Chris McCormick

Photo by John Leonard.

Warning: post contains serious navel gazing.

Lying around in the dark trying to get my sleeping patterns back into Western Australia time from Western Scotland time has got me thinking a lot about focus and priorities.

• I used to spend about twenty hours per week in my spare time doing Free-Libre and Open Source Software. I currently manage to allocate about zero hours per week to FLOSS.

• Almost all of my time is now taken up with commercial work, social life, and family time. Although I would love to write more Free Software, I am ok with this balance for now because spending time with family and friends is definitely not the worst thing to do with your life.

• I am officially orphaning the Infinite 8-Bit Platformer project. If you are a Free Software developer interested in taking over that project please contact me! There have been a ton of irregular users but the codebase badly needs some love. It's written in Python and Pygame and is GPL licensed.

• I still get to contribute a bit to Free Software projects during the course of my commercial work - I just don't have the luxury of pioneering my other vanity projects any more - except maybe jsGameSoup which gets used by one of my clients.

• This whole shift is in general probably a good thing as it is turning me into more of a team oriented and social programmer. It forces me to re-use other people's code and work on other people's ideas more which is a good and efficient way to roll.

• I have a plan to recover some of my commercial time for specific use on Free Software again in future. This basically comes down to making a way to fund some of that time myself and still keep my family in sustenance. Hopefully that pans out!

• The one thing I wish I had more time to do is make music. I guess if I wanted this bad enough I would just make it happen but right now, no.

None of this is really a bad thing, just a fact of life. Friends and family are super-important to me right now, life is happy, and I still get to write a crapload of code for my wonderful clients and the very interesting projects they have created. :)

photo by Dirk McCormick

I don't talk about my professional work a lot on this blog so this is a bit of a departure. Lately I've been very lucky to be working on some really interesting projects with really great people. Here is something I've nearly finished (shipping to app stores as we speak!) with the wonderful PVI Collective and friends:

how to play deviator movie from pvi collective on Vimeo.

deviator is an immersive, real-world, outdoor game which invites players to temporarily transform their city into a playground. your mission is to seek out 15 audio instructions hidden in public spaces and play as many of the games as possible. as a deviator you can explore the local area, play a series of on-site games, interact with on-site performers, receive points and send text messages within this application.

using gps and the camera on your phone, deviator allows you to select a game from an on-screen map, locate it and scan a strategically placed qr code to activate the game instructions. games are scored in terms of difficulty and range from activities such as "guerrilla pole dancing" and "ring-a-ring-a-roses", to "spin the bottle" and "twister". each game encourages the player to explore their public space in a new way.

There were just so many great things about working on this project.

• As an artwork I think it's pretty compelling.
• The technology was a lot of fun:
  • Fully "vertically integrated" software stack - got to code up both the clients and server.
  • Cross-platform smartphone clients for Android OS and iOS using PhoneGap (HTML5, Ajax, etc.).
  • Python + Django back-end and API.
  • Multiplayer game-like server features, messaging, point scoring, real-time map with player locations.
  • QR codes!
• PVI Collective are just really nice people and easy to work with (happily this seems to be a trend with my clients at the moment).
• Got to ride my bike to work which is always invigorating.

The first tour of the work is showing in a few weeks - the last week of July 2012 - at Surge Festival in Glasgow, Scotland. I'll be there as "tech guy", so if you are a fellow geek into Free Software, video games programming, Pure Data, makerbots, etc. and want to share a beer look me up!

There will be other tours coming up around the world, and if you are interested in booking the tour at a festival in your city, please contact projects@pvicollective.com for more info.

Bye!