Fixing "Whitespace is not allowed at this location" Bugs With PHP

An Update On Things

Its been a while since I've blogged about anything last. I left for Winnipeg last Saturday and got back home Wednesday night. We went for a family event that a long time friend of my dads was holding. Winnipeg was great, I was able to take a few sights and meet some fantastic people in the process.

Project Galaxy seems to be back on, I sent a proposal to a game publisher asking if they would be interested Thursday night. We haven't heard back from them yet but are still holding out hope for good news.

Another Shelved Project?

Unfortunately, it seems the project that was previously alluded to may not be coming together at all.

I've been told I have big ambitions and am a creative person, whether any of that is true, I don't know. The idea started years ago yet wasn't developed into what we had in mind until late June of this year. We were supposed to get a quick demo up in about a weeks time to show to potentially interested parties. We didn't meet that date. Even now, the project is probably about 70% finished, we have quite a few things to do before we can show it to anyone. Charlie and I have other programming projects we maintain, even some that we were collaborating on so we didn't want to spend too much time on a tech demo if there was no guarantee that it could go anywhere since we would only lose time and resources.

Programming: What I've Been Doing Lately

Charlie Page of Insane Visions and I have been working on an upcoming PHP project codenamed "Project Galaxy". We can't go into specifics at this moment but it will hopefully be pitched to game publishers interested in the idea. On a personal level the project combines everything I've learned in the gaming industry and in University when it comes to business. As a team, Charlie and I were able to bring our coding experiences to the table to build a good framework from the ground up.

I'm not a great programmer by any means, I'm more of a concepts person, despite this I was still able to make good progress on a personal level with the project. Seeing Galaxy get to this stage (about 75-80% finished) was not easy by any means. To a certain extent I was burnt out with programming, Charlie became flooded with work. Scheduling issues were present, finding people who could work for cheap was also tough. Other issues were really with the code itself, in the beginning it was a nightmare, if something broke all work on the project had to be stopped until it could be fixed. What was supposed to finish in a week began to drag on.

My First Interview: A Reflection

Recently, I had the opportunity to conduct my first interview with an industry personality, I've been in the industry for nearly four years now. The interview in question was with Eric Caen, president of Interplay Entertainment about their DSiWare title Legendary Wars: T-Rex Rumble. The interview itself was a fantastic experience, I had a lot of fun doing it, in hindsight I may have asked some ridiculous questions or done something that was ridiculous which is probably the only negative I can draw from the experience.

There were questions I wanted to ask about the company itself but didn't, I'm fascinated with businesses in Interplay's position and their goal to return to the glory days. I'm also into the finance aspect of the gaming industry so its another reason why I'm following the company. While I have few gameplay/business ideas, from personal experience I believe the company going forward should work on the community side of things.