A surprise gig that ran 4 years

Well this is awkward.  I pretty much ghosted from the blog 4 years ago because I got a job working on a game project, and they asked me to drop the blog for a bit.  That job was working in HTML5 to make some mini games that would run within a larger health oriented system.  I needed to make the games run on all browsers, on all devices and with no plug ins.  I also handled the back end development.  It was a pretty fun project, but it ate up a lot of time.  It was only going to be for a year, but they had extra funds for more experiments and 1 turned into 4!  Recently, the funds ran out, and the product wasn't self sufficient yet (a lot of what was built for the health aspects were experimental), and while the games I made for them would be great as stand alone content, they chose to pack them up until perhaps some day they can be paired with the health content as originally desired.  Alas, the world will not get to enjoy all that lovely gameplay, but I did mature as a developer in the meantime, and I really loved the team I worked with.

The next adventure could take me anywhere, so I am preparing myself by reviewing Unity C# and Unreal C++.  While I am now very well verse in the insanity that is HTML5 and java script, I was using it raw to maximize performance inside of browsers without plugins, which is quite a bit different from the industry standard of using development frameworks and making mobile apps, so even if I stick with java script development, I'll be learning a different implementation.  Thus, I'd like to go all out and exercise my other coding a bit since there isn't a good way to predict what environment my next job will utilize.

I did make a bit of progress on my design documents for the large AI project I had just started when I was hired, but I haven't built it.  Thus, I will very likely build pieces of it, or possibly build some classic AI in unity and unreal as a warm up.  I have continued to go to GDC and stay current with programming trends that way, and I'll be going again this year.