Work

Massive, the company I have been so busy at over the last 22 years was sold a few months back. This is an amazing milestone. It’s rare to have a job that you love to go to every day. In my role as the person who solves the new and technically hard stuff in a user experience centric manner, I get to work on the most amazing technologies with the most creative people in the world.

My Son’s Game

Hope you have all been following the success of my son’s game. He’s currently close to releasing ‘skinning’ which was inspired by some fan art submitted about the game.

You can purchase it on Steam for US$3. It’s a bargain.

Working towards releasing skinning now that is is ‘feature complete’ https://t.co/gAX6ixEJBM pic.twitter.com/hrHEPh50Tl

— Rivalry (@RivalryGame) January 14, 2019

MetaWrap Rides Again

As a side project, I’m turning the game’s core networking engine into a separate project and product. It’s been evolving over the last few years into my main side project, mainly as a way to save hosting costs and distribute load for his game. People who knew me from back when I was working on MetaWrap kept drawing my attention to the last season of Silicon Valley as their ‘new internet’ is similar to what I was talking about many years ago. The distributed object model that MetaWrap exposed to the world was always imagined as a ‘free’, consistent and more useful version of the internet developed over the top of the existing one. While working on the game networking engine I kept being drawn back to the old ideas and solutions I came up back then that solved the same problems, so it’s merged with the goals of my old vision of a distributed decentralised internet. I’ll definitely be posting more about this in the future.

Hex – But In Unity

I’m resurrecting my cellular automata physics game. I sank years into Hex, only to have Microsoft abandon XNA. This made me down tools for a while. I’ve been working on the networking technology required to run such a massive world in the meantime and been testing it on my son’s game. I’ve done so much in Unity over the last 5 years helping my son with his game that I feel confident in using Unity starting Hex up again. Luckily I designed it with many layers of abstraction and Unity also uses C#, so this will be more of a port than a re-write.