Thursday, December 12, 2013

Breaking Radio Silence!

Boy have things been busy for me!  I'm now going to do something rare and dive into more detail into my personal life, so feel free to skip this entire post if you want development related information.

Since my last post, I've moved twice and changed jobs.  In August and September 2012, my previous employer's parent company had tasked us with the simultaneous development of four games in order to present them at a big expo in Las Vegas.  For a team of 12 people, this was quite a task, but we were successful and were all quite happy to see the games on the show floor in October 2012.

We returned home in high spirits and full of new ideas to implement.  There was a meeting scheduled with our parent company just days after we got back.  We all thought it would be congratulatory and a discussion of future projects.  Instead, they announced that our entire studio was being laid off and we had three hours to gather our things and leave.  Being the first time I've ever been laid off, it was quite shocking to me.

I immediately began searching everywhere for a new job: San Francisco, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Montreal, Orlando, etc.  I ended up accepting a position in Reno for a small-ish casino game developer.  I'm basically the resident "Unity expert" and I help guide the best practices in it's use (reduce memory usage, improve artist workflow, etc). I also help plan and develop Unity tools and template projects as well.

I decided to move to be closer to the new office.  Plus, I figured it was finally time for me to move out of an apartment into a house.  That involved not only moving all of my stuff, but also getting much more furniture to fill the house.  One of my major intentions of moving into a house was to get a puppy, but it turned out I was misinformed and my landlord didn't allow dogs. So, I had to move again to a house that really did allow dogs.  I now have a Chocolate Labradoodle puppy named Fenrir.

I've also been occupied with developing a relationship with a fantastic woman, but that's all I'll say about that, since that is a little too personal.

So, although life has been quite busy the past several months, it has also been relatively good!

I've been tinkering around with Unity 4.x as well as testing out various web IDEs for doing WebGL development.  The 2D workflow in Unity 4.3 looks fantastic and I want to play around with it more.

Oh, and I also got braces on my teeth since my last post.  So I'm one of those weird adults with a brace-face.

I'll probably be looking into actually updating my assets on the Unity Asset Store sometime soon.