I'm Going on an Adventure

Here it is! First blog post here on the newly minted Phantom Magazine website. I thought I’d use this opportunity to give you a little update on my life in the present, and what lies ahead.

I’m ready to start development on Sentenced, my upcoming VR experience that puts you in the role of executioner for an authoritarian government. For the last six years I’ve been deeply entrenched in the Visual Effects industry. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, but balancing a 9-6 work day with a healthy social life doesn’t leave me a lot of time for game dev. However, about one year ago, I had my first experience in Virtual Reality with HTC’s Vive, on a work-in-progress version of Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine, at my current workplace, Industrial Light & Magic.

It was love at first virtual-sight. Since then, I’ve been teaching myself the mysterious and arcane ways of Virtual Reality. I bought myself a Vive. I experimented. I absorbed tutorials like Donald Trump absorbs criticism. My job specialisation in VFX is Digital Modeller, so I already had a pretty good grasp of the art & asset side of development, but my skills in programming were sorely underdeveloped. I downloaded a copy of Unity and the Playmaker visual scripting tool, and got to work filling in the gaps in my knowledge.

Eventually, I arrived at the stage where I felt I was ready to put my skills to the test. Inevitably, I was up against my diabolical nemesis, Time, once again.

I made the difficult decision to drop out of my secure job and take a chance with my new passion. After coming up with detailed work-plan, I decided that two months was the minimum time I’d need to develop Sentenced, while living on my savings from my VFX career. Staying in London wasn’t an option I liked. It’s an extraordinarily expensive city to live in and it’s full of the lovely distractions I call my friends. And why not turn this experience into an Adventure? So I found accommodation and booked flights to Budapest, a city I’ve never visited before.

As I write this, I’m preparing to moving out of my converted warehouse flat due to a fickle Landlord and a stratospheric rent increase, putting me in the role of reluctant couch surfer for the next month of March. I’ll be counting down every impatient second till April, when my flight and VR dev adventure begin.

So that’s it! I’m going to keep posting here regularly, and when I start development proper in April, I’ll be keeping this blog and my twitter updated daily.

Keep it weird.

Sam