A must read article for any game developer wannabe here:

Your industry heroes work like dogs too. Ask a Blizzard employee what their “core” hours were for the last year+ before WoW launched. Or a Bungie employee leading up to Halo shipping. And those are the lucky ones. For every studio that turned out a brilliant game, multiple other teams of equally cool people ended up wasting years of their lives working on games that never saw the light of day, came out stillborn or got pushed out early and died an ignominious screaming bug-filled death.

Don’t even get me started on the core work hours for Japanese studios.

How sad, and how true…

Some 6-8 years ago I’d think hey, games programming is all I want to do. Right now I’m more on the “let’s see” side.

One thing is: I don’t really play games. Last time I seriously played a game was, like, 7 years ago (IIRC). Some of the modern games I’ve seen or tried a bit are HalfLife2, Doom3, DungeonSiege, GTA3 and… that’s all! Wanting to be a game developer when you’re not really interested in games would be pretty weird, right?

Right now I’d think that my main interest is (realtime) computer graphics. I know that sounds pretty familiar - everyone starts from doing rendering engine - but hey, I’m still interested in CG now, and my first attempt at it was ~9 years ago, a mosaic-drawing-program on ZX Spectrum…

Would I want to work on a game? It depends. I don’t really like the current state of the industry at large; and working on something that’s not directly a game (like at IHV, or middleware, or research) would probably be more interesting.

I guess that’s why I’m trying not to work fulltime and leave some time for demoscene and similar stuff. Ok, my daughter has got the scissors somehow and now is trying to cut some books. Gotta go :)

Boring3D is back with new semi-daily images. That stuff rocks the christ child (*).

(*) The phrase is invented by Casey Muratori :)

3:00PM. Last 8 hours frantic game progamming, before that 6 lazy hours at work. Must submit my work tomorrow, but the result looks really bad. Perhaps it was a big mistake.

Now: sleep, get up at 7:30, eat, ciao to daughter&wife, go to the gym, go to work, work, eat, edit demo storyboard for a break, work, shop, go home, play with daughter, browse a bit, guitar a bit, eat, wife comes home after 12hrs of teaching, we’re all tired, talk a bit, sleep. Repeat?

Sleep.

I’m not dead yet! :)

A pretty busy time it is. Real actual work at work (!), writing “storyboard” for our ImagineCup demo (required, deadline April 1st) and that game I’m working for as a contractor. I wish there were less jobs at the same time, right now I’d sacrifice the game work…

On the good side, looks like my demogroup has won the scene.org award for “breakthrough performance” (that means “best newcommer of the year” or something like that). I wasn’t at the awards ceremony in Breakpoint'05, oh well. Maybe next time :)