Wow, it’ll almost be 2 years since I’ve posted here. A lot has happened in these 1.75 years! The two major things are getting a job at GREE International and the birth of my son, Oliver. With these two things, my time is all but gone. My last post mentioned Oliver and landing a book deal. Unfortunately, only one of those happened. Fortunately, if I were to pick one of the two, I got the one I wanted. Oliver is amazing. It’s a completely different kind of happiness, being a father.

So, no book was published. Shortly after I started writing the book, I landed a job at GREE and moved to California. I had to give up on writing the book, in favor of taking care of my pregnant wife and working. GREE was amazing! A small “startup” studio, making mobile social games, made me feel great! Eventually I was promoted to Senior Engineer, made the lead engineer on the project I was on, and spoke at Unite 2012!

So now Oliver is 14 months old, and I’ve been at GREE for 1 year and 8 months. I’ve learned so much! It feels odd sometimes knowing that I’m a senior engineer. How time flies!

This update is long overdue! The last time I updated I had recently moved down to Florida. Since then I great number of things has occured. I started working at a company here in Miami, working on software designed to help engineers maintain and repair airplanes. I’ve learned quite a bit working here. For one I had never worked with or used databases or web services. I think I enjoy working with the web services more because I work in Java which is more in tune to what I’m accustomed to. Unfortunately, the actual deployment and use of the web services still elude me. Similarly, I have no clue how to deploy an Oracle server, but I’m enjoying learning PL/SQL.

After that my big news is the coming of a little one. That’s right I’m going to be a father! While the thought is a bit daunting, I remain happy and excited. We’re still trying to figure out the logistics for the pregnancy and birth, but we’re confident all will go well. *Side note, these announcements are made in order of occurrence, not importance.*

Finally, my big professional game dev news: I’m writing a book, on Unity game development on Android, for Packt Publishing! Wow! I’m writing a book. I’ve been wanting to do something to give back to the game dev community, here’s my opportunity. I was originally planning to record webcast tutorials, but if a publishing compant wants me to do it for them instead, I’m game!

Thats about it from me for now. I’ll do what I can to update more often, but who knows. I’m not known as the blogger type.

Dear visitors,

For those of you who recently visited my website, I strongly suggest you run a virus scan on your computer. Last night (January 28, 2011) I found out that my website had a virus. The website was recently paid visit by the spam fairy. It looks like one of the spam comments came with a little gift. I don’t know how long the virus has been there, but the spams started appearing this past week. I was able to locate and eliminate the virus, but I felt it important to notify you all about this incident.

I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. Thank you for understanding.

Sincerely,
Ernesto Rojo Jr

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it; Happy Holidays to those who don’t; And Happy Winter Solstice (though a bit belated) to the rest of you. I hope everyone is having a good December.

Updates since October:

I started my own game studio, Firebeard Studios. So far it’s just me and possibly Kemp Lyons. We’re both still doing our own stuff, since the company doesn’t really have money. I did get some help from some artist friends, and I’m currently developing a Solitaire game for Windows Phone 7. It’s nothing big, obviously, just a little something to us started. This should be a fun endeavor.

I’m immediately available for work! Hire me! I’m willing to relocate, so I don’t care where the job is. My career goal is to get into engine development, but since I have experience in gameplay programming, I’ll start there. My main coding language is C++ and I also have experience working with C# using the XNA framework and Unity 3D.

Speaking of Unity 3D, I was kind of bored yesterday, so I made a demo of a camera pathing system. It’s a simple implementation of a Catmull-Rom spline. The camera bounces around a little when approaching the control points, but I’m not really concerned about that. You can find the playable demo here.

Alright, that’s all for now. I hope every has a safe and enjoyable holiday season.

I’ll start off by wishing everyone a safe and Happy Halloween.

I know I’m really bad at posting updates, but I’ve mostly been busy for one reason or another. It’s time for some news updates:

I’m finally married! WooHoo! Here’s an interesting fact, which Amanda will enjoy. So I was married on October 10, 2010, or 10/10/10 in shorthand. If we remove the slashes and say 101010 in binary, the decimal representation is 42. As all Hitchhikers will know, 42 is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

Firebeard Studios, LLC should be complete soon. I’m planning on filing the papers at lunchtime. Should be fun! I’m planning starting off by making a couple of Windows Phone 7 games. We’ll see how things go after that.

Speaking of Windows Phone 7, Charles Petzold just finished his latest book: “Programming Windows Phone 7″. He was awesome enough to provide it for free. Microsoft changed the XNA creators club website. It’s now known as the App Hub. It’s the same website, they just changed it’s look and name. At least I haven’t seen any difference. But they do have some really really nice tutorials on programming for Windows Phone 7 or XNA 4.0.

That’s all the news I have for now.