New Year's Resolutions

This morning I headed into work on my bike and then to the company gym where I usually start my day. Keeping with my early-rising habit I developed over the Christmas break I found myself there earlier than usual. I expected the gym to be packed with those seeking to lose a bit of weight gained over the Holidays. Nope, it felt really empty. Perhaps the idea of making and then breaking resolutions has gotten to the point where the new trend is to not make them in the first place. I hope I am wrong about that as the new year is always a great time to reflect on how we can improve ourselves.

On Sunday my wife asked if I had set any goals or resolutions and I had to confess that I have not made the effort yet. I sort of have a few ideas that carry forward from previous years like skiing more and dropping a bit of weight. So far I have started the year off right as I am down a few pounds which is a freaking miracle considering all of the feasting most people do during the holidays. I have also come back to work with a sore body from skiing so much over the break.

In this vein of looking at ways of improving myself over the next 12 months, I think I would like to learn a new technical skill or two. I have a very strong understanding of relational database systems and have even dabbled with other database technologies. Therefore those are not good areas to expand. Instead I should look at where my weaknesses are and set some goals to improve those parts of my professional skill set. I have used both Amazon's (AWS) and Google's (GCP) cloud platforms but could definitely improve there. Our company has a learning portal and should probably leverage it first and then fill in any shortcomings with a local conference.

Another area I would like to focus some effort is improving my artificial intelligence (AI) knowledge. Last year I ran through a Reinforcement Learning book and learned a lot. The book wasn't all that great but I did enjoy the code segments and doing the examples. There are a number of new AI tools emerging and I will try to find one that catches my interest and do something with it.

Finally I want to do more with gaming technology. I have dabbled with the Unity game engine but think I could learn a lot by learning Unreal as well. There are so many samples and tutorials that it would be good to spend an extra hour on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings hanging out at the office and building something interesting.

While it is nice to create a list of improvements, be sure to write them down. Someone once said that a goal not written is just a wish. If you want the wish to come true, start by writing it down and then coming up with a plan. I have the starting part down, now I should follow through and make a proper plan for each of these resolutions. Good luck on your own New Year's Resolutions.

Report from GDC 2018

Once again I attended the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. This year's conference seemed to have a lot more energy than last. I also found a number of new technologies to be very interesting. While Unity didn't have a large presence, Unreal did. For those that don't know, both are makers of video game engines used by many developers around the world. In fact, if I had to give an award for the best booth at the show, it would be the Unreal booth. They actually had 2 booths and the one showcasing a number of games written in Unreal is my favorite of the show. This is significant because my company had a large booth but I liked Unreal's more.

Another booth, other than my own, that I enjoyed stopping at was from Amazon. They seem to have some pretty interesting technology that others can use to help create games. I stopped and talked with them for a bit and am impressed. Of course, I think my ideas are light years ahead of theirs but I might be a bit biased.

Virtual Reality continued to have growing representation and I am interested to see how that part of the market evolves. Right now I think we have some great technology with high-end hardware from Oculus, mid-market technology from PlayStation, and ubiquitous entry-level hardware with the smartphone manufacturers coupled with Google hardware . All we need is great content. Some new games have recently been released and I look forward to the E3 announcements this summer.

It pleased me greatly to see that this year's GDC seemed much better than some of the more recent ones. It gives me hope that the industry is healthy and picking up momentum again. Perhaps video games are just the distraction we all need to keep our mind off politics. I know it helps me.

Writing a Video Game

I currently work for a video game company but don't really do anything to create them. Recently I decided that if I work for such a company, I might want to write a simple game. While some organizations might discourage this, my company encourages it. Furthermore, if the game is any good, they will publish it and let me keep the majority of the proceeds. There are some limitations in that while I can use company equipment and time, I need to make sure I complete the rest of my work first. After all they hired me to look after very important database systems and not to write games.

Normally I head back to Utah on Friday nights. This weekend I am staying in the San Francisco area instead. I have completed my CERT training and needed to spend this morning going through a skills test. It was fun being able to put out a real fire using a fire extinguisher as opposed to just talking about it. There were lots of other things I got to do, but I was done a little after lunch. So what do I do with the rest of my weekend? I figured I would start writing my game.

There is a hard way to write a video game where you create everything from scratch. Then there is an easy way where you use a video game editor like Unity to help you create the game. I like the easy way and so I downloaded Unity and am playing with it today. I don't expect to create a game in a single weekend but I do hope I will have a good idea as to how long it will take. Now I just need a simple idea for a game.