Welcome to this, the first entry in my journal! In the weeks to come, I hope to fill this space with random snippets of musings, thoughts, rants and nostalgia directed at all things related to games, and possibly anything else too. If I get the time to actually do some work, maybe I will write something about my projects too!

Slightly more seriously, I am creating this journal for a number of reasons:

• Firstly, it helps to have a single place to store all my ideas, open for other people to critique and offer suggestions. Since there is a lot of random stuff involved in developing games that really does not belong in a forum thread, it will all end up here. Hopefully my project will eventually get good enough that people will be excited by what they see here. I have read about some of the other projects that people are working on in their journals, and I am very impressed by what I see.



• In my previous attempts to write hobby games, the project gets killed when a bout of depression kills of the enthusiasm I previously had for the idea. By keeping a journal, I will help ride out those moments and keep myself on track. It will also help to motivate me to get work done, as if nothing has happened for several weeks I will look pretty foolish when I have nothing to write about.



• Also, in real life I am a pretty shy kind of guy, and have troubles in sharing my ideas with other people since I think people will think they are silly or flawed. This is a big setback in any creative field, such as game development and academia, so to break that I joined up to GameDev.Net. Keeping a journal of my ideas is a continuation of that process.



• Plus, in a slightly paradoxical twist, I hope that keeping a journal will make me less likely to spend all my time checking GameDev.Net. I have been checking the forums for updates several times an hour while procrastinating over writing a recent reasearch paper, and the number of posts I have been making a day is getting a bit riddiculous. By having to put intelligent posts into this journal, I will try to keep the posts in the Lounge down to a minimum.

While there's heaps of stuff I would like to include at the start of my journal, there's too much to put in this first entry. I will stagger the content over the course of a few days. So look out for another update in a day or two!



I suppose I should also start this journal by describing a bit about me. I have always wanted to be a professional game designer ever since I was a boy, working my way through the commercial game industry until I was successful. However, with my brief taste of life as a programmer at a developer having burnt me out both physically and mentally, I realised that I would most likely never be happy building games under the pressures of the big money commercial industry, particularly if their unhealthy work environment practices and the massive amounts of stress were starting to kill me.

I've tried a few other things since then looking for my ideal career. These days I am a Ph.D. student working in robotic vision and heading towards becoming an academic (and much happier). However, now that I've had to get settled in, and my research is coming along nicely, the allure of designing games has got to me again. I have already decided that I will not try again to work my way up the ranks of the commercial game industry, but that is no reason to not treat it as a hobby! Plus there is always the potential to be a solo indie developer...



Tune in next time for an overview of what you can expect in this journal over the course of the next few years!
(Or don't. I mean, it's not like I'm going to force you to read this journal. Come back and check it if you feel like it. Or if you don't have anything better to do, you know. I'll understand.)