Good things come in threes...

You know, it's amazing how life can move so fast sometimes. A lot of big things have happened to me in the past few weeks. To begin with, I've decided to pursue opportunities outside Firaxis. I really enjoyed working with everyone there (Sid Meier especially) on such an amazing franchise as the Civilization series but after careful consideration I decided it was time to move on. I learned a lot and am incredibly proud of my contributions and wish only the best for everyone there.

As for myself, I'll be headed to a young but ambitious company named Destineer Studios based in Raleigh, North Carolina to work on their console technology for a currently unannounced title. I'm fond of the area (my parents have lived there for years) and was incredibly impressed by everyone I met there during my interview. After a month of interviewing and multiple offers around the country, I decided to take a chance and go with a company I feel will really make a difference. The people at Destineer (and when I talk about I company, I really do refer to the people - I mean seriously, what else gives a company it's strength), are incredibly talented, enthusiastic, and friendly and I'm very glad to be joining the team. I'm sure to have many more great things to say about the new job and the move in the coming months.

So in addition to changing jobs and selling my house (in an amazing 1 week!), I just got engaged! We're trying to fit the wedding in within the next few months but we're not sure yet if that's going to be possible. We figure we can leverage the fact that we're doing all the most stressful things at once to reduce the possible stress later on, haha. Hopefully it'll all work out.

As I hinted at last time, I've been working on the iPhone on some pretty neat stuff. One of the things I finished was a port of Hexen for the iPhone. I plan on putting the source code online as soon as I find some time. It's a pretty straight forward port and runs really well. Thanks to my friend Rich Whitehouse for his help (the port is based on the work he had done for his Nintendo DS port of Hexen). In the end it was really fun and I learned a lot. It's quite surprising what the iPhone can do and I'm looking forward to doing some more work on it.

In addition to my iPhone projects I'm thinking of writing an article on effective interviewing techniques from the perspective of an interviewee. As I mentioned before, I've been through quite a number of interviews in the past month (something like 8-10), both over-phone and on-site. From this experience I've learned a lot about what an interviewer should and shouldn't do to both represent the company well and impress the applicant. While I've seen a lot of articles on how to interview as an applicant, it's just amazing how many mistakes are made by the companies interviewing and I think there's some good things to be said about improving the process. I have some idea's on what mistakes a company should avoid and some questions that should and shouldn't be asked. Hopefully I'll have more on this soon...

Lastly, here's some amazing stuff coming from ATI: WOW. The only thing is, 100+ MB a frame!? Hmm, maybe not so practical yet. Still, amazing that we're almost at the age of photorealistic gaming!

Take care everyone!