Outside of work I enjoy pursuing projects in my own time. They allow me to hone my skills, explore ideas which are of particularly interest to me, and experiment with techniques which it may be too risky to “try out” on a live codebase. A few such projects are presented here. Magna Karter was a team effort: three of us, over a marathon 72 hours. We learned a lot from that experience, and wrote up our findings in a post-mortem later on.
StrongCar Racing is a project I’ve wanted to work on for a long time. I originally envisaged it as a character-driven take on destruction derby featuring strong cars, but when we were asked to write a game for the handheld GP2X console I decided to take the opportunity to code a Mode7-style time trial racer. This was one of my favourite projects at University and I’m very pleased with the result. I also had it translated into twelve languages before handing it in!
The WiiAction Input Library was another exciting single-weekend job. There had been no Wiis left in stock and I hadn’t preordered, so I bought a controller and did what I could. The video I released was featured on a number of Wii homebrew sites at the time, owing to how shortly after the Wii came out it was filmed.