Sirocco

In all seriousness, the Reddit influx is upon us, full tilt.

+1 for a very detailed summary of various mechanical switches and boards. A pity they glossed over the Alps switches, but few people know anything about them in detail. You owe it to yourself to get a good keyboard! Not all mechanical switches are noisy, so it's possible to use one without annoying your cube mates.

Hack News is a place I frequent to come across interesting subject matter. It is not a place to accrue accolades based on posted material. There are plenty of other communities to visit if you want to make a name for yourself.

Getting away from HDMI will be nice if for no other reason than not having to buy hideously overpriced switch boxes. Also, the HDCP fiasco will come to an end. I'm sure that last bit will be replaced with something equally absurd.

What I'm worried about more is people throwing around labels such as "xenophobe" and "homophobe" whenever someone has ideas that run contrary to their own.

Perhaps he has some ill-conceived notions floating around in his head. I doubt that justifies your final statement.

There's a whole sub-industry based on diabetes! You have goods providers shuttling out boatloads of sharps, insulin testers, strips, etc. A lot of companies profit beyond just insulin, which isn't terribly expensive unless you have to use a high dosage.

I'd probably start with something like a DIY lucid dream mask.

http://cre.ations.net/creation/face-mounted-lucid-dreaming-m...

I'm not saying you're wrong, as I'm not familiar with this stuff in the slightest, but the blog post mentions two supposedly free IDEs: IAR Embedded Kickstart, and Code Composer Studio 4.

http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Code_Composer_Studio...

http://focus.ti.com/docs/toolsw/folders/print/iar-kickstart....

Going indie can work, but there's a ton of competition, and you have to work your arse off to make yourself a known commodity. Branding is important, and with so many platforms open to small developers, it's tough to know which ones to target. Aim too big, and you get swamped with other titles (iPhone). Aim too small, and no one will have a gadget that runs your title (PSP Go).

Getting coverage via engagements such as IGF and Indiecade helps a lot, but it's no guarantee of success. It's not impossible by any means, but I want to stress how much work it is, and what sort of timetable you'll be looking at to actually turn a profit from your first few titles. Expect your first games to break even at best, unless you have a truly imaginative idea and happen to hit the right platform at the right time.

Sorry, I got sidetracked. Holidays and whatnot :)

My day job has always been outside the gaming industry. I do programming for the industrial automation sector in America. Robotics, PLCs, manufacturing... that sort of stuff. It's interesting at times, but not particularly challenging. The pay is good, but we're somewhat of a dying breed. Most new programmers move into the web apps or networking side of things. Some days I'm not even sure how I got into this stuff!

As for my games, I've piddled around for the last decade or so making old SNES-style games. You can find some examples of my past work at (callofcodethulhu.com) and (http://www.allegro.cc/members/sirocco/projects). I'm about a month or less away from finishing my latest project, so it's a total grind-o-rama around my house when I get home from work.

Most of the people I know from the industry got out after five or so years, and started up their own small outfits, or went indie. Game development sounds sexy and fun, but unless you're at the top of the food chain calling the shots, you're usually an overworked drone. Worse yet, you may end up working yourself to death on a slew of titles you have no particular interest in.

I adopted the opposite approach because I'm a control freak and can't stand working on other peoples' projects. I kept my day job as a programmer outside the game sector, and indie it up in my spare time.

Don't feel bad if you want to bail. You're most definitely not alone in that respect. The way to spin your experience to potential employers is to emphasize how demanding game development is: tight scheduling, zero percent bug tolerance, rapidly changing standards, performance is always an issue, etc.

According to this blog entry:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/art-of-homepage.html

this is a 24 hour promotion to let people know about their background feature. Either way, it stinks.

I, too, fall into the "possibly one or two a week max" category. Over at Reddit, they seem more like a vehicle for narcissism than anything else. Once in a great while a person with a genuinely interesting profession comes along, but the signal to noise ratio over there is nowhere near where I'd like it to be.