Google at Casual Connect Seattle

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I’m heading to Casual Connect Seattle next week with a group of fellow Googlers and we’re looking forward to meeting lots of casual and social game developers. We’re setting up meetings now. We’ll largely be talking about things related to the Chrome Web Store (although admittedly, that’s an awful lot of things :) ). Love to hear from you if you’re interested in a chat while we’re there.

We’ll also be in two presentations: One with our friends at Kongregate, Unity, and Adobe… okay, it’s called “Browser Tech Smackdown” so we may not all be friends afterward! ;-) Browser Tech Smackdown is Tuesday at 2pm.

Our second presentation is Thursday at 5pm, just before we all go get beers to celebrate the end of a successful conference. In “Games and the Google Chrome Web Store”, we’ll talk about how you can get your game into the store for launch, using Flash, HTML5, or C++-based technologies.

We’re really looking forward to the conference. Hope to see you there!

Twelve weeks at Google

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Wow, it really has been 12 weeks? Dang. I stopped counting around 10, I had to check the calendar. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so busy! Well maybe when I was working on the first Game Programming Gems book. :) I’m working to keep on top of all the things being done by Google that are game-related – things like iGoogle, Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, GoogleTV, and a number of APIs that are extremely game relevant – and that’s just a heck of a lot of material coming my way. I’m slowly getting better at surfing the waves of email and docs coming at me, but some days I still get overwhelmed with all the info I’m trying to assimilate as I ramp up at Google.

Today was a nice day, I stayed in the San Francisco office instead of heading down to Mountain View. Most days I take the shuttle down the San Francisco peninsula in the morning, from San Francisco to Mountain View – it takes roughly an hour. The shuttle has wi-fi, which is great, but it is a bit difficult to get serious work done, with the bus bouncing up and down as it does. I have numerous times accidentally deleted messages when the bus has hit a particularly rough patch of road. Makes me very appreciative of UNDO, let me tell ya. But by and large the shuttle is a win, since it makes me more productive than spending an hour cursing at the traffic on the way down and again on the way back.

One of the things I’m really excited about at the moment is the Chrome Web Store. Later this year, we’ll put a store within Chrome, to enable developers to more easily distribute and sell web apps. Of course, I’m thinking all about games, I want to make sure we have lots of games in the store for the launch – Flash games, HTML5 (Javascript) games, Native Client (C++) games – so I’ve been talking to a lot of game developers and tool manufacturers.

It’s been fun for me to slowly get more up to speed on the world of HTML5, although I do have C++ flowing through my veins. :)  The thing is, it doesn’t matter what I like – it matters what game developers are using, and I think it’s pretty damn cool that people are making HTML5/Javascript games. The Google Pacman Doodle is a Javascript game, for example, and it is pretty awesome.  I’m looking forward to seeing more games made with WebGL, too.

Well I’ll keep this short for now. I’m planning to ramp up the blogging again, for realz this time. So many interesting things going on that I want to talk about :)

Third Week at Google

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Wow has it really been three weeks already? On one hand it feels like it has zoomed by pretty fast – on the other hand it has felt a bit like dog weeks. It has been a very busy time!
A lot of folks have emailed assuming that, or asking if, I’d be completely focused on Android. First off, my apologies for failing to respond to many of you – I’ve been so focused on work that my personal email (and LinkedIn, and Facebook, and Twitter DM) is a cluttered mess. But secondly, you bet, I’m focusing on Android because it is a great games platform, but I am not dedicated to Android. I am dedicated to: GAMES! The Android team is doing really well, and they have engaged with the game developer community more than any other team at Google. Some of you have shared with me ways they can improve, and I really appreciate that! There are also many other interesting things going on at Google that are game-related. Many of them you will hear about over time, and many of them are already available and just not widely used for games yet. Google is a big place, with lots of smart people and interesting tech, and I’m enjoying fascinating conversations.
Of course, Google I/O is coming up in a few weeks, so if you’ll be there and are interested in meeting up for a chat, drop me a line!
On the personal side, I am slowly getting less hectic, although I am still thinking about work 24/7. :) Taking the Google shuttle to work as much as possible is helping my state of mind – an hour on email and news on a comfy bus is much preferrable to an hour focused on crazy traffic in my comfy car. (Though I do like my comfy car!) I won’t always be able to take the shuttle, but when I can it is definitely a win.
Last Thursday MB and I took an evening to finish emptying out my old office on New Montgomery Street. While I was sad to leave there since I’d been in that office about two years, I think MB might have been even sadder since now our office is full of boxes and office furniture parts. Part of the weekend was spent reducing that, but if anyone in San Francisco is interested in a big huge Scandinavian Design desk and shelf unit, let me know!
It was the first weekend since starting at Google that I’ve been at home and relaxing, and that helped me clear my brain a bit. I realized I need to spend more time reducing entropy. :) Mac and I are becoming friends, and that helps since we are living together pretty tightly now. I still feel like I’m wearing mittens when using the Mac sometimes, but going back to my WinXP laptop I miss the two-finger swipe and the overall MacBook reliability. However, my Win7 desktop still wins out over all. And what’s up with only being able to resize a Mac window with the little doodad in the lower-right corner of the window? Ugh! Anyone know some decent freeware to fix that?
Shuttle pulling up to campus. Will sign off for now!

