Ramblings about programming, gaming and other random stuff…

Happy new year

January 20, 2011 at 2:31 am (game development, metaplace, Unity3D)

Wow it has been a while since I have posted anything.  So you may be wondering how is unity going, what happened to the game programming stuff I was talking about?

Well a couple years ago I decided to get serious about making games, at the very least make it into a hobby I could do at home.  I had a design for a dragon raising game in some notebooks, had been programming in the business world for 6 or more years, and could squeak out art good enough for at least a prototype.  My problem is I didn’t want to write an engine, I wanted to make a game.  So what was a girl to do?

Strangely enough at about that time a new company was announced at a TechCrunch event.  This company Areae was announcing the beginning of an Alpha test for an online world building platform called Metaplace.  It fit perfectly, it was built to support exactly what I wanted to do.  I had my engine!  I read everything I could from the event, which was really very little, but a ton of promise.

I took a leap of faith, which is totally not like me at all, and bought a domain name and created a wiki that was going to be used to support the platform and report on any new information that was announced.  I applied to the Alpha.

Turns out I got in, which is kinda old news if you have read any of my past entries.  What I didn’t mention is I found out later on that my programming experience wasn’t really enough to get me in the Alpha by itself and neither was my wiki, I had decided to do a small thing and because of that little thing I pushed myself into the early Alpha and got in on something that has given me opportunities I had thought I missed out on.

On October 11th of last year, about 3 months ago, I was hired by Playdom, which is really a division of Disney, which bought Metaplace a few month prior.  I am a professional game developer now!  So yeah I have been making games, it has been amazing, lots of work, and often times almost surreal to think I get to do this and get paid for it.  For obvious reasons I can’t say what I am working on, how I am working on it, or really much of anything about it.

This is and has always been my dream job.  This is what I answered as a kid when someone asked me what I wanted to do when I grow up.  It only took a few games on an Atari 2600, or maybe it was the Colecovision under the tree one Christmas, but it was the dream.  Then life took over, things happened, responsibilities arrived way younger than they should have and the dream was put on a shelf, only to be dusted off every once in a while in the form of a DirectX book here, or a VB game there, maybe some 3D modeling, or a few seamless textures in Photoshop.  It would always go back on the shelf, and the truth is I figured that the ship had sailed.  I had made choices, was rewarded in many ways, but the dream job was no longer on the list of things that were possible.

I know I am kinda rambling, but all I can say is I am living up to my blog header.  Guess my point is if you wants dreams to come true at some point you need to stop dreaming and try doing something about it.  You may end up just learning something about yourself, figuring out something new you can do, or some other small thing, but sometimes if you are lucky and driven you might just get that dream.

I won’t really be posting about my job, or what I am doing, if things change and for whatever reason I am no longer in the industry I can almost guarantee the posts will return.  Anyway, that is all for now.

So there is that.