Programming is my career. Game programming is a passion, but has yet to be a career. Maybe some day.
My one complaint about game development is that no one seems to be able to figure out how to do it right. Most companies that I'm aware of always end up thinking that it is OK to make their employees work for 60 hours/week when crunch time hits (a.k.a. the last six months of the development cycle). I dunno. There's got to be a better way. One that doesn't make your employees hate their jobs.
Perhaps one day I'll start my own. And maybe that's kind of what Starbound is for me.
Game development is a tough area. There's a lot of competition and since it purely entertainment, it makes things tough. But it also means there's lots of game development companies out there that are hiring.
More than that, there's always room for one more good one. Always. One more good game developer, one more good game, one more good game development company.
I did go to school for programming. I got a BS and an MS from Utah State University. In fact, that's where this whole site started. I was teaching a group of students about game development, and had a small set of PDF tutorials for them. When the university decided to get rid of web space for the students, I moved it all over to Wikidot. Now I've just about outgrown Wikidot, leading to the next step in the evolution, my own site (the Starbound one).
I don't have any quaternion tutorials yet. That's a really good idea, though. You're right, it can get really tricky. Quaternions are strange mathematical beasts. I'll put it on my list of tutorials to create.
I do have one tutorial about matrices and how they are used in the 3D world, though, admittedly, there's a lot more that could be said about them.
I hesitate to even say what I'm about to say, since anything I say might be held against me if I don't do it. So let me preface this by saying this is just what I'm thinking right at this particular moment in time. Things will very likely change.
My next big set of tutorials will probably be a complete game. I'm leaning towards Missile Command, since I think it is just about the right complexity. It should cover all of the major topics without being more complicated than necessary. And it is a little more obscure than Asteroids, which was my other thought. I think doing a game that is a little less well known is probably a good thing.
Then, I'm leaning towards developing more math/physics tutorials, along with a set about basic game AI and networking. The quaternion tutorial would probably fit under the math stuff.
Those are all fairly large sets, and I think I'll do other random tutorials in between them. I'd like to add a few more tutorials to the HLSL/shader tutorials as well.
But in addition to more tutorials, I've got a couple of other ideas rattling around in my brain that I think will be really great for people. I won't go into the details of them right now. Maybe another day.
In the mean time, I always appreciate good feedback about what tutorials everyone is wanting. I'm making my decisions based on what people are recommending in the forums and from emails to me, so keep them coming!
Sorry for the long post…
Chazzwazzle (guest) 10 Dec 2011 20:52