Achievements
Work
We got acquired in July and unfortunately most of the development team was made redundant, since we stopped the development of our main products. But I was fortunate to stay and I wrote a plugin for a draping simulation program. Details here: EcoShot beta. We'll see in the new year how the product evolves, but I learned many things (see Power Up section). I've been using at work the WebGL Model Viewer I open-sourced in 2014 (the first version is in webGL-tests), so I've added some interesting functionality to it. The most recent one is just from the 31st of December 😃, a shader to visualize the intersecting volumes of a mesh: Self intersections (pull-request). You can test the Model Viewer here: WebGL Model Viewer.Technical blog articles
I haven't written much this year, but I think wrote some interesting stuff:- An article about inverse affine transforms (part of VidEngine development)
- Spherical Harmonics lighting from ARKit environment probes, where I also talk about the stencil buffer (part of VidEngine development)
- Some interesting discoveries about the English dictionary (part of Syllabits development)
- Introduction to Skinning and 3D Animation (Metail Tech), for some of the things I'm doing at work.
Indie development
I added some AR functionality to VidEngine, and I was creating an AR app with it, but unfortunately I didn't finish it. At some point in summer, I paused its development to start creating a new game, Syllabits Syllabits is an English word puzzle game. It's basically the same as the Spanish word puzzle game Silabitas, which I released in 2016. I spent some time to update the art and I tried to improve the tutorials. I was moderately successful because the game made it to the "New games we love" list in Apple App Store in the UK. It was 4th in the list, and approximately 6 million people saw the banner. The conversion wasn't great, and only about 200 people downloaded it. However, that's quite an achievement for me, since I earned more with that game than in the 6 years I've been in the App Store combined. Apart from Syllabits, I released some small updates to other of my games and apps:- May and Yam Against Pollution. No new contents, but it was a big update, where I finally added support for iPhone X and iPhone 11 screens, and I resurrected the Apple TV build, which was broken.
- Silabitas, just bug fixes;
- Sil·labetes, just bug fixes.
Power up
Between work and my indie development, I practiced mostly 4 programming languages,- Python. I've never been very fond of Python, but it was the quickest and most maintainable way to create the plugin I'm working on at work. So from almost 0 Python I've gone to use it daily.
- Swift. I keep using it for my indie projects. I've been updating my projects to the latest Swift, so I think I'm up to date.
- C++. C++ is still a big part of our core technology at work, so I keep using it. I did some interesting progress with cmake and got some of our stuff even working on macOS.
- Javascript. Mainly for the WebGL Model Viewer, and some node.js scripts.
Power down
Time is limited, so you can't focus on everything... Here are some things I haven't practiced much (or at all... 😅):- Piano
- Drawing. I stopped taking part of #pixel_dailies. However, I had to draw some art for Syllabits, and I also drew my regular Nenga to greet the new year: 2020年明けましておめでとう！
- C#. Well, we don't have to maintain any C# code at work at the moment, so I basically stopped using it.
Fun
Unfortunately, I couldn't visit Japan this year. But I managed to do many short trips around Europe instead:- Barcelona. I visited my family in January, April, June, September, and December 😍
- Iceland. I had never been to Iceland before. All my connection to Iceland was through Björk 🙈 But we visited it twice this year! In January and September. We wanted to see the aurora, the northern lights, but failed in January. We managed to see them quite subtly in September, but it's better than nothing. Here's a humorous video of the January trip to Iceland: Iceland "documentary"
- Paris. We went in June and attended the Paris Air Show
- Berlin. We attended the gay pride 🏳️🌈 in July.
- Budapest. We visited some friends in August.
- Basque Country. We visited San Sebastian and Bilbao in September.
- Lugano. I went there for the 3dbody.tech only, so we couldn't do any sightseeing, but at least we did a short walk around the lake.
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