Gaming for a living

One thing I haven't mentioned yet on this blog is the fact that I took a new job in 2006. I had previously worked at Metrowerks since graduating college, but eventually our focuses no longer matched up after the Macintosh product was end-of-lifed. The majority of Mac-related jobs are in California and Seattle, but I was willing to hold out for a local job. I was thrilled to finally see an opportunity arise to get back on Macs and help program computer games in Austin with Aspyr Media. Several people have gotten jealous when I tell them that I play games for a living. To be more specific, I'm actually porting games to the Mac. In my case, that means another game studio has written a game for the Microsoft Windows OS, and Aspyr takes their source code and manipulates the game to run under Apple's Mac OS. It has been quite an experience so far for me getting to learn more about graphics and sound. As an added bonus, it is definitely much easier to explain to non-geeks than my old job was (working on software development tools with IDEs, compilers, debuggers, and such).

Anyway, I thought it would be a neat idea to post which games I've worked on so far. I've actually done work on a few more projects, but no official company announcements have been made about them yet.

July 2006 -- I started off helping with Sid Meier's Civilization IV. My colleague Brad Oliver has blogged about some of its difficult development process. It was all pretty new to me, but one thing I quickly became aware of is that the game loading music gets old very quickly.


September 2006 -- Aspyr had already released a PowerPC version of RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 last year but it was sluggish when running on the new Macs with Intel chips. I worked on creating the Universal Binary patch for this game so it would run natively on those machines.