So... in my previous blog entry I told you that I have signed a new contract with a company. I only can and only will talk about stuff related to that contract that is already publicly available through their website.

I'm someone with a lot of experience... I really mean A LOT. I've been in and out the gaming industry for the last 14 years, working as programmer (junior, senior, lead), project manager, technical lead, head of development, freelance developer, etc. I've collaborated in several AAA game titles, and contributed to and developed several serious business applications from speech recognition based picking software to fully fledged CRM systems. I've written game engines and maintained code bases with up to 1.500.000 lines of code.

Why do I tell you this? Because it's important for what comes next Due to my experience and my notoriety in and outside the games industry, I'm in the fortunate situation that I never really have to search for projects as a freelance developer. Whenever I drop somewhere that I'm searching for projects, it takes between a couple of days and a couple of weeks before I have several projects on my table from which I can chose. And chose, I do.

While I've got a lot of "been there, done that" projects on my table, I usually chose those which a) seem to be the most interesting to me and b ) enable me to learn new things, mostly independent of the money I gain on that project. Sometimes it even happens that the 2 fit into one project. The project I've signed recently is one of those projects.

Here we go The company I signed with is iOpener Media. What do they do? They capture real-time positions/acceleration/etc. of racing cars on the track and stream that information into racing games. In that way, the player is able to do the race against actual pilots running the race somewhere else on Earth. You want to participate the latest F1 race in Monaco, Dubai or Japan? Run an iOpener enabled game and log into your account... as soon as the real-world-race starts, it will start on your screen. This is one of those games.

If you want more information on this, please read the web sites

My work on the project will probably be the delivery of the content to the user base and contributing to the development of the API for game developers. I'm really looking forward to this because it combines hardware, software, web, cloud computing, traveling ( ), and collaboration with old friends and people inside the gaming industry.