Well it’s official: I’m changing jobs and going to work for Certain Affinity. I’m pretty excited about this move, as I’ll be moving more into a dedicated graphics programming role and doing a little less art asset creation. Also, I’ll be working on much cooler products for the Xbox 360, as opposed to social games with a very different demographic and an often limited scope.
The unfortunate part is the circumstance which arose to catalyse this move. I would never leave a job prematurely unless there were some serious misgivings or misunderstandings between myself and the company, and sadly this was the case with my previous employer. I’ll leave it at that. On the one hand I am very sad to let go of a company which I helped found, and indeed held a not-insubstantial amount of shares in, but in the end it is the heart that matters. I would not have been happy had I not made this move.
But hey, on the positive side, I landed a kick-ass job at a sweet company! I’ll be working with some former co-workers on Dungeon Runners, plus many other talented folks from around the industry. I expect I’ll be learning a lot from my new peers. I can’t wait to dive deeper into my passion for graphics, writing shaders, and streamlining art pipelines.
Working on Dungeon Runners, I had a chance to optimize and improve the graphics pipeline, but only within a limited range. The hardware constraints of our user base required that certain, newer graphical tricks had to be omitted. However, working on the Xbox 360 hardware looks to be truly liberating in that regard. It’s a couple of years old now, but it’s still more capable of doing interesting things graphically than I am used to. I can’t wait to play around more with post-processing, shadows, and lighting models, oh my!
Cheers to new opportunities.
