Realigning the Azimuth

(This is part two into a bit of a personal retrospective for my 2009. If you’ve not read the first part, check it out here.)

Moving into the second half of the year, I was on quite the buzz from WWDC, and that energy was directed to completing the 1.0 release of Eventbook, and sending it to the bunch of volunteers for its first round of beta testing. I also had I did have my sights on some preliminary bits for the freelancing career… in particular, trying to sort out a proper bit of working space at home – as inspiring as the bedroom programmer aesthetic is, having it as my permanent environment is not a good thing at all.

I also put a good chunk of effort (in the down time between sending off betas and getting feedback) towards completing the last few items on the checklist for Meteor Swarm in order to get a complete build ready for a second playtest night with the gang who helped first time around.

I got Eventbook into Apple’s review queue as July wrapped up, and like the vast majority of developers on the platform, had a fairly smooth time in review. The morning it went live has to be the best moment of the year for me. Getting an actual application published has been a personal goal for a long time – and doing so made a lot of the effort worthwhile.

Along the way I’d announced my availability for freelance work – considering the state of the market, I’d have expected that there would be a lot more interest. Those only resulted in a number of leads, which didn’t eventuate for a number of reasons – distance being the surprising one (at least in the sense it felt like they expected me to work on site).

Not entirely disenchanted, I returned to Eventbook – with an aim to add a chunk of improvements which were sorely missed from the initial release. One of the things which really helped the development process was to reduce the number of people I had testing to a couple of friends who had been helpful with testing the first release.

Along the way I’d also continued with the networking & conference thing – Freeplay on the indie game developer front, as well as both Web Directions South & Edge of the Web from a web technologies standpoint. All of those were exceptionally outstanding on both an exposing-me-to-new-bits standpoint, as well as a catching up with existing people & meeting up with others perspective.

As for what overall went right? First & foremost on my mind would be getting both the 1.0 (in August), and 2.0 (in November) releases of Eventbook out the door without any major issues. Whilst it’s not been a success in terms of downloads, getting it released has been the accomplishment of something I’ve wanted to do since I got out of University & entered the industry: Release an actual 1.0 application. It also served as the basis of a talk I did at the local Cocoaheads group on the MapKit APIs.

The other big positive was simply getting the chance to attend the various conferences: WWDC, Freeplay, Web Directions South & Edge of the Web. In my days as a corporate developer, I would never have had the opportunity to take leave for the majority of these things, so being able to take the time out (even if I had to self fund it) and attend these was a great learning experience as well as being inspirational on a number of levels.

Just as important however, was the networking opportunities. I had the opportunity to meet up with a lot of great people, which in itself has led to a few other bits & pieces – more so for the indie gaming stuff for the moment. Overall, the exposure to many talented people is a great inspiration to continue on your own work regardless!

What about the things that went wrong? I’d say the biggest one has been actually getting projects. Some of the connections I’d made had been with projects which were beyond my present level of experience (at least in some domain specific areas), but it’s also been impacted with my location as well, although that’s been more for projects where I would need to work in hour.

I’ve felt a bit hesitant to take stuff up in some other cases – mainly because I’ve not been confident enough to want to take a project on based on a one-line description. To some extent I guess, it’s down to not wanting to repeat some of the mistakes I’ve had in the last few permanent positions I’ve had. I guess that’s something I need to get over if I’m going to be any real value out there.

The next item I believed didn’t go so well was trying to kick start working out of home. That comes down to a number of things – the first being the fact that I was working out of my bedroom which eventually led to me spending an incredible amount of time in there – both as my resting space, and my working space.

In the long term, I’m convinced this hasn’t been that good for my mental health over the period – working for long periods of time without anyone around does lead to a serious sense of isolation. Even more so when you’re in an outer suburb without many peers close by. I’d also have to say trying to break out really requires the support of one’s immediate family, which hasn’t totally been the case for me.

I’ve been lucky though in that I’ve gotten a lot of support from friends on this one. This type of transition was always going to be rather challenging, but it also requires the support of the people around you, and whilst my family haven’t been so (like with the accepting I need real working space issue), my friends have been so in ways I can’t really be thankful enough of.

Another thing which didn’t go down well was the death of my Windows laptop. With that gone, I simply lost access to a bunch of tooling I needed to continue work on Meteor Swarm (at least at the time), as some of them relied heavily on Windows technologies which didn’t virtualise too well.

Having put a chunk of time into learning the XNA stack, I found that I’d need to find a new alternative. Whilst I wrote some details about that at the time, it happened to impact me pretty heavily. In fact, it wasn’t until I took the RMIT course on Torque Game Builder for the iPhone that I was able to really start to regain some of that game development momentum.

At this stage, I’m now hoping having a working Windows environment (even if virtualised) will give me the boost I need to just get Meteor Swarm onto XBLIG (even if it’s not quite as polished as I wanted), as well as getting a bit closer onto releasing some iPhone games stuff as well.

As for next year? First and foremost is trying a lot harder to actually pick up contract work. There’s been at least one project which has been on the cards for way too long, and I’m looking forward for things to finally align on both ends to get it started.

I’m also really looking forward for some of the gaming stuff I’ve been doing to come together and get that out into public hands as well. Some of things I’ve been prototyping aren’t necessarily original, but I hope that they’re appreciated by the outside world as well.