Ask HN: What's You Life's Work?

Closest thing I have to a life's work is probably my Proximity game.

* I released the original[1] as a flash game on Newgrounds eighteen years ago and it blew up, played millions of times across a bunch of websites

* Worked on a J2ME version for my mobile phone (it worked but never released it, probably should have)

* Worked on a sequel in Flash, then started learning about XNA and being able to put games on Xbox 360 with it, so I used that to learn C# and submitted to a game dev contest Microsoft hosted (and was a finalist in it. They also invited me to be one of the first demos for their Xbox Live Indie Games service - 1 of 8 - and was briefly shown during their keynote address at GDC that year, and was playable at one of their kiosks there. I happened to be at that GDC and got to watch people trying it live, it was surreal). I was at that GDC because the game got me a game producer job in the video game industry for a small publisher.[2]

* Saw iOS starting to blow up and decided to port my sequel to iOS and learn Objective-C and some OpenGL ES at the same time. Did okay but not amazing, I didn't really know how to market it on there, just kind of got lost amongst other games. It's not up there anymore as eventually it wasn't worth keeping up with the required updates. I plan to support an iOS version again with Proximity 3[3]

* Remember when Kindle had games on it? You could apply to be a developer for that, and I did, and I was accepted. I got pretty far along in development (mostly just working on game options and menus still), but got distracted by college just long enough that Active Content was starting to be on its way out, so it never got released.

* Mostly made a Pico-8 version. Once again core gameplay was done, but got distracted at menus. At some point I want to sit down and finish it finally.

* Ported that Pico-8 version to PlayDate in a couple weekends since they are both Lua. Still waiting to receive my PlayDate so I can test it on the device. The graphics are super basic though, since I don't know how to do 2-color graphics well (white/black and dithering), and I'm worried about releasing it without some help there because I'm already seeing some beautiful puzzle games (comparatively) being released on that system.

* Worked together with a friend to make a physical board game and pieces prototype using a laser cutter. Talked to a couple of publishers but most are too hesitant to release a straight abstract game (just hex tiles with colors and numbers), despite its past popularity. Hoping to release a new version out there and maybe that will help them change their mind. Either that or get some other board games designs of mine released, which may convince them to take a chance on it. One other game design is signed and in the publisher's queue (still a ways back, unfortunately).

* Working on Proximity 3 right now, using Monogame. I originally ported my Xbox 360 version of 2 to Monogame, and was just going to clean up and upgrade and add new features to it, but after a while I started getting really annoyed by resolution issues and having to redo art a bunch since it was all 2D art, so I decided to restart from scratch using 3D. Core gameplay loop is done and I've been spending my spare time working on the surrounding interface and options and redesigning some things so that a Twitch streamer can play it along with their viewers via the chat. Hoping to get that into Steam early access within the next 6 months.

* Have an idea for Proximity 4 already that makes the game a lot deeper. I'll probably switch to Unity at that point, because I want to make it VR-compatible.

* I also need to make a new web version at some point, and I'd love for it to have room codes so people can join from anywhere. I'd also love to store the stats in a database and slowly build up a lichess style database of moves.

I work on other games as well, and that's part of the reason why there was such a gap between Proximity 2 and Proximity 3 (over 10 years at this point), because I took a detour to try my hand at designing a bunch of other board games (also I was in the video game industry for a while with companies that had contracts that may not have looked too fondly on new video game releases by me), but I think it's time for a sequel.

[1]: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/183428

[2]: https://youtu.be/Yqe0hS7AvOE

[3]: https://youtu.be/uy08ohBLGhE

My daughter.

I've been working on a stack-based language, that is highly dynamic, incorporating as much of the theory work around F-expressions as I can. For a number of years. I'm getting close to getting it fully-realised into something that is both performant, and shouldn't feel too odd for most programmers, even if they're unfamiliar with stack languages.

That work? Doesn't matter at all. What matters is how my daughter learns to respect herself, and position herself in this world.

I've been known to be drop everything, when she asks me what a Gruffalo is.

I don't really take credit for that stuff in public, but it's not a secret. Feel free to contact me.

This is something I've knowingly devoted my life. It's an immature idea / realization / dream I had at age 12, which was about 1976. I saw a presentation by Ohio State's 3D computer graphics group, basically showing off the then-new field of 3D computer graphics. I thought in my 12 year old head "some day someone will make realistic versions of ordinary people in animation, and that person is gonna be rich using these to sell stuff to those same people." And since that time I have in one way or another been working towards that goal. I've been a 3D graphics pioneer, game console OS and game dev, VFX technical artist, MBA, the author of a patent on automated actor replacement, and the failed CEO of a startup doing actor replacement for advertising. At this point my emotional state on the entire effort is mixed and complex. I feel "personalized media" is inevitable and on the cusp happening, and without me, despite my working on this at high levels for decades.

My life's work since I was a kid in the 90s was to make a computer game. Then in the mid-2000s I started working with someone I'd met at college to make an ambitious online multiplayer game, but the effort fizzled out. I continued working alone on the parts of it I had written myself.

So I was working on the same game code (eventually just the game's engine; I had lost sight of the original goal) through the 2000s and 2010s. I had an initial period of great productivity (in lines-of-code), but the more I wrote the more work it was fighting bit-rot. As operating systems, graphics technology, and the C++ standard itself changed, I was perpetually playing catch-up to build-breaking changes rather than making new progress.

Over the course of time my git history had gotten convoluted, and I had also split things into a couple of repos. I considered re-merging everything back into one repository, and was debating whether to try to consolidate all the history or start a fresh repo with existing sources. My friends suggested: do neither; don't even start with the old source files. I could always mine my old work for useful code, but I didn't need to pull it all in just because it was there.

I.e. after more than a decade and a half of life's work that had only resulted in treading water trying to keep up with the changing technology I could just... stop.

Now instead of trying to push one codebase forward against the relentless march of entropy, I'm trying to work from a simpler premise: what do I need to build a game jam submission, and back-fill what I need from that goal. Even that goalpost keeps receding before me. (Any given game jam I might target will be over before I get the first pixels on the screen.) I guess I just work at a slower pace than the world moves.

With ambitious projects there's two ways to go about them: forward-chaining or backward-chaining. You can start from the beginning and build up (forward-chaining) then attempt to bend your arc of progress back Earth for eventual release. You're always in danger of discovering you've described a wider arc than you're able to close. Or you can start from what does a released thing look like and backward-chain to putting your original ideas into it.

What I've learned is neither strategy provides any guarantee, but if I'm still having this much trouble with the latter I certainly was never going to be able to close the loop on the former.