Okay, I'm now allowed to say something about what's been happening at I-Imagine. We were
informed at the end of November that there was the possibility of company wide retrenchments
on the 31st of December. So, the entire development staff has just been laid off after working
hard on Final Armada. The good news, however is that Final Armada has some very good prospects
of being published and that I-Imagine may yet (and hopefully!) survive.
The whole retrenchment thing really is pretty sad. Publishers don't take South African developers
very seriously and I-Imagine is certainly the victim of a poor industry publishing model. Many of
the issues we have faced are not unique to I-Imagine - they are certainly world wide issues and
have been the cause for much debate in the industry over the last several months.
Greg Costikyan has been quite vocal on many
of these points and there have been some interesting articles on Gamasutraregarding the industry "crisis" both in terms of game financing and distribution as well as
creativity in the industry.
Even though we have released no games over the last 3 years that I have worked at I-Imagine, we
developed several game prototype/demos that were regretably closed to public view. Fortunately, I-Imagine
has been very generous and allowed us to use screenshots of projects that we have worked on as part of our
portfolio. So, if you're interested, go check out some screenshots of the demos that I worked on here:
I'll really miss working with all of the guys at I-Imagine. I really learned a lot about game
development every single day and have learned more about myself. It really is a growing experience
working in the games industry.I-Imagine was the only registered console developer in Africa - which pretty much
makes me the most expert PS2 programmer on the whole African continent, how many people can say
that? ;)
In other news, having completed the first round of telephone interviews, I'm being flown over to California on 10th January
for a round of on-site interviews with engineers at NVIDIA. I'll be
interviewing for a position in their DirectX drivers team based in Santa Clara, California. I'm pretty
nervous about interviewing with the world's most prolific graphics chip company but I am confident
that I have the skills and passion that they need ;)
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