Hello World v2.0

Quick..code the ATOMISER!

Well this is strange….a blog post. How very 2006!

The world has changed a lot since I last used this blog in earnest. Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, FourSquare, Instagram and a whole variety of other social networks have invaded the territory once occupied by the blog site. Twitter and various social mobile applications have reduced the typical ‘post’ to  a much shorter form than used to be the case with blog ‘articles’. As I sit here and type as a proprietor of a one-person games consultancy from my self-built office, in my garage, in my garden at home…I find myself, however, wanting to create a more weighty dialogue with the outside world…and this blog site feels all of a sudden more relevant.

I’ve got a wealth of commercial, creative and general technical experience gleaned from 15 years of games, eLearning and web projects but I’ve often found it frustrating that I cannot bring about ideas/desires myself and have always been reliant on other people to attempt to do so. I aim to change that and so I’ve chosen to make a change of direction in my professional life, for the time being at least; one that involves throwing myself into learning how to program and to actually making games/apps myself.

This is quite a challenge for a soon to be 43-year old who has been a project manager, product manager, product evangelist,  game designer, development director, studio head, entrepreneur and CEO….but with very little hands on proper coding experience (save for a short period of ActionScript in 2002 and a couple of years of BASIC in the early/mid 1980s). I did make a living as a web developer in the mid 1990’s but I don’t really count writing HTML and cutting and pasting other people’s ASP/JavaScript as ‘proper’ coding.

As well as undertaking games/digital media consulting (as SpiderShed Media – email me here ) I recently founded EVIL27 Games Ltd which has a focus on mobile (and more specifically, tablet games).  The mobile games space has been exploding in size and is – along with the growth of the freemium business model and digital distribution –  massively re-shaping the entertainment games market. I have some ideas around enabling user-generated content in mobile gaming and am working on a grant-funded project to explore this (click here for more info).

Along side this research project I am planning a number of tablet games that will hopefully be published under the EVIL27 Games banner. I am personally developing the first of these using Lua and the Corona SDK. This is quite a challenge given my limited prior programming experience and it is about this journey of discovery that I feel most compelled to blog about. And so I shall.

Hopefully you will find these interesting, thought-provoking and maybe a little amusing. Please feel free to comment or otherwise engage with me.

Updates to follow.