Life

HoloLens Unboxing and First Impressions

Woot! It’s here and I’m really excited. Here is a quick video of me unboxing this thing!  Plus, you can see just how I’m at a loss for words as I’m really amazed by the technology.

 

I’ll be creating another post tomorrow showing some of the apps that are ready to download from the Store. If you have the opportunity to get one of these devices I think you will really enjoy it.

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The first day of Build 2015 blew my mind!

Satya NadellaYesterday I spent quite a bit of time watching the live stream for Build 2015. I was able to be at Build a couple of years ago but I was unable to get into the registration page when it opened a couple of months ago. I’ve been super busy with client work for the last month so it was probably a good thing that I didn’t travel 3,000+ miles to San Francisco. I’ve been looking for a new laptop / tablet machine and have been thinking about getting the Surface Pro 3, but I wanted to see what was given away at Build. Microsoft gave away the HP Spectre x360. So I spent about $1,500 (after tax) on the 512GB SSD version of that laptop last night. I’ll be digging into that before too long. It will be my presentation machine. My previous machine was an Asus EP-121 Windows 7 tablet that I made a Windows 8 machine. Anyway, I wasn’t able to attend Build, but I spent part of what the conference ticket would have been and bought the “give away”. But this post isn’t about the hardware given away at Build. It is about all of the AWESOME announcements made! Let’s dig in…
I’m going to take you on the journey as I saw things. I went to twitter feverishly as I saw all of the technical goodness that Microsoft was sending our way. First up, we get to hear from relatively new CEO, Satya Nadella.

After Satya, is a hero of mine – Scott Guthrie. I first hear Scott talk back in 2000 in Orlando where he introduced this thing called ASP+ and showed off IBuySpy (later to become DotNetNuke) and of course when ASP+ got to beta, it became ASP.NET. To see a developer rise over the past decade to a very influential and respected member of Microsoft has done my heart good. I always sit in to listen to Scott anytime I get a chance. He has done a lot for Azure since he went to that position a few years ago. He does love his red polo 🙂

 

Next up on stage was Mark Russinovich, who is super smart and really understood how the operating system worked more so than almost anyone who worked at Microsoft. Microsoft did well to bring him on board and make him a fellow. During his part of the keynote, he demo’d Docker working in Windows. Super awesome! He also showed an actual breakpoint being hit from Visual Studio while remote debugging a .NET app on Linux.

Being able to run .NET Core on Windows, Linux and Mac is awesome. It was around this time that this was reiterated. ASP.NET 5 is great. If you haven’t taken a look at it, do yourself a favor and take a look and watch some of the weekly community stand-ups the teams do. It is open to everyone! At this point the first BIG bombshell was dropped. Below, you will see this is Visual Studio Code running in both Mac and Linux. Too awesome!

 

Oh, and it’s free! The installation experience is super smooth. From download to install it was less than 90 seconds. It was probably closer to 60 seconds.
The next thing was saw was more information around Universal Windows Apps (for Windows 10). Universal Windows Apps have been around for a while, but this time it’s for real. 🙂 You can finally write once and deploy across all of Windows – even including the Hololens! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

After talking about Universal Windows Apps, they started to talk about 4 new ways to bring apps to Windows. This included bringing in existing web applications, bringing in existing .NET and Win32 applications, bringing in Android apps that used the Java/C++ “subsystem” and finally, even bringing in Objective C apps. That is pretty incredible to make it as painless as possible to let all developers to bring in their apps from all the different ecosystems (even Windows desktop). It was around this time that my head felt like it was going to explode and I spit out this tweet:

And then I promptly retweeted @Windows (along with well over 1K other people):

Then there was talk about the project previously known as Spartan. Microsoft introduced their new browser that will ultimately (read as a long time from now) replace Internet Explorer. This browser is called Microsoft Edge and it looks to be pretty awesome.

Next, they showed Continuum which allows your Windows Phone to be your PC. This will be huge in emerging markets where many people have a smart phone but don’t have a conventional computer. Paul Thurrot said it best with his tweet:

 

And finally, we started to see the bit I was soooo excited about. Microsoft Hololens. It is hard to believe it is real. When they first showed this when they announced Windows 10, I was down right giddy. Sersiously, I was almost aggravated with myself over how excited I was over a piece of technology. But I couldn’t help myself. It was exciting. Seeing the demos again at Build just brought in even more excitement. I’m finding it extremely hard to wait for Windows 10 simply because of the Hololens. It is going to be awesome.

 

Then we got to see a cool robot named B15. I’m telling you, this is going to change the way we interact with the world.

 

And with that I’ll wrap up my experience with the keynote from the first day of the Build 2015 conference. It was awesome and I think this image of Satya shows how he thought it went:

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East Coast Game Conference 2015

I was able to speak at the East Coast Game Conference last week. It was a good time. I gave a talk on Unity 3D. The room was pretty full and I was able to meet quite a few folks afterwards. I always enjoy talking to people after my talks.

I was able to attend some good talks as well. I listened to Luis Cataldi, from Epic talk to students and those trying to get into the game industry. He had several great points. He said,

Good habits trump raw talent.

