Viva La Headache

Welcome, it's getting on May 2017 (um....) and I've been quiet in here for ages. Going to try to do a monthly visit to this thing, or so I like to promise and lie. Here's what's been going on, very quickly..

1. Laid off from DAQRI. I worked there shy of 4 years, that was my longest gig (second longest was back in Boston!) Ah, the tech industry. Anyway, I was sad to have it end, for many reasons - but excited to move onto something else. Things were starting to go around in circles, it was time. To be positive, I had a great time working there, and I learned a LOT. It absolutely changed my career in a very dramatic way.

2. New job about 6 weeks later, I'm a developer at Method Studios/Deluxe VR in Santa Monica. It's been nearly a month since I've begun. As is not unusual with the VFX industry, things are pretty hush-hush so I can't really rap about it much in here until things are announced/releasing... anyway the offer was a good one so I had to jump on it.

3. Working steadily on indie games, but I've been turning into one of those lost souls who perpetually gets enamored with a new personal project, puts a ton of time and energy into it, then gets sucked up into "development hell" with release nowhere on the horizon. It is a blessing and a curse! Fortunately I have released indie games in the past, though I'm still yet to do it 100% on my own. When my day job ended, I immediately through myself into independent development once again and it was very gratifying, but now that I'm working again it returns necessarily to the back burner. Alas.

4. "StarCrab" for Hololens was the last thing I really touched, in the brief downtime I did a lot of tinkering under the hood and cleaned up a lot of it's guts and got it back on track to where I wanted it to be going. Very close to putting the tech-centric part aside and concentrating on actually building the fun parts of the game! I started demonstrating it and getting great feedback as well. I very much want (need) to get it out into the world this year, in the next few months ideally. We will see.

5. "Flip Master - 180 Returns" is the name of a new sequel to my older puzzle game I've started putting together from scratch. Basically I began working on this right at the New Year, as StarCrab was stalled and I was tired of being addicted (again) to Drop 7 and wanted to build my own unique strategy game. I put in a good couple of weeks worth, might have posted about it in here earlier, I don't recall. A lot of the basics of the game's guts are in there, but still some fundamental things to work through, yet. I got it to a good stopping point, and I intend to get back to it as well soon.

6. I picked up a Vive VR setup. It's been about a week, and I'm waiting for the lightStands to be delivered (come ONNNNNN, USPS) so I can finally get it setup. I have some ideas of projects I'd like to endeavor in VR, and I am rather eager to get busy modding some existing things to work in there. I am not super-versed in VR, yet - with the Vive, I've seen a couple of apps like Tilt Brush, Google Earth, Robot Repair - they are very fascinating and room space is a blast....! I want to get busy with it as well. Hopefully I will have interesting news to share on his as well, in the near future.

I guess that is about it. Life is alright, I have lots more to say but find it useful to keep things brief. Drop me a line if you want me to keep blogging!