Yeah so I went to the job meeting. 15 minutes into the meeting I got the job! So I am now a full time employee ( for 6 months at least ) at the xDelia project as a game programmer.
I start tomorrow already, so it is going a million miles an hour at the moment. I am headed over to Germany, Tuesday – Thursday, next week for some work related workshop as well. So lots of things happening indeed.
So now there’s lots to do. I need to fill out some papers for the educational part of school and report that I am taking a leave of absence. Then of course there is also contract signing and all matter of other stuff I need to fix with the job (have to hunt down a computer for my room, and then of course have someone tell me where my room is). Not to mention having to report to CSN my leave of absence as well so they’ll stop sending me money, but for some reason you need to know how much you will earn, which I don’t know yet, before you are allowed to report a leave of absence. Seems kind of silly to me.
Now this is the story all about how
My life got flipped, turned upside down
Kinda how it feels. This will pretty much change everything I was doing. No more school for a while of course and iPhone coding will be put on the back-burner again. It is, however, all good. I get what I value most. Experience. With the economy as it is there is no way in Helsinki that any game company would hire someone that has no prior work experience. So this job will be worth a lot for my CV. Hopefully it will be for at least a year. Generally looks better in the resumé than 6 months, I say anyway.
So who’s turn is it next now then from Quantum Studios?
Yeah so I haven’t written in a while. Been busy with school so there hasn’t been much progress with the “furthering of my career” aspect of my life.
One of the courses I am taking is assignment oriented, so there is no exam, which makes the assignments very time consuming. So I have been working alot at that.
After these few weeks of being back to school I have convinced myself that I really need to try harder to find a job. School is nice and stuff, but I feel ready to make a name for myself and gain proper work experience.
So I updated my portfolio a bit today (just added info about my Bachelor’s thesis) and found a job I am going to apply for as well. So the rest of the day will be dedicated to three tasks.
Write a cover letter and apply for the job.
Start looking at the next assignment.
Go to Amiralen (a local shopping center) and do some grocery shopping (Dragons need food apparently).
The UDP networking is now done for my Freevo remote app, tested it with my Freevo server earlier and it works perfectly. Just have to finish up the Settings tab, which will most likely be done today, so that one can specify what host and port it should connect to and stuff like that. Then it’s just the final icons and intensive bug testing and tweaking left to do. Making this app has been a great help in putting the stuff I have learned in the book into practice.
So school starts again tomorrow. Or well not really. I’m just going to talk to someone about what courses I decided on for my master’s education (since you get to pick 90% of the curriculum yourself). The courses don’t actually start until Tuesday. Will be nice to start meeting other people again, rather than sitting here cooped up in Karlskrona with nobody we know.
So I found some artists to help me out with my apps. Andreas Nilsson is making some icons for the Freevo remote app. Rasmus Welin is learning how to make sprite characters for the usage in the JRPG I mentioned previously. So now I just have to get out of procrastination mode and continue work on the apps.
Starting the Masters education on Monday at BTH, so I don’t know how much time there will be for programming on these things during the week, but there’s always the weekends.
To the glee of some (Keendra) and the despair of others (mostly me) I ended up starting a blog.
Thought it was time to let people, who are interested, what I’m up to. However this blog will be focused on my aspirations of becoming a game programmer and all which that entails.
Currently I am on summer break. Got my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, with a specialization in Game Programming, in June and I’m going straight for my Master’s in Computer Science, which starts in September.
On the agenda currently I am moving to Karlskrona, Sweden in a week with my girlfriend. Other than that I have started reading up on Objective-C/iPhone programming with the hopes of making some cool iPhone games in the near future with some friends, and maybe make some money.
Other than that there isn’t much to report at this time.
This is a two player co-operative horror game that me and my classmates made as our final project in our Bachelors education in Computer Science. We also competed in the Swedish Game Awards -09 with this game.
My role in this project was as the Project Leader and the 3D Engine programmer. Since we have had bad experiences with existing 3D Engines I decided to start creating my own 3D engine for the game about 6 months before we started working on the actual game. As of the end of march 2009 the engine consisted of 12,000 LOC.
Other than this I also worked on modelling the house (which was made in 3D Studio Max) and spent much time completing our in-house Collada parser.