Achievements
Work
The beta of our main product, EcoShot, ended successfully and I've been creating updates for it and our avatars. I also created a YouTube channel for it and created a few videos (with iMovie 🤠): Introduction to EcoShot During the summer, we managed to put together a remote internship program and I'm quite happy with what we achieved. It's a pity that we didn't get to meet the interns in person, but it was a great experience. We also joined an EU Horizon 2020 research project, eTryOn, and I've been doing some interesting things for it as well. Because of the pandemic, I've been working remotely since the 2nd of March, but I feel quite fortunate that we can do so and that we still have so much work to do! I've been quite busy...Technical blog articles
I've started syndicating my technical articles to Medium, so I can collect both the articles I publish here and at work. My Medium page: medium.com@endavid. I think I managed to publish a few interesting articles:- What's wrong with that pixel: The backwards journey of light. This is a quite dense summary of how computer graphics are created. It is written with the idea to help people at work troubleshoot problems with images.
- The Stencil buffer and how to use it to visualize volume intersections. I'm quite happy with this one because I think I managed to demystify a bit the stencil buffer, a part of GPUs that many don't want to touch. The article got featured in Medium and I got lots of positive feedback.
- Skeletons & 3D File Formats: Why do developers create their own?. This one was a bit painful to write. It was in the back of my mind for years, and it just touches the surface of the format nightmares I have day to day.
Indie development
I spent 9 months creating another Spanish puzzle game, Sopilabitas (Word Wall ES). I created the concept a few years ago, but I just came back to it in January 2020, and started revising it. The main target user is again my mum, because she seemed to enjoy the first game I created for her: Silabitas. After I saw that my mum spent a lot of time with word search games, I thought of combining Silabitas and word games. But I also thought I needed a time limit, because I found that Silabitas could be boring when the stages took too long to clear. So I came up with the "sunset" timer: when the sun sets (5 minutes), game over. As always, I have only sold a bunch of copies, but my family & friends loved it, and my mum managed to reach the last stage, which it's quite impressive! I also created a Daily Challenge mode in an update, which I think works quite well. The challenges are generated randomly using the date as the random seed. And I created one of those new iOS14 widgets for it. Another technical achievement was to release it for macOS as well, although I cheated a bit because I used Mac Catalyst (the thing to compile iOS apps on Mac). Before doing so, I also released my drawing app Swift Pixels for macOS, so I could test Mac Catalyst and the release process for macOS before I did for this new game. The release this time was a bit painful. I got rejected and it turned out it was all a misunderstanding from Apple. It took me 3 weeks of back and forth with them. I wrote a blog post to summarize it: The infamous Apple Guideline 5.2.3 on audio/video streaming. After the release of the game I took a small break from game dev, but I resumed on November, when I started creating The Therapy RPG for my sister. I planned it so I could finish in 3 months, although it took me slightly more to get it released (my sister had to play the beta in Testflight for her birthday...). Apart from games, I've done a bit of redesign of this site and I like how it's looking now. I wrote a bit of a design article about it, although it's not my field: EnDavid style update.Power up
Between work and my spare time indie development, I keep using these 4 programming languages: Python, Swift, C++, and Javascript. This year I also started doing some programming in Go, for work. I've created a couple of command-line tools in Go to do some basic image processing. I think I keep losing Japanese language skills, but I kept reading some chapters of Uramiya Honpo comic book, and I've watched a couple of anime series, including Demon's Slayer (鬼滅の刃).Power down
Time is limited, so you can't focus on everything... I didn't practice any piano during 2020, but I'm thinking of restarting this year. I'll have to reduce the time I spend on indie game development.Fun
2020 has been mainly not fun... In early March I started coughing so I self-isolated. It turned out to be allergy-related, most probably, but since I couldn't visit the GP it was a hard time of not knowing was going on... I basically stayed home until mid-May, with horrible pain in all my ribs from almost 2 months of cough attacks. Finally, the GP gave me an inhaler (preventer) that seems to have helped. When I stop using it, the cough seems to come back, so I'm now using it again. Hopefully this year I can get some allergy tests done... Anyway, I had planned to visit Japan in late March, but because of the covid-19 pandemic I had to cancel all my travel plans. I did manage to travel to Spain to see my family and to disconnect for a bit on September. It wasn't easy to travel, and there's the quarantine and all that, so I decided to go for one month. Since we are working remotely, it doesn't really matter where I am. Although I took some days off, I was mostly working, but in a different environment, which felt good. I was able to wake up a bit early every day and go to swim to the beach before work. I found some time to play games as well this year. I cleared Death Stranding on January, and I picked up Uncharted 4 in October (after releasing Sopilabitas). After that, I started Final Fantasy XV, but I stopped playing when I got busy with The Therapy RPG. I also bought Speluny 2 on Playstation 4, and I play from time to time, but that game is too hard... What's my soundtrack for 2020? Probably something from Attack On Titan soundtrack. I also listened to a lot of lo-fi channels on Youtube, and still listening to Final Fantasy XV soundtrack quite often... In 2019 I made a couple of playlists in Youtube that I still listen to as well: Focotaku Heisei Best J-Pop, and Focotaku Heisei Best J-Pop Side-B. I had to update some of the links because a couple of videos had been removed. And that's all! Happy new year everyone! Let's hope we can break free from the virus in 2021 ❤️Tweet