I just finished my contract position at Electronic Arts. It was supposed to only be for a year, but my team liked my work a lot and found a way to extend my contract by another three months. This is my post mortem reflection on working at EA.
I worked on the UI team as a remote worker on the west co…
It's been a while since I posted updates:
I recently started a new contract job at Electronic Arts in July 2022.
Prior to that, I was a contracted VR developer at Raytheon for six months.
Prior to Raytheon, I was a Graphics Programmer at Facebook Reality Labs for two years working on AR/VR research pr…
I'm a programmer. There's this terrible term in the tech industry called “Programmer Art”. The underlying idea behind the term is that if you are a programmer, you can't be an artist. Or at least, if you tried, you wouldn't be a “good” artist. I have found this to be a toxic mindset which serves to…
Today I went to my co-working space in downtown Seattle and closed my old desk space. I had been renting a desk there for about 5 years, spending $400 a month. It made no sense to continue paying money for something I wasn't using anymore, so it was time to close down that operation. I am deligh…
Things have been going really great!
* My moms chemo therapy is working. It's not a cure by any means, but it will buy her more lifetime. There's a very small chance that she might eventually get healthy enough to fly back to America.
* One of the VR projects I worked on in Nov 2018 was recent…
Games are art.
Art is created by artists.
Artists are people.
People have lives outside of their work.
Our personal lives can be messy.
Parts of our lives are reflected in our art.
I've been thinking a lot about life lately. My personal life has been going through some pretty radical chang…
So, to get started, the beginning of this project is a funny story:
During Christmas, my brother bought me a hand full of games that he saw on my steam wishlist. Just for a joke, he bought me a game called "Hentai Girl Linda" for $0.99. As you can probably guess, it's anime porn. I played it…
This morning I went for a long drive. I started thinking about image recognition. The question is, "How can you train a computer to recognize a common image pattern, even if many parts of the image change?" In other words, can we teach a computer to recognize and identify memes? The thing with me…
(Warning: Rambling ahead!)
I met a new client in the beginning of November through a friend. The client asked my friend if he knew how to use Leap Motion. He said, "No, I don't, but I know the just guy who does! Eric is probably one of the best Leap Motion developers in the country.", and a ref…
This may be one of the harder, more difficult entries to write. I am almost tempted to not even write it, but I've convinced myself that every step of the journey is important.
Almost exactly a month ago, I hit rock bottom. I was completely broke. I had nineteen cents in my bank account. My …
I've got a broad production level puzzle I've been trying to figure out and I've never been sure if I've been working with all of the pieces. I'll try to explain the problem and my considerations.
1) I need to create AI for all of my characters and it needs to be good enough that it's convincin…
Alright. I finished my project for Dell this evening. It took me about two and a half months to complete it, though the first month or so was very light work. The work ramped up quite significantly towards the last two weeks and I was working weekends for the last two weeks. The good news is, I …
Herby sat on a log around the campfire and half listened to the tales and gossip being told by the villagers. He took a long draw from the frothy mug of ale and set it back to rest comfortably on his large belly. After each story ended, he’d quietly huff in mild contempt and …
It almost feels like it hasn't been worth writing an update for the last month because so little "progress" has been made on Spellbound. But I suppose such is life, and it too must be captured and noted as a part of the journey of an indie developer. I have still been doing various contract proj…
I need to make money to fund the further development of my game. So, I've been doing paid contract work in VR. Most of the work is pretty easy for me and consists of producing VR applications which run 360 videos with some interactive GUI elements embedded into it. I also have been helping other…
I took the last two weeks of December off for holidays, so no production was done for Spellbound during that time. I met up with my friend Russel (Magforce7) for an afternoon at my office and gave him a demo of Spellbound in VR. He works for Firaxis, so it was interesting to compare notes on dev…
Spellbound is intended to be a story driven game. I feel that's the only thing which can make the game interesting on its own. The story of Spellbound has gone through a lot of evolutionary changes throughout the development process. When I initially conceived of the game, I just had a game conc…
This update is going to show you guys what an idiot I can be. Be warned, this could happen to you too!
For the past month, I have been focusing almost exclusively on developing an artificial intelligence system which uses machine learning to play the characters within my game. This is a primary…
PAX:
I went to PAX as an attendee and checked out a few booths and games. I was thinking about setting up a booth in the VR section, but the financial reality made that impossible. I just can't afford the booth fee (10x10 booth - $1,050). Even if they gave me an indie discount, the price put…
"Flow" is that mental state you enter into when you are focused and highly productive. It is a pleasurable state to achieve and leads to productive gains (aka, "getting into the zone").
When it comes to any sort of creative work (game development, writing, artwork, design, et…
The biggest struggle for me is still money. It's getting harder. Game sales have pretty much stopped completely, but game development continues forward. I'm starting to think I'm a bit crazy.
The rational side says, "Why are you still working on building a product which literally gets zero sale…
Below is my preliminary draft design for the AI system within Spellbound. I'm slowly migrating away from scripted expert systems towards a more dynamic and fluid AI system based on machine learning and neural networks. I may be crazy to attempt this, but I find this topic fascinating. I en…
Tomorrow morning, I have to fire someone.
It's been a tough three months with a lot of big life changes. My girlfriend and I were unable to pay our apartment rent in downtown Seattle, for the months of April and May. So, we were strongly encouraged to move out. We were paying $2461 per month…
I wrote this article on Medium and thought I'd cross post it here:
https://medium.com/@Slayemin/your-indie-game-dev-team-will-fail-108d4b663e7e
This is based off of my own past personal experiences (and failures) and observations of indie teams. I think a lot of the points are probably common…
It's been a tough few months. Spellbound is not really selling very well on Steam. It's to be expected, since the game is both in Early Access mode and has zero marketing behind it. But, it's still a disappointing reality. I'm optimistic that it will eventually change. All I have to do is keep work…
I just spent three days debugging a problem within my VR game. I don't quite understand the root cause of the problem, but I do know enough about the nature of the problem to create an effective work around.
Over the course of my career as a programmer and developer, I've gradually gotten better and…
I don't really have the energy to write a long dev blog for this month.
I was invited to meet a chinese delegation looking to do some collaboration with the VR scene in Seattle. I picked the brains of a few fellow chinese devs and I learned that most of them understand english well enough that trans…
January 27th. The first major update for Spellbound since early access release on Sept 4th, 2016. Almost five months later. For the sake of brevity, you can read the lengthy Patch Notes here.
This helps me get one step closer to achieving a core strategic business objective: To get Spellbound on as…
Last month I said:[quote]
On VR Indie Growth & Survival:
Eventually, I'm going to have to get more people to join my team. Growth is going to be very tricky to manage correctly -- especially in the VR industry, which is brand new. The biggest danger is that a company gets a short term influx of m…
