independent software developer
My first makerbot print. Felt like the first time Mum and Dad brought home the Apple IIe. Everything feels different today than it was yesterday. Thanks so much to Mike for letting me (ab)use his makerbot!
The lego man is from Thingiverse. The arcade machine is a hack of one on sketchup warehouse.
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. :)
Here is what I ended up with at the end of GGJ 2012. I've cleaned it up a bit, got it working under Internet Explorer (mostly) and put it online here.
I ended up with more of a virtual world or virtual ecosystem than a video game. I ran out of time to put probably the most important thing into the game - game mechanics. Also no time for sound, the player has very little agency in the world, and there are no win or lose conditions.
Overall it was a lot of fun to build though, and I got some pretty neat new technology for jsGameSoup out of it, namely the isometric camera library, and a lightweight vector math library.
GGJ was also really fun just because of the social aspect of being crammed into a room with like minded people for 48 hours. Can't wait for next year!
End of Saturday night, day two:
Got some sleep. Lots of on the TODO list for today. About 7 hours left. :)
The theme is "Ouroboros". Progress as at midnight day 1:
I have a reasonably concrete idea of where I am going. Hopefully there will be time to iterate on my idea and "find the fun".