Oct 8, 2013

The continuation of the project? Aka: Why so quiet?

It's been quite a few months since my last post. The last 7 months have been pretty busy times from a personal and business perspective. Though I haven't spoken much about my day job in my posts before, I feel it deserves a mention now.

For over three years myself and two other guys ran a software development business specialising in database-driven desktop applications. Running my own business allowed me to take half or whole days off each week to dedicate some quality time to Bulldog.  My take home pay suffered a little as a result, but the bills were getting paid, so it wasn't all that bad.

Not long after my last post in March, through a complicated series of circumstances, our biggest customer suggested we shut down the business and become permanent employees for them. After considering the situation we agreed and set about shutting down the business.

Let me tell you, it's pretty stressful and takes a lot longer than you'd think, especially since we still had to meet our previously agreed development deadlines. We started with them officially on the first of July, and have been pretty busy in our new roles ever since.

A welcome side-effect of the change is a much higher salary and not having to worry about all the busywork you have to do as a small business owner. An unwelcome side-effect of the change is that my work is very full on now and there's no room for work on Bulldog during work hours. Additionally, the work is more draining mentally than before and so when I get home the last thing I feel like doing is firing up Visual Studio again and coding for a few hours.

Despite these setbacks I don't regret my decision at all. My wife and I have another child on the way, so a higher paying job couldn't come at a better time.

So what's happening with Bulldog? Well, the good news is that I've managed some sporadic bursts of coding in the last few months, so the project is not dead. I'm determined to make something of this, so I'm going to continue chipping away where I can.

I've started to write another post which I'll clean up and submit sometime soon hopefully. It details some of the coding I've been doing recently which should take care of one of the most important aspects of the game, terrain generation.