Unit Zero
Rewinding the clock back to 1999 I had two possibles paths in my life. The first being to follow my love for games and competitive play as a game programmer or apply my primitive skills as a dev in the Enterprise space. Given the prospects of finding game dev employment where I lived to be minimal at best, and with the sudden need to produce money to eat and sleep with a roof over my head… I let the business dev work suck me in. Much credit to those who in the same situation pushed on through and pursued their game dev passion successfully!
In Retrospect
It’s been a pretty wild ride over the past 20+ years with living and working on four different continents, giving keynotes to audiences as large as 2,500 industry professionals, and in general pushing me out of my comfort areas at every step of the way. I got a chance to experience so much over the world and I really benefited from working with many fun, talented, and humble people along the way. Some cool things which happened:
While working for a Healthcare Company and on-site at one of the hospitals, the systems responsible for running the tech used for emergency patients arriving while suffering from suspected myocardial infarctions (Heart attack); suddenly broke down. Even worse, the technology company who developed and supported the system was unable to send an engineer within the contracted time frame. I was asked to take a look to see what I could do. Having never seen or touched the system before, I felt a bit dubious that I could resolve the issue but got stuck in anyways. I was able to break out of the console system to a Linux shell prompt and determine the system constituted of three networked Linux systems and they were experiencing network problems with significant packet loss. I was able to resolve the issue and get the systems back online. The manager for the operating room was ecstatic and told me I had just averted the need for the hospital to helicopter patients to another hospital much farther away and thus losing valuable minutes and seconds in a bid to save a patient’s life. So while not being the most technical challenge of my career, it has been the one I’m most proud of.
I had the chance to develop a product idea I had for a distributed system to assure test availability and compliance for CI/CD systems. During the course of the work, I was able to dive deep and take advantage of my employer’s extensive academic research programmes to pick the brains of some outrageously smart people on Control Systems Theory, Deontic Logic, and Zero Knowledge Proofs. As a geek for all things tech, I felt like I had finally climbed to the top of the mountain to see the real cutting edge of Computing Systems and Software. Now, if only I could talk about it publicly…
Converting Dreams to Reality
Having said that, there was never a time where I thought I was throwing my life away. Giving up on a passion that still burned and watching waves and waves of new developers enter the game dev industry and producing awesome work. Finally, I decided to put together a plan which juggled family, financial, visa, and permanent citizenship considerations. Everything had to be timed just right.
I’m glad to say that I finally pulled the trigger to resign from my role and focus on Game Dev full-time. I’ve enrolled in the Game Programming course at CG Spectrum and working with an amazing mentor from the games industry. The focus has been on Unreal Engine, and the amount of capabilities and systems has been stunning. Luckily I have a background in software engineering am able to work my way through the feature set and Unreal’s API for C++ and their scripting system called Blueprints. With my background in networking it is super tempting to instantly hone into the Online Sub Systems, NetDriver and Actor Replication capabilities of the engine and focus on that. However, I’ve decided to get the full picture of the Unreal Engine as a developer first, so I have a solid understanding of how things come together. So far it has been a lot of fun and I’ve really enjoyed and benefited from the large community of people involved at the CG Spectrum school.
Currently the intent is to finish the programme and develop portfolio work to aid in the upcoming job hunt. I’m keen to develop a modern version of the old school Nintendo Spy vs Spy game. The competitive sneaky gameplay and the amazing music have really embedded themselves into my brain and I have some great ideas on how to leverage some of the advanced engine technologies of Unreal to do the game justice.
So with all that said, I’ve decided to dust off my neglected blog, last post in 2016…, and provide updates on my progress here.