Taking it slower at GDC... fighting a cold and balancing sleep and parties. :) Speaking on GameSpy panel, 130p in South 300 on open data! [markdeloura]
If you’re a game developer and live in the San Francisco bay area, drop by our current thread on the IGDA-SF forums and introduce yourself! We have a lot of developers in the area who don’t know each other… let’s try to fix that
Did you miss the IGDA San Francisco event on November 19? If so, you should kick yourself, it was great! Jeremy Gordon, Daniel James, Charlie Cleveland and Steve Demeter spoke for ninety minutes (uncensored) about what it was like to start their game studios up. Then we adjourned to Il Pirata and had great conversation over pizza and drinks.
We posted photos on our flickr page, a brief blurb on the blog and forums, and will have video up soon.
I hope you can make it to the next meeting!
It’s been conventional wisdom as of late that the videogame industry will not really be hit by a downward-trending economy, since people always seek in-home entertainment in a downturn. However, I was surprised by some stats from an industry dinner I attended a few nights ago. There were probably 45 people at the dinner, but at my table of nine, only three people were gainfully employed. Either their company had recently gone out of business due to investment challenges, they had lost a game contract with a publisher, or they had become a part of corporate downsizing.
It may yet be that we will see a strong holiday of sales for the game industry. But the people making the games don’t seem to be holding up quite so well.
Today I stumbled across some of my first writing on the Net. There have been many times that I’ve deleted something I was about to post up in a blog or comment somewhere, thinking to myself “this will *always* be on the Net if I post it now.” Sure enough, recently I found this gem, a piece I wrote up in late 1992 that described the virtual reality research going on at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Digging a little further, the earliest post of mine onto the Net that I can find is a plea for help with my Amiga 500 in Nov 1988. I was hoping to separate the keyboard from the CPU so that I could put the keyboard in my lap. This ultimately turned into a personal project that involved thin sheets of oak and a table saw… I will spare you the horrible details and embarrassing photos
There are many other things out there when I dig around, like the lists of virtual reality hardware that I used to post to Usenet’s sci.virtual-worlds. It is simultaneously amazing and creepy that I can still access this information, in seconds, that I wrote 20 years ago.
I’m glad my writing has improved.
I’m at the IGDA Leadership Forum in the San Francisco area, day two. It’s going great so far. Yesterday we had some excellent talks in the “personal management” track, which I’m moderating – from Kathy Gibson (Threewave Software), Torrie Dorrell (Sony Online Entertainment), Scott Crabtree (Intel), Rodney Gibbs (Fizz Factor), Manveer Heir (Raven Software), and Don Daglow. I really enjoyed Mark Cerny’s long-view keynote this morning, and also appreciated Curt Schilling’s keynote on leadership yesterday. You’ll find a lot of coverage on the website, and videos will come at some point in the near future. But being here is so much better than watching the presentations later, since the group of people attending are half the fun – if you missed this year, by all means, check out the presentations in the re-runs. But better yet, hope to see you here next year!
Texas Instruments has a pretty entertaining series of videos up on their website, called “Thank an Engineer”. I realized long ago that the engineering gene has pervaded by entire being – I can’t go near something that is broken without wanting to fix it, or near any non-optimal hardware solution (squeaky door, slightly askew toilet seat, etc) without feeling the need to grab a screwdriver and go at it. So, thanks to TI, for honoring engineers everywhere!
It occurred to me this morning, and then two good friends have reminded me, that I haven’t really posted here about what I’m up to lately. So I figure it’s probably time to say something about it!
Earlier this year I joined a company called GreenScreen Interactive… I had been doing consulting work for the previous year and part of it was for GreenScreen… as the company grew it made sense for them to hire someone full-time for tech, so I came on as VP Technology. It was a growing young multi-national, multi-location publisher, with a main office in New York, and a development studio and two smaller publishers that had been purchased. The core team of people there was great, and we were dedicated to creating high-quality original titles. Well, it isn’t appropriate for me to get into the details, but most of the company came apart about a month and a half ago. The core team is gone, the New York office closed down, the studio has detached itself, and what is left of the company is basically just the two small publishers. That company is now known as Zoo Games.
