Bored of Spore already, so let's blog...

I picked up Spore on release and have put about six hours into it... It's alright, but somehow not what I was expecting. Particularly it lost me when I entered the Tribal stage of development. The instructions asked me to go impress or destroy a rival village, then left me alone to figure out what that meant. It turns out you are now spending a ton of time harvesting and occasionally fighting off marauders. I need to get past this stage asap before I lose interest and move on to another game.

On the work front, I've been spending most of my time lately trying to tie up the odd bugs here and there on projects... It's a mostly ho-hum task of whack-a-mole that often seems to crop up near the end of a project. This usually comes about as more users come around to test things out and start doing stuff you were not expecting during the design phase. Fortunately though, this time around has been pretty benign.

Also I have been preparing (or trying to prepare) for AGDC. Compared to JavaOne, I guess this should be cake as I'm simply standing up for a bit to pimp something I've worked on for several years. If you're already well familiar with jMonkeyEngine you can go ahead and whip out your DS while I talk for 15 minutes or so. :) If you have not seen the jMonkeyEngine, or it has been a long time, here's a little shot from my last job showing what you can accomplish with it. (A former manager thought this should be okay to post... hopefully.) Sadly, the project was canceled for reasons out of the Java programmers' hands. :-/



On a more enjoyable note than bugs, cancellations and prepping for speaking engagements, I had a chance to hang out with Rikard ("MrCoder") today and talk about some fun coding ideas we've been kicking around for quite a while now. There were some very cool things discussed and I'm looking forward to seeing something new get started soon. :) Hopefully more can be said about what that "new" thing might be in the next couple months.