I Am Still Alive

Not many things happened in the last couple months, but that’s about to change. I’m raising from the dead – not in the literal sense, and I’m finally doing what I should have been years ago.

So, first things first, my unnamed RPG was put on hold – how unexpected, yes I know. Reasons for this are aplenty. Working with Sony’s ATF proved way too slow for RPG editor, with single developer working on it. So back in February, I decided to do my RPG in Unity. It does mean I won’t have a mobile HTML version, but that’s a sacrifice I have to make to hopefully gain much needed development speed.

Of course, after taking 3 months or so on my 2 weeks quick just-so-I-finally-make-one RPG, I had to make some money to continue eating sardines here and there. I already wrote about that in my last post. Bleak as it sounded I ended up making some livable money for that month of work.

That didn’t rescue me entirely, but it proved I can make a shabby living myself.

Parents To The Rescue

My parents use Google Spreadsheet for managing their small family company orders and to speed up spreading current order status between themselves. After 40k rows it started proving slow at times and occasionally unreliable.

So they hired me to make them a software for that. Estimation: 3 months, current time since start: 8 months and 9 days, estimation of progress: 92%.

Everything looks simple until you actually look deeply into the problem and read about how Operational Transformation works. No, I didn’t end up writing that, but I had to devise something similar, albeit simpler.

Technologies used: WPF, WCF and SQLite. And currently I’m implementing SymmetricDS to avoid single point of failure.

Thinking now, I would really wonder how it would go, if I decided to try one of my original ideas – making it using something like Electron, i.e. all web stuff. Probably Redis for DB, which might have helped in many places. Oh well, we learn until we die.

Coworking

The main issue I had with achieving my dreams was my productivity, eh, my laziness. After finding out I’m allergic to gluten at the beginning of this year, my focus improved immeasurably. Productivity was still lacking though, compared to what I would like. So almost 3 weeks ago I decided to try something, I was thinking about trying a year ago – coworking.

What is coworking? It’s this silly thing where you pay money to travel away from the comfort of your room, away from solace of your toilet, away from availability of your fridge. All so you can go into less comfortable chair (and no standing desk), into environment filled with people not unlike you.

It works.

I don’t exactly know why, but for the two and half week I am going there, my work hours turned from 3-4 to 10. Average productivity per unit of time is slightly lower, but in total it’s impressive.

The Future

What’s next? Finishing the software for my parents obviously. Then getting back to game development. Today is Sunday – my only really free day in week. By the way, I don’t get how people with kids manage to get anything done. I barely manage to clean dishes every day and that, and preparing salad for the next lunch, is my only chore during the week.

Anyway, Sunday. I might get some gamedev work in Phaser using TypeScript. So that’s one language and engine to learn. Also I want to move my assets and build toolchain to NodeJs, so I know what I will play around with today.

As for the less immediate future, I hope to make enough money to start actually playing around with Unity. Finish my new, still unannounced, game studio web page. And start making some mobile games that will hopefully eventually lead to my RPG. Things are starting to look good, did I mention it’s Sunday?