This is so true in almost every field. Talent is awesome, but many times it is about grit. It is about sticking with something and working it out. Figuring out what went wrong and what the problem was and then fixing it. It is about not giving up and continuing to move forward. It is nice when we can work smarter and not harder, but sometime we just need to dig in and work harder. And that is ok. In fact, usually that is much better than having all the talent in the world and not working that hard. So, if you aren’t the best developer in the world, or the best artist, writer or whatever … don’t worry – just work. Diligence pays off – every time.

He also said,

Do less, better. … Make an awesome broom closet, not a mediocre city.

Here, he was discussing creating portfolio work to present to companies to try and get a job. If you want a job in a game studio, chances are you will be working on some part of an engine, or creating some tool for the game developers to use, or you will be tasked with making the flooring of the buildings. These are all very limited in scope and require a great deal of domain knowledge. These types of game companies want someone who can spend time getting something done at a fantastic level. He also mentioned, that in regards to your portfolio, you are judged on your worst piece, not your best. So if there is one in question, it is best to leave it off. Only show your absolute best work.

I met up with Dave Voyles and David Crook, both Microsoft employees, and was able to enjoy a meal with them. There was great conversations and plenty of good food. I then headed back to put the finishing touches on my presentation. It felt a little awkward talking about Unity 3D in Epic’s backyard. I love both engines and am so jealous that these tools weren’t available 25+ years ago when I was getting started.Dinner with Dave Voyles (photographer) and David Crook

The keynote was presented by Mike Laidlaw, the Dragon Age Creative Director at Bioware. His talk was fantastic. I enjoy the Dragon Age series, but unfortunately, I hadn’t had the opportunity to play Inquisition yet. I’ve been working on getting my game development site off the ground and between that and consultant work, I’ve had very little game playing time. Still, it was great to hear him talk about the game.

I dropped in on David Voyle’s talk on WebGL. Unity is working on getting this to work, but there are still some missing pieces in many of the browsers. WebGL is still a great way to get your website to be able to utilize your GPU. If you haven’t taken any time to look at this great technology, spend some time to get to know it.

I had lunch with David Voyles and David Isbitski, formerly with Microsoft, currently with Amazon. After lunch, I was able to hear @thedavedev talk about in app purchases and a lot of support data that discussed best practices for monetizing apps.

I also attended a talk from David Crook where he gave an overview of Azure for game developers. I personally think Azure and Game Development go together like peanut butter and jelly.

I wrapped up the sessions I went to by attending a session on “Idle Games”. I had never even heard of the term. These are games that basically play themselves or require you to click to progress. It was fascinating hearing Anthony Pecorella, from Kongregate, talk about this new genre of games. He talked about games like AdVenture Capitalist 2014, Cookie Clicker, A Dark Room, Candy Box, Tap Titans, Bitcoin Billionaire, DripStat, and Swarm Simulator.

Overall, it was a great conference and I had a good time. This was the second time I’ve spoken at the East Coast Game Conference and I hope to go back next year.

Chad Carter Leave a comment

Valentines Day Game I Created for My Sweetie

I have recently switched from being a full-time employee from a company for the last decade and a half to running my own consultancy services company. It has been great so far. I’ve been able to focus on some of my passions like creating video games and creating content for folks to consume around video game creation.

But running your own business also comes with some challenges. Having a steady paycheck every two weeks for the last 20 years is comforting. Not knowing exactly where the next project will come from and how the next month’s bills will be paid takes a little bit of a mind shift. Due to this mind shift, I decided to make my wife a game instead of buying her a card. It was sort of a geeky thing to do, but my wife has come to expect the geeky ways I express myself.  (When we were in college, I’d send 3.5 floppy disks to her through the college mail system for her to run different applications I had made. These included instructions like, “on the DOS prompt enter iloveyou.exe”. Yes, she can’t say she didn’t know what she was getting into!)

The Valentines Day Game

Anyway, even though I haven’t changed my cheesy ways all that much in 20 years, the technology has. Unity 3D makes it really simple to get something going. I spent about 2 hours getting the Valentines Day game to work as I wanted to.

The game is simplistic and randomly puts candy inside of the 3 heart boxes. It plays one of 3 random songs when it starts and tapping on the flowers makes it switch songs. If you find the candy on the first try, you get 3 points. If you find it on the second try, you get 2 points. If you didn’t find it until the last box, you get no points and you get a strike. If you get three strikes the game is over. It also keeps track of the high score and updates the screen (and storage) if a high score is achieved during the gameplay.

The game won’t win any awards to be sure, but it was fun to do over the course of a couple of hours this past weekend.

If you haven’t tried out Unity yet, I’d highly suggest you give it a try. It is really easy to get into and after a little bit of a learning curve, you can be creating awesome games – even a Valentines Day game like this one.

The game in its current form is using a font that is only licensed for personal use and I’m using songs that I have rights to listen to, but not to redistribute.  So I’m not releasing the game’s source in it’s current state.

That being said, if getting your hands on this Valentines Day game is something that interests you, please let me know in the comments below. If I get 20 comments asking for the files, I’ll spend some time to rework the game with assets I can actually distribute and make it available to download. So if you want to see it, let me know (and let others know too so they can comment as well.)

Chad Carter 3 Comments