The unfortunate part is the circumstance which arose to catalyse this move. I would never leave a job prematurely unless there were some serious misgivings or misunderstandings between myself and the company, and sadly this was the case with my previous employer. I’ll leave it at that. On the one hand I am very sad to let go of a company which I helped found, and indeed held a not-insubstantial amount of shares in, but in the end it is the heart that matters. I would not have been happy had I not made this move.

But hey, on the positive side, I landed a kick-ass job at a sweet company! I’ll be working with some former co-workers on Dungeon Runners, plus many other talented folks from around the industry. I expect I’ll be learning a lot from my new peers. I can’t wait to dive deeper into my passion for graphics, writing shaders, and streamlining art pipelines.

Working on Dungeon Runners, I had a chance to optimize and improve the graphics pipeline, but only within a limited range. The hardware constraints of our user base required that certain, newer graphical tricks had to be omitted. However, working on the Xbox 360 hardware looks to be truly liberating in that regard. It’s a couple of years old now, but it’s still more capable of doing interesting things graphically than I am used to. I can’t wait to play around more with post-processing, shadows, and lighting models, oh my!

Cheers to new opportunities.

This latest explosion of Flash games on the social networks is interesting, though. The kind of gamer that they appeal to may never grow out of the phase they’re in. I’ve heard it said in many places that these gamers will and must eventually expect a deeper play experience, but I wonder.

When I think about how my own gaming tastes have evolved, I am startled to see that they haven’t. It’s almost as though whatever genre and mechanics I was initially attracted to have really stayed with me. As a young boy, I loved playing Final Fantasy 2 (US) on my SNES, which started my thirst for compelling RPG’s. I also loved strategy board games which led to my interest in games like Civilization and standard RTS fare.

Although RPG’s have evolved as a genre since Final Fantasy 2, all of the basic mechanics are still there, albeit shuffled around a bit. The only thing that has dramatically changed has been the graphics, UI standards, and playability.

In other words, the games haven’t changed — they’re just easier and more enjoyable to play, with prettier packaging.

So where does that leave games like Farmville or Cafe World? Well, my guess is that the gameplay mechanics will continue to be shallow collection games with doled out rewards with some social hooks. This set of features has been honed, polished, and perfected for a simple reason: it’s like crack. Crackheads don’t want deeper game mechanics, they just want more crack, the same way I just want better RPG’s or RTS games. I don’t expect those mechanics to go away anytime soon.

So, given that the mechanics won’t change much, just graphics, UI, and playability remain. Unfortunately, those are not Flash’s strong points.

I’d love to say that HTML5 will come and deliver us all from these issues, but that technology still feels like it’d be a couple of years before the spec is decided on and has reasonable browser/user penetration. I guess we’ll all have to be patient.

There are some alternatives, of course. The big three that come to mind are: Unity, Instant Action, and the Portalarium Player. All three of these solutions are browser plugins of some kind that essentially run a 3D engine in the web browser, but only the Portalarium Player can run an arbitrary engine of the developer’s choice.

These choices still have the inherent problem of creating another barrier to the game that the poor user will have to navigate through. Hopefully the user’s attention span is long enough to make it, but admittedly the sort of user interested in playing these crack-like games has little to no patience. These platforms do seem ripe for some high-quality content though, and could do quite well if the games targeted the proper demographics.

Fern was a small particle engine that was highly optimized for SIMD instructions — all particle integrations and operations would happen using the SSE instruction set, so it was pretty quick. However, the problem with this project was that I was starting from a blank slate, and was quickly bogged down writing boring IO, Windows API, and low-level engine functionality. The point of having a code project that you work on in your spare time is that you enjoy what you’re working on, and I quickly found that I didn’t like writing all this stuff.

I went searching around for a nice creative, open-source project for graphics testing, and found Cinder. It’s pretty nice as far as a sandbox for graphics testing goes. It’s multi-platform, but currently only supports OpenGL.

So far I’ve re-written much of my particle code from Fern to use Cinder, and although it’s not quite as fast as Fern, it was working in a matter of hours. I posted an example of the system in my Folio.

Next, I’d like to test out the Cinder FBO and write another pixel convolution kernel to get some blurring going on.

The reason for this is clear: Facebook has turned off the most viral of their viral channels, Notifications. And with good reason. Those things were spammy as hell, but they were also what catalyzed early adopters like Zynga to achieve user counts of epic proportions.

I think from here on out it’s going to be much, much harder to acquire users on the Facebook platform without shelling out wads of cash on advertising. This essentially puts developers in the same boat that they were in before the social network boom came along: you have to pay for your users with marketing. But let’s all admit it, it was way too good to last. Meanwhile, Facebook stands to make millions on these huge game companies that have entrenched themselves on their network, because the only way they can retain and acquire new users is through ads. Nice move.

So the question now is, “Will this sort of boom ever happen again?” We have to look towards the likes of MySpace, hi5, and the newly launched Yahoo! social platform. Luckily, all of these networks implement the OpenSocial API, so it shouldn’t be hard to develop an interface to OpenSocial and deploy across all three.

Fun times on the bleeding edge.

Why did my blog never get updated and eventually disappear? Well, it’s a long story, but suffice it to say that I was too caught up in work matters. While leaving NCsoft, many different opportunities arose, and the team and I were stuck in a sort of limbo. Things eventually fell through at NCsoft, and I went on to help found a new startup, Portalarium, where I’m at now as the Lead Technical Artist.

It’s an exciting venture, entering into the social games space. There’s so much movement in this area of the field right now; so much potential. There are also quite a few big players that will make it hard for anyone to grab any market share. Portalarium being essentially a spiritual successor to Origin, I have hopes that we can make it.

So much of what I work in now is web-centric, so JavaScript and PHP are utterly essential. It’s interesting diving more into these two languages, but the deeper I get into JavaScript the more horrified I am at its implementation of object-oriented concepts. *shudders*

Back to the grinding stone.