"Here's to what I hope will be a smaller period of inactivity than the last one."
Pahaha, I said that in my previous blog entry - which was posted nine months after the one before it. Nine Months was posted during March 2010. It is currently January 2012, twenty-two months after that. Goddammit. An absolute ton has happened since that point.= YoYo Games =As of July, I've been employed by YoYo Games as a Junior Developer. I was initially in contact with Sandy from January that year, but had to keep it on the down low, hence no mention of it in Nine Months. My job is essentially to program (be it from scratch or ontop of the existing code in some games' cases) the games that YoYo Games publishes to mobile devices. Contrary to some people's beliefs I do not work on GameMaker itself (my programming experience does not extend beyond GML), though I do quite frequently throw bugs and suggestions at Mike and Russell (example - I was the one that suggested Search In Scripts should be extended to include standard code blocks, something that's previous omission had irritated the crap out of me!).I'm still employed with them currently with no end in sight - my relocation from a small village in England to slap bang in the middle of Dundee feels permanent, and it should never be understated I absolutely love the job. While a lot of the guys are business headed, the HQ retains an air of casuality, which makes the feel of the job most awesome. Not to mention that it's a full-time wage to use GameMaker!= Games =My personal game development has slown significantly since my YoYo Games employment due to burnout - 40 hours a week of GM at work has smashed my GM-minded attention span at home. I've still managed to release a few things, though, one of which is probably my best game to date (more on that in the next section). Before July 2010 I made a sequel/improvement to madnessMADNESSmadness called Remaddening, which basically piggybacked plays off its predecessor, though it didn't garner half as much attention.mMm, by the way, is my most successful and most played game by an absolute mile, a fact that continues to completely elude me. As of this writing it is the all-time 27th most-played game on YoYo Games, at 47,963 plays. Only one game with more plays was created later than it - most of those ahead of it are from 2007 and 2008.Games I've created since employment have included the two latest FKRs (joke series now!), aforementioned Innoquous 4, an utterly weird little platformer called The Inverse Man, brain-destroying FPS experiment Cintourmind, and a couple of odd me-style arcade games, Xporadic and EverScrollingTwo.= Innoquous 4 =After having poked around this game since shortly after the release of Innoquous 3, I finally managed to release number 4 last May. It's by a country mile the biggest game to date - around 6 hours now for 100% completion or at least 1 if you just potshot Standard mode and give the other modes a couple tries. I updated the game a week or so ago to include another mode too. I didn't release it on 64digits when it initially came out as at that point uploading was broken. I figured I'd try it again with the updated copy and *hey presto* it works now!The game itself has done alright. Perhaps a global 6,000 plays since its release. But I am very pleased with the final game, especially given its birth out of a time of complete inability to make anything in GameMaker while not at work.Anyway, I don't want this blog entry to turn too tl;dr so I'll cut off here, even though I've missed off a lot of things (I make fonts now! I made a magazine called RekameMag! Praise Jesus! Just kidding!). Have a good day, 64digits user currently on this page, and see you all in 41 months or so! (Hopefully a little bit less than that!)
How did you get that job?
I finished 6th Form in July 2009 with absolutely pants results. After dallying around at home for six months I finally needed to get some form of job, so I left my moderation position of YYG, posting a relevant topic on their forums stating I couldn't do it any more due to a need to jobseek.
Somehow Sandy saw it, and mentioned over Twitter to me that they would have a position going in a few months! Despite initial hesitation (having to relocate 450 miles away from everything and everyone I knew was not the most exciting prospect given my lack of confidence anyway), the idea of having a job like that with such a dire skill list was too good to miss, so I kept on his ass. In May, after a visit to Dundee with my father, the job was made formal, and in July I moved up here :)Pfft, you lucky swine. It's probably worth taking that money and a) squirrelling it away and b) spend it on getting some further training. Jobs don't last forever, even if they seem that way (especially if Scotland secedes from the UK - God only knows what's going to happen to the job market then).
Good for you man. I think that's actually pretty clever of YoYo Games, having someone working in Game Maker in-house - how many companies have people making products and testing them simultaneously?
Congrats man, sounds like a sweet job.
Very cool. Do they they tell you what kind of games to make? (I assume they generally want more casual ones)
Pretty interesting story you have here! Are you the same NAL that comes on minecraft every once in a blue moon? :P
Well I'm glad you chose to stop by here at 64digits. We very much appreciate game development news and discussion when we don't have much news of our own haha. I look forward to seeing updates from you.That's a pretty cool job. Congrats.
Yay it's nal!
Congrats on the job that sounds super fun.I think I played your mMm game a few times myself, despite your lack of submitting it here >:lHope you post again sooner than that.Now that's the way to find a job. Also, nice blog frequency.