This past Monday, I left Google. There are a lot of very interesting things going on at Google right now, and I enjoyed working with many of the people there, but it was not the perfect fit for me. I’m looking forward to my next adventure.

One of those things Google is working on that I do [...]]]>

This past Monday, I left Google. There are a lot of very interesting things going on at Google right now, and I enjoyed working with many of the people there, but it was not the perfect fit for me. I’m looking forward to my next adventure.

One of those things Google is working on that I do think is particularly great is Native Client. Opening up the web so that you can readily use languages other than HTML/JS and ActionScript is a really big deal. I hope that other browser providers will also adopt Native Client – it is open source after all! The web feels like it is blossoming open with this next wave of technologies, moving past its history as a markup language wrapped around text and toward a fully interactive platform for applications.

For game developers, I’m looking forward to the day where we see more games running in the cloud, like Farmville and World of Warcraft do now, and it is easy for developers to create clients on multiple platforms so I can bring my game with me no matter where I am. As game developers we’ve talked about the idea of making multiple-platform game access simpler for a long time – trans-platform play where the experiences may be different, as opposed to cross-platform play where the experiences are the same – and it should be easier for developers to create clients for web, mobile and desktop without needing to write them in completely different languages or using vastly different SDKs. Microsoft is closest to this with XNA and Silverlight across multiple platforms; Apple’s SDKs across iPhone, iPad and Mac OSX are pretty cleverly designed as well; and Google is approaching it with Android NDK and Chrome Native Client. The increasing use of web services can abstract away a lot of the need for platform-specific SDK features, but there’s still a lot of work to do all around. Games aren’t getting cheaper to make, that’s for sure, and it’s important that technically complex features are still easily available to independent developers working alone.

Game engines and middleware are only getting better and better, and make increasing sense to use to bridge all these gaps. But the costs can be difficult to bear for indies, and there are also the different market systems, social graphs, and platform tech requirements to deal with… it’s clear there are still a lot of problems for the game industry to solve to make things easier for small developers. Which is good, because we all don’t like being bored. I’m going to continue studying and talking about the game technology space in this blog and occasionally on my Gamasutra expert blog, as always.

Lastly I want to apologize to those of you I haven’t kept in good touch with these past few months. A lot of people reached out to me during my time at Google, and I’ve been pretty lousy at replying back or staying in touch due to how busy I was. Sorry about that! I’ve found that increasingly my inbox overwhelms my ability to get work done, so I hope to do more tweeting and blogging in the future to help with that, a lesson I’ve learned from the very wise and public Robert Scoble.

I’m looking forward to sharing with you what I’m up to next!

My first week at Google was extremely busy. On my first day everyone was encouraging me to take the courses for newbies that they [...]]]> I’m hanging out in an airport restaurant waiting for a flight. Seems like something I do fairly frequently. While I’m not exactly “Up in the Air”, I do enjoy travel quite a bit.

My first week at Google was extremely busy. On my first day everyone was encouraging me to take the courses for newbies that they have all week – it sure seemed like a good idea on Monday. But after midday Tuesday, all bets were off, as my schedule filled with people to meet and things to work on. With so many interesting things going on, the last thing I wanted to do was sit in a newbie class! (The good news is that they have them all recorded, so I’ll watch the videos later. )

One thing that has been incredibly marked for me has been the change in my productivity tools. I’ve gotten used to using Exchange, Outlook, and the suite of Office products. I really, really like the system I have down for file organization. And I’ve got a laptop with Windows XP and desktops with Windows 7. My first day at Google I got a Linux desktop and a Mac laptop. Beautiful pieces of hardware, but – woah! So different. And of course we’re using the suite of Google Apps products. I felt like not only did I need to learn a new environment and new job, but my productivity habits now also all needed to change. Yikes!

At first it felt a bit painful. As the week has gone on, however, I’ve realized just how valuable it is to have my data in the cloud. Mid-week, I converted my Nexus One over from my Gmail account to my corporate Google account, and suddenly all my business information – calendar and email in particular – was in my pocket. My manager was probably pretty happy, as I suddenly stopped missing meetings and messages. Then Thursday I started really using Google Docs. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am still having a hard time getting used to popping open a web browser to edit my documents, and I have yet to come up with an alternative for my trusty hierarchical file system. But the moment of epiphany came when, in the span of an hour, I had taken some notes in a meeting on the Mac, booted up my Linux box and made some edits, and then over a coffee meeting later I brought the doc up on my phone to review what I had written. Totally seamlessly, without worrying about copying files around or anything. Holy smokes! This whole cloud thing is pretty great. But it is definitely a shift in mindframe.

Right now I’m at the airport, as I mentioned earlier. Today I did a bunch of work in the Mac’s Text Edit program. When I got home, I suddenly realized I needed to copy all that stuff onto a USB stick, since I was bringing my personal laptop (my Windows XP one) on the trip with me. It wasn’t a big deal, but one point I lost the USB stick and couldn’t remember if I had packed it. What if I forgot it? After a few moments of argh, once again the idea of the cloud really sunk home for me.

So it’s been an interesting week to be sure (and that’s leaving out all of the most interesting parts!) But the idea of the cloud, which sounded good in theory but I hadn’t put into full practice, is really growing on me. I’ve loved my Android phone for months and months… but when I embraced Gmail, Google Docs and Google Voice, all the sudden my cell phone became so much more useful. It’s a very interesting transformation.