This is the first year since 2004 that I haven’t moved house, and I am delighted.  I find that I always settle into a place about 10 to 11 months in, so I usually start to feel at home just as I have to put that home back into a box.  Not this time, though!  Finally I am not dealing with man and van companies as Summer kicks in.

Summer, however, turned up rather early this year, didn’t it?  The rain returned just as I began cycling to work every day. Thanks, Britain. I love you too.

Rain aside, it is absolutely marvellous to be sticking in one place for a while.  I am closer to unpacked than I’ve been in a long, long time (although I still have a great deal of stuff in boxes, the boxes are now stowed in cupboards) and I really do feel settled in.  I even know where most things are around the house. Our towels even go in the airing cupboard! What a delight.

I have lived in many fascinating places since I moved away from Andover, and I don’t regret any of them at all, but I do wish I could have skipped the moving.  Turns out, I really don’t like moving.  I like having all my things in the right places.

Lately I’ve been having a go at making a video game, and it is really fun!  I have had a few attempts in the past, but I’ve always fallen down because of the sheer scale of every project I attempt, or the realisation that I’m really bad at graphics, but every time I get a little bit further, and I’m really pleased with how Spacegame is going so far.

What’s nice about this project is that I’ve decided to make it, at least initially, just for me.  I know that games are hard to make, and even harder to make fun, so I’ve decided to just work on the bits that I enjoy and leave the rest for later.  For example, I can’t draw, so the graphics are all 2-minute efforts, and I started out writing a multiplayer game, to learn about it, but now I’m focussing on making it a fun single player game, so I can play it on my own.  By only working on things I like, it’s kept the project interesting, and I haven’t given up on it yet.  It’s actually my longest running project on Github now, clocking in at 15 weeks in total.

Games as indie projects have gone through a bit of a revival lately, which has been fantastic: before Quake, a game mod was a feasible one-man project, but the advent of Quake’s quality 3D modelling and sound effects meant that it was very time-consuming to create a good-looking, playable extension to an existing game.  Around that time, I gave up on the idea of ever being able to write games, but lately, indie development is coming back and 2D is becoming popular again.  The tools are also improving, and suddenly it seems like making a small game is achievable, and that’s really good for the industry.  These days, I spend more time playing budget games than I do triple-A titles, because I get a lot more hours of gameplay for my money.  It feels, now, like if I were to put enough time into it, I could come up with something that could at least get some players, and that’s encouraging to know.  The distribution channels are there, too, for people who are willing to put the marketing time in - the one-man game studio is a possibility.

Spacegame is not yet very playable, but if you know how to run ruby source code and feel like giving it a go, the source is available here.

In the past, I’ve always worked on jobs that have had a definite end: temporary positions and limited work visas.  My last job was the first that I’ve actually had to quit, which is an unusual state of affairs.  On one hand, it’s great to have found an exciting new job, and you want to shout about it, but on the other, you feel like you’re abandoning your colleagues and friends by moving on.

Leaving Optimor was probably quite a difficult place to start.  I’ve been there since the company first opened its offices, and I was a quarter of the development team, so quite a lot of weight was on my shoulders.  Handing in my notice felt pretty awful, but I suppose it was that weight that made me do it, in the end.  I think that this sort of thing should be kept professional, and I should try my best to think only of the career opportunities and the future rather than the amount of work I’m dumping on my friends by leaving, but it’s difficult to separate the professional from the personal. 

I do feel bad about leaving so much work behind, but I think I achieved a hell of a lot at Optimor and I’m very happy with what I did there.  In the past three years we’ve built an incredible website that does a lot more than it should be able to, we’ve been in the news papers countless times and on TV twice, including a full feature on The One Show.  It’s been epic, and I hope that I can make my next project just as huge.

A long time ago my friend Ben lent me a book, called Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy, after I expressed an interest in learning about psychology.  On the face of it, the book looked a little too much like a work of fiction to be a usual introduction to the field, but I’m not one to judge a book by its cover (har, har) and Ben knows his stuff, so I put it on my bookshelf and forgot about it for months.

Fast forward to sometime this year, and I finally found the time to pick it up.  In the foreword, Dr Yalom gets on with it straight away and charges through an overview of every conceivable problem that the human mind could possibly come up with, complete with plenty of “Oooooh, that’s why I think that” moments that I’m sure anyone reading it would find.  It then moves through 10 case studies, each detailing one of his patients.  The whole thing feels wonderfully intimate, leading the reader into the lives of both patient and therapist in a way that almost feels wrong: the revelations offered seem a little too private to be published. I was struck by Yalom’s ability to take a case and boil it down to its fundamentals to find a model that fits, but then build it up again to produce a solution that was tailor-made to fit the individual.  I suppose this is what psychotherapy is all about, and perhaps there are a million other books out there doing the same thing, but this book definitely isn’t one that I’ll forget about any time soon.