Indy Game Dev
2 Aug 2011 - Osaka, Japan
Sadly my job at Istpika ended with a fizzle at the middle of March, not two days before the Big Japan Earthquake which threw the Earth 10cm off it's kilter. The project I was leading was roughly two weeks away from having a production release ready game, but due to various reasons the CEO ended up dissolving more than half the projects that were going, including my team's. He had us all do what is called "jitaku taiki", a process backed up by law where you stay at home and get paid for 2 months at a 60% rate while you find a new job and/or wait for the company to pull itself back together.
I found a new job with a web company out of Kamakura named Kayac who had just begun to try to break into the social/smartphone game market, and had to endure an extremely painful 1.5 hour train commute to the newly opened Kyoto office each way every day. During the short time I was there I received no less than 4 offers from other companies, which was quite surprising in regards to 3 of them since I have not posted my info to any English job hunting services. Given the current climate of social media it's not surprising there are a lot of headhunters out and about right now, and as it turns out they came across my sad little web presence via standard web searching, not because I am some kind of internet superstar. Ah well.
I ended up turning down the 3 generous offers to interview, which wasn't an easy choice considering who they were. However, what I did end up doing was taking up the offer from a man with whom I had worked with for many years before, and who has pestered me every year for who knows how many years asking when I was going to come back to Alaska and build software with him. We ended up carving out a contract to build 2 titles within a year while I work from Japan, and I have complete control as to what I build, and how I build it. In return I get a decent salary, and a small budget to help push these games to release. Dream job? Check.
So here I am, building my first solo smartphone game in Unity3d while working from home. Unity3d is an amazing product once you wrap your head around it, and takes away all the tedious coding bits and replaces it a powerful behavior based coding approach. It's new to me, and therefore fun and fresh.
I also have a small personal side project I am working on with another buddy which I'll talk about more if it ever gets close to release ready. I'm doing the RESTful server API side of the business using the Sinatra Ruby gem, and MongoDB on the backend. I swear I will get a massive Ruby/MongoDB system out there one day.
Lastly, I recently published a Ruby gem named hate that I had been working on in my free time while working for Kayac. It's supposed to be a simple Ruby OpenGL 3d game engine, somewhat inspired by the Lua Love project. Unfortunately it's not a complete product and could use a lot of work, but was definitely a great learning experience and is worth looking into pushing forward more at a later time.
Anyways, if I come to a point where I'm inspired I'll write a technical post or two about what's going on.
