A new beginning!

I'm unemployed! woohoo!

Yesterday was my last day as a Zynga / NaturalMotion employee. Lots of mixed feelings - leaving behind the Boss Alien crew has been really hard, I get the feeling I'm going to be missed which is nice. No paycheck is going to be very hard to adjust to.

I'll not be sorry to see the back of the corporate environment. The way big companies make games is just - well, not ideal. I think I have enough information now to write a book on it. Whether anyone would listen is another matter entirely.

I'm incredibly proud of the work I've done over the last 4 and a bit years. We've made a lot of mistakes along the way but we've created a game that's spawned a franchise, has over 200 million downloads across the various platforms and incarnations so far, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that double over the franchise lifetime. We've been running a live game for over three years, which is just crazy.

I've had a large number of awesome times working with team Boss Alien. Given that I was involved in hiring a large majority of the folks I've worked with, I can safely say that our "only hire people who are competent that we like" policy and our "yes, maybe, no - and a maybe is a no" policy has worked out fantastically. Or maybe it's confirmation bias. Anyway, it was the best leaving card I've had ;)

So - what's next?

VR is next! a big steaming bucket of VR!

and the first thing I'm going to be working on is a holodeck.

And I'm going to try and document my progress, pretty much live.

If you're interested in watching or participating, drop me a mail. I'll be looking at ways to fund this over the next month or two - I've got a warchest that'll get me through summer but if I can figure out a revenue stream by then I'll be able to think a bit bigger. Patreon and Kickstarter are options, I guess.

I've got a lot of bills and logistics to get cracking on next, and I've got to recreate all of my hacking and prototyping of the last year or two, from scratch, starting today.

Time to get cracking!