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To bring in the new year, here's a little rundown of the games, tech, personal, and professional events happening in 2016!

The Games

The Division

Easily the top of my list of most anticipated games this year, poised to fill the void left by Destiny's flagging appeal. Co-operative open-world TPS with high stakes PvP areas? Sign me up...

Squadron 42

If the timelines are met, then this year will see the single-player incarnation of Chris Roberts' much-hyped and much-funded return to the space combat genre. Personally I'm pessimistic about the release date, but welcome any progress towards getting my mitts on the Constellation I backed the project with way back when.

Destiny

A game I've hardly touched for the last few weeks, but the inevitable release of new co-op content for Bungie's console FPS will no doubt get me back in Guardian mode.

Homeworld : Deserts Of Kharak

The teaser was released just before Christmas, although revealing little about the game apart from the fact it's a ground-based RTS prequel to the Homeworld games, with an uncanny resemblance to Ground Control. I'll be waiting to see more info on this one in January.

No Man's Sky

No doubt delayed to be a launch title for Sony's Morpheus VR platform, this has been on my radar since it's reveal. An beautiful, universe-sized exploration game that I can play from the comfort of the sofa, this is on my must-buy list.

The Profession

C++

There's no way around it, this is the year I'm going to be able to call myself a C++ programmer. Currently flitting between Java, Actionscript, C++ and Javascript several times a day is making my head spin a little, but at least it keeps the brain ticking over. I'll be putting out regular articles on my C++ work here, starting with some tidying up of the Boids code (and making it UE Blueprint-friendly), and followed up the creation of a simple engine featuring a core Entity Component System.

Website/Streaming

In addition to the programming articles, I'm going to make a concerted effort to stream more. I've enjoyed the few times I've streamed while programming, it seems to focus the mind rather than distract as I had feared beforehand, and it's good to have people interested to chat to and help out.

You can find my Twitch channel here.

The Personal

German

Nearly two years in Germany now, and my Deutsch is still only at about A2 level, this needs to change, and will be this year. I've already cut out most English language TV at home and will be arranging another course to get my spoken skills up to scratch.

That's about it! I'm going to be producing a minimum of an article a week, preferably more, though I can't guarantee they're all going to be meaty technical articles. 

 

Category: Site

As we're coming up to 2016 and I've got all the various changes done on the domain and site, I thought I'd finish off the year as I mean to go into the next with an article, and what better than my review of gaming in 2015.

The Games

Well, there's no way around it, for me 2015 was dominated by Destiny. Obviously it launched in 2014 but I have been playing it almost exclusively throughout the year until December. What's kept me interested? Well it is first and foremost a very polished FPS, the core gameplay is terrific, the variety of weapons, gear and enemies is superb. The music, artwork, voice acting just add to what is a beautiful game to behold, I've never been so taken in by a game world...but all this aside, what has really kept me engaged is the community. I've met a great bunch of people both through work and online and spent the majority of my game time in parties on voice comms. The predominantly co-operative nature of the game engenders a great sense of camaraderie, even when the game deals you a crap hand, it's all taken in good spirits and everyone has a good laugh about it.

But alas, I have sunk a huge amount of time into the game, and after beating the last of the King's Fall challenge modes in December, I feel like I'm finally done with the game. The Taken King DLC was excellent, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing through it, but now, I'm out. There are too many other games to play, and too many things I need to be spending my time on (like this website!). 

Other games I've dabbled in this year include Elite: Dangerous, which was a phenomenal experience on the Oculus Rift, but the emptiness of the universe and the huge amount of time required to get the most out of the game has meant I have barely touched it since launch. I backed the game well before launch and I have a lifetime pass, so I will be keeping an eye on future updates, particularly the atmospheric planetary landings which should turn a game with a lot of potential into something truly engrossing.

Star Wars Battlefront got some playtime in the run up to Christmas, after sinking so many hours chasing carrots in Destiny it felt great to have a game you can just drop into for 15 minutes and have a bit of quick simple fun. Glorious to look at and listen to, and in my view, mercifully shallow. I had a little dabble in Homeworld Remastered for old time's sake, and popped in to see how Star Citizen is going occasionally, but apart from that, that's about all my gaming this year.

Making The Games

A big year for engines, with Unity and UnrealEngine really duking it out for their slice of the market. Having spent time in both, it's hard to see past UnrealEngine for the hobbyist or indie, free access, a quality IDE, great Visual Studio integration, the language of pros (C++), and most of all, complete source code access. It's really a tremendous time to get into making games, compared to back in 2003 when I was at university and there were precious few engines around and you pretty much had to roll your own, to be able to get a AAA engine like Unreal for nothing and start making things on day 1 is invaluable. 

I'll admit I've given Unity very little time this year, back before I joined Blue Byte and I was dabbling in mobile games, even when I wasn't doing anything terribly complicated I was running into bugs, and with no source code to look at you're stuck with hacky workarounds. At least it plays nice with Visual Studio now, and for mobile games it probably trumps UnrealEngine which is a bit more heavyweight.

The Gaming Community

After all the noise late last year things settled down and we've really started see more equal representation of races and genders in games become the norm, rather than the subject of headlines and countless, foaming-at-the-mouth comment section outpourings of bile. Long may it continue.

This is already a bit late, so I'm going to end it here, and start the new year with an article on what I'm looking forward to in 2016.

Frohes Neues!

Category: Site

As you will know if you are seeing this, my site has moved! The original domain 'appzeit.com' was something I chose back when I quit the enterprise software industry and wanted a mobile app development related name. These days this website is really just my personal page for various game development stuff, so I've moved to a more generic domain that will be home to all my STUFF.

Of course, I will have to make a new logo and change some labels, but the move seems to have been pretty painless so far, no broken links as far as I can tell :)

Category: Site

Still working on refactoring the boids code a little and testing the extensibility by implementing some 'predator' boid types. Here's a little preview until I get the article written. You can of course check out the latest code on Github in the meantime.

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