We did some good work there. I really had a great time, and got to meet and work with some fantastic people: in New York, in Orange County, Melbourne, Helsinki, and here in the San Francisco Bay. And we built some fun games.
So it’s back to consulting for me, for the moment. I’ve been toying with a lot of other ideas, from spinning something new up to joining on with someone full-time. Lots of ideas, lots of conversations. Right now I’m enjoying having a little office in San Francisco, walking to and from work, meeting up with people to talk about what they’re working on and how I can help. And when the time and opportunity is right, I’ll dig in. For the moment though…
Today I heard that LinkedIn now has applications. My first thought was: “Oh greeeeat, pretty soon it’ll look like facebook.”
But the good news is, they have a very small set of apps that so far, seem quite well thought out. In particular I like the SixApart application, BlogLink. It says that it will let you link your personal blog to your linkedin account, which seems like a very good idea to me. However, I haven’t had much luck linking my blog yet – but what I found really great is that it connected me up with the blogs of everyone in my linkedin account.
I’m pretty diligent about knowing the people I connect to on linkedin, so it was with great pleasure that I found out that a handful of them have blogs that I didn’t already know about! For example, here’s Don Daglow’s blog (founder of Stormfront and once a director at Intellivision), and my friend Peter Alau (who recently joined Digital Extremes).
Very nice.
I just bought a USB floppy drive from OfficeDepot, so that I’d have a convincingly working, fast floppy drive to use to go through about 100 old 3.5″ floppies I found hanging around in a box when I moved. The floppies were packed next to about 20 Iomega ZIP disks and a NeXT magneto-optical disk. What is on all of these things? Who the heck knows? But I knew I wanted to know.
The easiest problem to solve was the floppies. Poring through them using the new floppy drive I found old resumes, old journals, and old source code – in fact I found what may be my only copy of the source code for the arcade game I worked on in 1994-1995. I also found a whole bunch of old drivers and software for DOS, Windows95, all manner of old things that I don’t need any more. Pretty entertaining.
But now I wonder what is on those ZIP disks… I have an old ZIP drive lying around at home looking like it may just work if I plug it in to something. So I’ll give that one a shot next. The NeXT MO disk though… where the heck can I find something to read that? And would the data even still be on there? The NeXT drives were notoriously flaky, and a quick look through ebay finds a few NeXT workstations for sale labelled “MO drive not guaranteed to work”. So that one may be a little tougher.
It is weird to have all this old media though, and realize just how easy it is to lose data. It seems like I spend too much time thinking about what to do with my data. At the moment I have a Windows Home Server which does a great job of preserving my files, although mostly the machine sits in my office bored and lonely. But at least I know that what I have on there is RAIDed and safe.
The good news is that slowly we are getting to a point where I can put almost all the data I have on a small portable drive. I bet a terabyte would cover it. Within a few years we’ll have portable drives that size, and I won’t need to worry about this – I’ll just keep multiple copies of all my files and sync them to each other as I travel around. The era of carrying around a small portion of my files on a portable device will seem silly.
Unless I start doing a lot of HD video. Oh no, that reminds me… I have all sorts of audio tapes and VHS tapes at home too. I wonder what I have stored on those? Sigh. I guess this process might take awhile.
One of the highlights to my trip to Abu Dhabi was an evening concert on Corniche Beach by Addictive TV. I hadn’t heard of these guys before, but once they got started I realized I was in for a real treat. They create wonderfully fun, danceable electronic music, and they do it by mixing together the audio from TV or movies with their own synth work. So the experience is the kind of music that you have a hard time NOT dancing to, along with a visual extravaganza which tells a tale.
The music was frickin’ great (especially to hear in the middle of the middle east) and was also a demonstration of some really cool tech, the way they synchronized the video with the music. It’s hard for me to describe, so here’s a highlight – an Iron Man mix. You can find higher-fidelity versions of their work via their website, but this one is a really good example. Fantastic stuff! Turn up the subwoofer before you hit play!
Popular Posts