A Creator’s Impressions – Microsoft Surface Pro (4 years later) and Oculus Go (2 weeks later)

I’m making progress on my video game, I swear! Anyway, it’s been almost 4 years since I first purchased my beloved Surface Pro 3 tablet (my initial review can be seen in this blog article), and after the screen finally cracked, I found myself upgrading to the new Surface Pro (2017) model around March 2018. I also just purchased and have been testing the new Oculus Go, a standalone device from Oculus and Facebook that doesn’t require a high-end phone, computers, or cables to allow a user to experience virtual reality. I have thoughts on my experience using the Surface tablet for four years, thoughts on the new version of the tablet, and thoughts on the new VR headset.

I got some buggy new toys…

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How My New Year’s Resolution Is Helping My Indie Game Development

For all of 2017, and even part of 2016, I’ve had a serious problem focusing on making games. Most of my time was spent making a living like a proper adult, but that was no excuse. I think this can be attributed to just generally poor time-management on my part: instead of spending every waking available moment I could on my games, I found myself exhausted at the end of each day, defaulting to TV or Internet, or else going straight to bed.

So I made a serious resolution for the New Year’s of 2018: to better organize my time and work more on my games. It’s February now, and so far, it’s working.

Keeping a timesheet and sticking to it can be a great motivator.

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Augmented Reality is Becoming Slowly Relevant

AR (Augmented Reality) has been experimented with for almost a decade. I recall in 2013 working over the summer at a app-development company that was playing with the idea of using smartphone cameras to overlay an animated character overtop a QR-code trading card. We’ve seen games like “Pokémon Go” in 2016 giving us cute little monsters seemingly in the same space as us. The applications have been simple so far, relying on simple overlay of CGI, but I suspect we will see greater innovation and growth in this field in the next 3-5 years. This is because both Apple and Google are starting to heavily promote the applications.

Apple and Google used AR to excite audiences for their new devices in Fall 2017

Apple and Google used AR to excite audiences for their new devices in Fall 2017

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