Apple hates middleware

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So Steve Jobs has finally told the world why Apple doesn’t want Flash on its platform. And the answer is: cross-platform middleware “…ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.”

REALLY?

Haven’t we moved past this as an industry? I imagine there are a bunch of old-school assembly language programmers out there saying “yeah! And compiled code wastes so many cycles!!” At some point, the convenience to the developer needs to triumph.

I remember when the game industry went through this middleware conundrum. Back before Grand Theft Auto 3, the common sentiment was “…games that use game engines all look the same!” And arguably, games running on Criterion’s Renderware at that time did LOOK the same, but it wasn’t because of the game engine, it was because of the lack of capabilities of the graphics hardware. Once shaders became available, games suddenly dramatically diverged and looked QUITE different. As a point of fact, what Renderware gave developers was the ability to make their games more quickly and more cheaply, allowing them to experiment more with the game design and create more interesting CROSS-PLATFORM experiences that players loved. See Grand Theft Auto 3, for example. Renderware was a big win for game developers, which is why it quickly became hugely popular and then was purchased by Electronic Arts.

Steve’s argument is that cross-platform development tools result in “…developers [being] blocked from using [Apple's] innovations and enhancements because they are not available on [Apple's] competitor’s platforms.” In actuality, Apple’s developers wouldn’t HAVE to use Flash if it’s on the platform. They could still use Apple’s native APIs and would be able to access all the unique features of Apple’s platforms. Or, Apple could work with Adobe to help them enable platform-specific extensions to Flash. These are common practices in the game industry – game developers want to make their titles unique so that they stand out in the market, and one way they can do that is to use platform-specific features well.

I imagine there is more to the story than Jobs is able to share, because his argument just doesn’t hold up. Middleware is important to developers. Blocking middleware on your platform is a sure-fire way to alienate many of them. If he really wants to head down this path, I am more than happy to invite those developers to work on Google platforms. We LIKE making the lives of developers easier. :-)

Second Week at Google

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Well, it’s been two weeks at Google now – actually this is the first day of week three. This morning I’m trying out the Google shuttle bus. The commute from San Francisco to Mountain View typically takes me between 50 and 90 minutes. The traffic on Highway 101 varies wildly, but generally sucks and leaves me in an angry state by the time I get to work. Google has a bunch of shuttle buses on common routes to get people to work more easily. And the bonus is that they have wi-fi installed. So theoretically I can arrive at work more relaxed, get some work done, and save on fuel costs – a win/win/win. The closest bus stop in San Francisco is a 10-minute walk, so hopefully with the bus’s use of the carpool lane this will be a total win all the way around. We’ll see. Left the house  at 7:30, caught the bus at 7:43.

My second week was just as busy as the first, or maybe even busier. But at least I’m getting used to my productivity tools. I find myself mostly working on my laptop – a MacBook Pro – and while I still find the MacOS harder to use effectively than Windows 7, the hardware is an absolute joy. You mean I can close the lid without worrying about losing docs? Nice! And it auto-connects to wi-fi and holds the signal? Yay! And I can sweep two fingers on the trackpad to scroll up and down? Why didn’t anyone think of that sooner? (Oh yeah, no one else has multi-touch trackpads.) So, I’m not a Mac convert, but I’m getting along with it better and better.

I used Synergy to tie my Linux desktop’s mouse and keyboard to the Mac laptop, so when I’m at my desk I have a much more ergonomic keyboard and mouse and a couple much larger displays. That works out great.

On the software side last week I found myself bailing out of the cloud a lot. I just haven’t figured out a good analog to my hierarchical file system, so I have only been using Google docs for ToDo’s and sharing with others. Meeting notes etc have wound up in TextPad and on my desktop or in folders. I had to do a couple presentations last week and I tried used the presentation software in Google Docs, but quickly abandoned it in favor of using Powerpoint and then uploading the result back into the presentation app. I was just much, much more effective in Powerpoint, and I was in a hurry. Friday I got Keynote installed on the Mac, and I’ll give that a go today.

If there was some good hierarchical file storage in the cloud and the presentation software worked better for me, I would love to be doing more there. Maybe I’m missing some things… I’ll keep looking at it.

One of the amusing and wonderful things about the Google Mountain View campus (the “Googleplex”) is that it is near a lot of wild open space along the San Francisco Bay. Last week I kept having wildlife sightings – and in the morning when the campus is quiet, with its lush trees, it is quite peaceful. Or at least more so than my urban San Francisco dwelling. I appreciate that a lot. Here are a few shots (Pokemon Snap style, I guess) from last week :-)

Wild turkey wandering around in one of the parking lots.

There have been some goats next door mowing the lawn.

This happy little bird was hanging out in the fountain at the garden.

The T-Rex doesn’t seem so mean in his old age.

My personal email is a massive graveyard at the moment, so I apologize if you’ve emailed me and I haven’t gotten back to you. I’ve been literally non-stop since starting at Google, including a trip on the weekend after my first week (though admittedly, that was for fun) and this past weekend, an IGDA board meeting all weekend. Still looking forward to taking a deep breath. Maybe next weekend. :)

Shuttle got to my building just before 8:30am. So from home to work, about an hour. Not bad – got a blog post written, time to check some email, time to imbibe some caffeine. We’ll see how the trip home goes!