The past month has been really quite exciting. In my last entry, I mentioned that I had recently interviewed at Zoë Mode, Kuju’s casual/lifestyle games studio in Brighton. I have a lot of respect for this sort of market, even though it’s often somewhat less glamorous than the world of fast-paced AAA action titles, because of what it’s doing to include more people in the gaming community. I was therefore quite keen to get involved with that side of the industry, and thrilled to be offered a programming position there.
As a result I’ve now moved to Brighton and am due to start work on Monday. I’m looking forward to finding out what I’m going to be working on – I don’t even know yet which platform I’ll be dealing with. All will be revealed, though, in a mere three days!
The timing was pretty good, too. We were just coming toward the end of the current project at Virtual Playground and there wasn’t too much pressure on any of us, so I didn’t have to leave everyone scrabbling to hire a replacement. Also, my graduation from the University of Teesside fell neatly in between the two jobs, last weekend. Naturally, I had the cheesy graduation photo taken.
I hadn’t been back to Middlesbrough since July, so it was nice to see old friends. Unlike many of my colleagues at the University, I don’t really miss Middlesbrough at all. It was nice being able to get lunch at Etsuko for £1.99, but the Japanese restaurant here in Brighton, Pompoko, is really much better – although four times the price and cheap at that! No, Middlesbrough as a place doesn’t hold any appeal for me at all, but I do have good friends there.
I stayed for the first night with my former housemate AIDS, and his girlfriend Kaz. They have recently had a daughter – I believe she was two and a half weeks old when I visited. Her name is Kaitlyn, and it was a pleasure to meet her. I’d been warned that she could make a lot of noise, but she seemed very well-behaved during my time there! She’s an absolutely gorgeous baby, so of course I had my photo taken with her, too.
My computer is still broken, but I’m now thinking it’s the PSU which is on the blink, and that’s pretty easy to replace. However, right now it’s both broken and on the other side of the country to me, so I can’t test this theory. Meanwhile, I’m using my laptop, but as my desk is also still up in Newcastle I don’t have the best working environment at home. As a result I’ve not really used this week off for anything much useful, just a bit of reading and a bit of writing, and some exploring around Brighton.
I was recently reading about GOAL, though, as it was mentioned in passing on the sweng-gamedev mailing list. I quite enjoyed my brief experimentation with Lisp during the AI module in my final year at Uni, so I’m intrigued to see how it would be applied in a games scripting environment. I’m tempted to pursue my understanding of Lisp once I get set back up with a desk and so forth, but on the other hand I can’t escape the feeling that learning Lua would be far more practical.
We’ll see how it goes… for now I’m probably going to concentrate on work at my new job before I take on any other major programming projects. I also have a load of other ideas which I’ve started and not fully developed – some with friends, some on my own – so I may pick one of those up again.