something resembling a budget is ready, we made a meal plan for the week, did the groceries and said our goodbyes to luxury items like croissants and wine. There will be no take-outs, no new toys, books or clothes for a little while. And we will only read Dickens. May God help us.

Health insurance is the next big issue. Besides praying for Obama to make it free ASAP we are trying to figure out the cheapest option. Let me tell you, it's no easy task. But Massachusetts is definitely in better shape than most other states, so we can't complain. Once we figure this one out I can finally focus on the biggest part of the plan: How to get my dream job.

2009-02-27T18:40:00.000-08:00

I did it. I finally did it. After 8 years working at the same place I was finally able to let go. I handed my resignation letter today and, to be honest, I don't quite believe it's really done. Reading this post a few times will probably help cement that in my brain.

Do I have a plan? Sort of. I will spend a month working on a game programming demo. Then it will be time to knock at some local video game companies' doors. You see, many years ago, while still in college, I wanted to do nothing but work with computer graphics. But somehow I lost my way and spent the next ten years building web sites, GUIs and writing data processing programs. I have to say that I am completely able to enjoy writing software of any kind if the challenge is good. But why didn't I work in the area that got me interested in programming in the first place? Probably the fear of being overworked and underpaid. I suppose that is valid. But fears must be overcome. So here I go! Wish me luck, please, pretty please...