Average Suburban Housewolf and Game Developer
Pure website javascript development. Used the React framework.
My resposibilities included minor feature additions and lots of bugfixing.
Why do I do freelance game development?
First is to consider the alternatives:
My goals center around providing a stable environment for my family. Everything else is in support of this goal.
Making games requires time, money, a very supportive family, and a team. For as long as Ive been a game dev, Ive only had one of those: a good family. It took many years to finally find a great team. Even though I now work with my fellow consultants in this group, we are all in a similar position that we dont have money to invest.
Work for another game company? Maybe a decade ago or longer Id heard that for every game thats been successful, there were nine that never turned a profit. In the current explosion of indie developers relying on the professional tools that are cheaply or freely available, Im guessing that has risen to at least a hundred to one successful project, if not a thousand.
So why not work on normal applications? Its steady work, even pays more, and its available country-wide. Over the years Ive done normal applications. My early career I intentionally searched for application work despite already having done some game dev. I wanted to have a wide range of experience. What it taught me is that I have a special gift that applies more to games. Im at best a mediocre app developer.
But Im a really good game dev.
Clearly there are games being made. Some successful ones. Being a consultant means I get to swoop in and help people with my specialized experience and help them reach their goals in a fraction of the time and expense than for their group to try working it out for themselves.
Its not like we just leave in the middle of a project. We support the projects and hand off the work in ways so the clients can maintain what weve done long after we have moved on. And we dont simply drop off the face of the planet. We answer questions for old clients when they come up. Most of our new work comes from references given by people we have helped in the past.
So yea. This is where I need to be. Helping as many people the best ways I know how.
This conversion required a much more complicated loading upgrade, as there were many different structures loaded from disk directly to memory. I had to create a system that leveraged the in-code structure meta-data to reformat the incoming game data on the fly.
Pretty straightforward. Just needed recompiling and a few tweaks to data loading for expanding the 32 bit integers to 64 bits. The lua interpreters needed some tweaking.
Most difficult part was getting the Apple codesigning working correctly with binaries not built directly in Xcode’s build process.
It’s finally time to release – the core of Asset Bundle #9!
As long time readers already know, I’ve been working with asset bundles for years. I finally got around to packaging up the core system that I’ve been solving problems with so that others can benefit from what I’ve learned.
You can learn more about it’s technical abilities from the developer site: http://bundle.dwulf.com/developer.html
And then to convince your boss to let you buy it, there’s a section of the site for them too, to make it easier to explain why you need it. http://bundle.dwulf.com
And then go buy it from the Unity Asset Store! https://assetstore.unity.com
This is the core – the part that actually downloads bundles and unpacks them. It’s currently compiled for current Unity versions, but can absolutely be rebuilt for older versions once purchased.
Over time (or based on interest) I plan to release template projects that demonstrate how I use this core to accomplish the things I talk about in my blog series about asset bundles. Want a refresher?
Hope to hear from you about questions and how you are doing neat things with it!