Weird Lightning

“A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void…The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through.”

- Neuromancer, William Gibson

So i’ve been very busy lately.  I’m regretably going to have to push back my release date for trample to another time.  Fortunately, the reason i’m doing this is because i’ve been busy going through the interview process with several game developers!  Almost every week I’ve had to take a test and for the most part i’ve performed very well on them.

When you program games all day at work the last thing you want to do at home is… program more games.  Game programming requires you to push yourself in several directions, the technical overhead for creating a game is extraordinary and doing all of the art, programming and music by yourself is very difficult.  Of all things, maintaining an independent project outside of work has been difficult.  Especially for a guy like me that also likes to read, work out, play music and travel (i’ve got 3 trips planned this month).   On top of all this I’ve been taking tests and interviewing with several studios which has eaten up virtually all of my time.

I have had time to play a few quick amazing games lately, namely braid (blow’s artistic masterpiece) and bionic commando.  Bionic Commando might be one of the hardest games i’ve ever played in a long time and i think most of the difficulty is due to its “old school physics”.  The gameplay programmers on the BC team played the old game several times and tried to reverse engineer every single aspect of the grapple mechanic they could.

both of those games a brilliant go check them out… i just wanted to make a post today so that people Didn’t think i was dead (although i might soon be if i keep going through these interview procedures).  Tonight should atleast be fun, i’ve got tickets to go see the boss!

Rock on cowboys.

Hey everyone,

Well its been a busy month.  I actually completly forgot i had this website and then i was notified that some spammer was trying to add comments to my blog.  So i thought i might help the spammers a bit by actually creating content here that people would read.

TRAMPLE

I’ve just settled into moving to malvern and i’m setting up shop for some interesting new projects.  The new project is essentially a DJ animation studio (tentatively named Trample) which will facilitate syncing up abstract animations with audio not unlike this video.  I was inspired to make this program after i saw the cornelius video for smoke.

My intention is to create something on this level but also add a real time “jam” feature that will let people loop their samples in real time with corresponding animations that will speed up and slow down according to the speed of the sample.  So yea… look forward to that.  I’m still hammering out the details.

PODCAST

For a long time I’ve wanted to start a podcast in this are to discuss game news and etc… well I’ve finally met some hardcore game nerds that are willing to be my partner in crime for this endeavor.  Within a month or 2 we should have all the details sorted out and we’ll likely be hosting the podcast on each of our respective blogs.