2012-09-18

Raspberry Pi

Got a Raspberry Pi (sponsored by Nokia through the QtonPi project, thanks!). Was pretty easy to get running. For starters I ported my 4kb demo “San Angeles Observation” to run on it. I used the VBO-enhanced code from Chromium source tree, so it runs much better than the original OpenGL ES port. :)

Page about the original 4k demo: http://iki.fi/jetro/visuals/4k-intros/san-angeles-observation/

Here’s direct download link to runnable binary: Download .tar.gz – Tested to be runnable with the Raspbian wheezy distribution (2012-08-16 build).

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2012-08-07

Stuff for Assembly 2012

Here’s list of some stuff from Assembly 2012 summer, the annual computer festival!

Together with stRana we made a little demo for the Assembly 2012 event’s demo competition. Like last year’s Grandma demo, this is also bit of an experiment, this time with real-time rendering of drawn line art/sketch data. Music is created by our friend Crud, embedding also bit of beat-boxing sounds by Ion. You can read a bit more about the demo in this page. Click to download (Windows), or watch the YouTube video.

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2012-07-24

K2 and 1KB

I’m taking part in the game development competition of Assembly 2012 event. I sent a little prototype game named “K2“. Click here for the game web page.

This year the event is also having “1KB intro” competition. I’m a big fan of little 4KB demo things, having made a few myself as well. Those can have surprisingly lot of stuff in them. But doing something interesting in just one kilobyte is a hard challenge. For example, an executable which simply opens a window and does nothing else, and works on Windows 7, will take maybe about half of the 1 KB (when compressed with Crinkler, de facto compressor for small executables nowadays). Anyway, I have already made a little try for a production in that size category, which you will be able to see in two weeks when the event takes place.

2012-07-07

Moving Forward

This spring was different time for me. For years my B.Sc. degree has been missing just a few tiny bits. For example, I needed just a few course credits to fill up a second minor subject, which is “Software Business” offered in collaboration by local universities. This spring I took a mini course and wrote one report about things I found interesting in last GDC, which were enough to get the few missing points. Now, after 15 years, I unlocked the B.Sc. achievement.

I don’t actually think there will be much difference from having a degree or not. It has just been sort of nagging thing because it was just almost there, so maybe it was sort of mentally easier to get done with that than keep it lingering forever. So I don’t have any current plans to continue towards M.Sc., even if I’m actually already halfway there (basically only thesis missing and a few other bits).

But that’s not all of things making this spring different for me. I decided it was time for me to leave Secret Exit, the company I co-founded over 5 years ago. I’m planning to continue as an “indie developer”, but I don’t really have anything announce-worthy to say about that yet.

I have actually already mentioned about these things in Twitter and Google+ already a while ago, so this post is sort of old news, but I figured I could write an update here as well.