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!