I’ll start.
I worked for an audio company for about twelve years, called Sensaura. We were developing device drivers for Windows, back in the days of Windows 95 etc.
Our software allowed games to use 3D audio on different speaker configurations including stereo and headphones. We’d get sent hardware to test on, and eventually games in beta to see if our drivers would work with them.
When the audio sound card market dried up - as sound cards became integrated onto motherboards - we switched to game audio API, we called it GameCODA. Black and White used it, and we might have been a competetitor to FMOD and wwise.
However, Creative bought us and shut us down after two years and some of us moved on. My next job was in audio at Codemasters - I was there for four years!
After a decade I’m back in the games industry, just not in audio.
Games as an industry did not exist when I started; it was all text based games like adventure, moria, rogue and nethack. I do remember early consoles with pong, asteroids and so on.
BBC Micro. No one really used it in the classroom as it only had BASIC. So I wrote a multiplayer Tron / Blockade / Snake clone to play with friends having read some of the user guide that explained how to draw lines… Each player had two buttons: one to turn 90 left and one to turn 90 right. Pretty sure it used MODE 5 so there was only three players / colours and the black background. The next day, everyone wanted to play my game at lunch time and it remained a hit for weeks.
The following year we got a computer lab full of Acorn Archimedes computers and I wrote another Tron version but this time with four players, power ups, obstacles, hazards, a menu to change some variables like speed, frequency of power up drops and hazards et, a scoring system, a few animations for deaths and powerups, and a bitmap icon for the game package so it looked really legit.
At some point we got a networked server for a file share and the game was the first game on the share. Because the code was just there for anyone to copy and change, but the time I left for my next school, there was so many different versions of the game with different modes, colors, themes, etc. I’ve been a fan of open source ever since haha.
I had an intense moment of hubris while playing Hammerwatch with some friends where I thought “I could do this”. That’s how I learned C# and got the job I have now.
Uh, more details wanted
I love it! I’m a big fan of game jam games, and I watch a lot of videos about them after the jams and I’ve loaded a few of them up. I really like that… you have this reasonable middle-road, like yeah my job pays the bills, I wanna learn more fun stuff. I would read more about you. I do have a negative takeaway, though, too. Your interests are all over. Rust, embedded, homelabbing, animation. And this is what my list of interests looks like too! This has made me feel I need to flip the light switches off and just pick two. I could live without embedded rust or whatever, for me? Nah, it’s not happening. I could stick to homelabbing and 3D. But ah, I will still have urges to learn C#, make a game, use it in scripting, etc. Oof. There is just… so much to life.
I would read more about you.
That made me smile more than I expected, thank you! Knowing that, I might do another pass on that post since it was somewhat rushed.
I’m a big fan of game jam games
I also intend to upload the game I mentioned for people to try if they were interested. While I haven’t added it to the site yet, here are some links to the game and the source code. If you look through the source you’ll find hints to some cancelled features as well as the source for the Android version too (it was experimental but it does work if you have the right dependencies installed).
As for a game jam video, I don’t remember too much about the process of making this, so a video for this particular game is unlikely :/
As for the interests, yeah they’re all over the place. I like to have a broad range of interests so I can join in no matter what the topic is! You might be surprised at how closely related some of them can be!
