[zackmorris]

Hah you got me, I'm 36. I also agree that consulting can be a trap, but for the reason that it's not scalable. A consulting firm is only worth about as much as its employees, so there's no real exit strategy. I guess I'm kind of lucky that I don't live in a big city so can afford to dabble in it. But it does sting sometimes to not receive residual income for past work.

Cool to hear about your earlier escapades. My business partner and I were just getting a foothold in Mac OS 9 shareware games when Apple switched to OS X and antiquated the code we had worked so hard on for 5 years. I took it really personally and suffered several years of depression. Things didn't turn around for me until I stopped using my own code. Now I don't maintain an "engine", I just scavenge commonly used code and find that it shields me from the whims of proprietary APIs.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, I also look back on what might have been, and sometimes wished I had been born 5 years earlier, when things were “booming”. But it’s an easy trap to fall into, because at least for the time being, programmers’ leverage is increasing faster than competition can fill the niches. Kids today, what with their supercomputers and megabit internet connections and being able to stand on the shoulders of giants’ open source projects! Get off my lawn! In my day we didn’t even have the internet! We had BBS’s, and floppy disks that stopped being readable, and books.. paper books! Imagine such a thing! And girls didn’t even use computers! Neither did teachers! Can you imagine?

I too have often wished the geeks and hackers of the world were better at networking. Generations of potential have been lost to reinventing the wheel. It’s kind of ironic that we’re so able to communicate in this distributed fashion and solve problems but have so few interpersonal and professional relationships.

[mietek]

FWIW, I enjoyed your game. I especially liked the way the day and night cycle shifted the colour palette. Made a lasting impression.

[zackmorris]

Thanks, that is nice to hear. Lots of custom 16 bit blitters made that happen. I made one that blended between (I think) 16 bit patterns to interpolate between two images, plus some RGB blending if I remember right. PowerPC had some wonderful functions for all of that but in the switch to Intel, computers were fast enough that I used a regular loop since it was waiting around for ram anyway. We got pretty far on an OpenGL port but ran into issues with needing to draw the scene in a handful of passes instead of piece by piece. My partner had the vision for artwork and special FX and I just made it happen on the back end.