Tales From The Frontline – Making the time to work out

Since, I was on vacation for the past 9 days, I must admit, I let my fitness regime slide a bit. Easy to fall off the wagon, but easy to get back on, if you don’t leave it to long.

I also admit that in the past, when things were really busy, which was pretty much all the time, working out got demoted to a pretty low priority. The problem with this thinking is that when you’re running a business, especially a high tech start-up like ours, there won’t ever be any time unless you make it.

So earlier this summer my business partner Mike and I decided that we’d start getting up around 6:30 and meet before work to workout. The first week was a bit of a challenge, but I’ve got two young kids at home, so I was a little easier for me to wake up early than it was for Mike.

I actually really enjoy getting up earlier now because in addition to ensuring I get some exercise in, I also find I have more time to prepare for my day and get organized before business hours start. It’s also strangely quite at this hour, which doesn’t happen to often when you have 2 kids in your house.

We usually workout for about 45 minutes to an hour and we try and switch things up between the weight room and cardio activities like walking and biking.

Being a programmer, I’m working on some pretty “rocket science” type stuff a lot of the time and I definitely feel the extra shot of energy and brainpower a morning workout gives me. There is actually a lot of research showing exercise boots brain power.

Mike is a avid snowboarder, so he’s working on getting in shape for the upcoming ski season. I’m interested a bit more in strength training right now since I get quite a bit of cardio hiking and walking around the North Shore. I also avoid driving whenever possible and try and do things like taking the stairs instead of the elevator whenever possible.

If you’re in the same boat that we were, try waking up a little earlier and starting off your day with your workout, I think you’ll find it makes a huge difference!

Comp 3906 iPhone Application Development at BCIT

I’m really excited to announce that I’ll be teaching a part-time course at BCIT in September called Comp 3906. The course is a hands on, practical guide to programming for the iPhone and is designed for people with previous programming experience who want to start programming for the iPhone.

Unlike other courses, students will program and run their projects on their own iPhone/iPod touch and not just the simulator.

After almost a year of experience developing for the iPhone, building to the device is the only reliable way to really know if your code is going to run properly and seeing how it will perform, sorry, the simulator just doesn’t cut it.

Check out the course blog located at comp3906.wordpress.com or follow our progress on www.twitter.com/comp3906.

For more info on the course check out:

http://www.bcit.ca/study/courses/comp3906

Tales From The Frontline – Force vs Flow

Being a small, self-funded start up is not for the faint of heart. I’ll be taking my first significant vacation in 5 years tomorrow and I thought it would be great to discuss the importance of stepping back sometimes and just letting things flow.

When you’re starting up, you do whatever it takes to move things forward, which often equates to long hours, working in the evening and surrendering your weekends, not to mention your social life. In my younger years, this was no problem, I had all the energy in the world and no other major outside demands on my time.

Getting married and having kids fundamental changed how I view and value my time. Before these fortunate events, time was abundant and free to be utilized, and in retrospect, squandered on whatever I saw fit. My solution to a lot of things was that if 100 percent wasn’t doing it then just give it 150 percent, just try harder.

But what I’ve learned is that simply working more or working harder is not always the right answer for moving things forward.

On the scale of self motivation, I run of the end of the scale and keep on going. I’m a big believer that if you want something to happen, then what are you waiting for, make it happen.

What I’ve learned is the difference between force and flow. Force is about making something happen on your personal time frame, your way and stubbornly forging ahead regardless of what lies in your path. Flow is about coaxing thing along to the best of you ability but allowing things to take a more natural course and time frame and realizing that you just have to let things unfold in there own way sometimes.

I’ve seen first hand how the different approaches work and what I’ve found more often than not is that flow tends to be much more effective and a heck of a lot less stressful on you and those around you.

As I set of in my first vacation in 5 years, I plan on enjoying it ( and boy do I deserve it!). I really think stepping away from things for a bit will help me recharge my batteries and gain a new perspective on things. Sometimes stepping back can allow you to move forward. Sometimes you just gotta go with the flow.

Tales from the Frontline

Ever wondered what it’s like to be an Indie game studio? We’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking over the past few months and have decided that a lot of or readers would really benefit from seeing what life is like on the frontlines. Technical posts are great, but only scratch the surface of what it’s like to produce games for a living. We would like to start sharing some of our experience and knowledge with the community.

In addition to the technical tutorials and postings we’ve been doing, you’ll start to see posting on the life, art of what its like to be a small Indie game company. We’ll be sharing what we know and what we don’t know and we hope you’ll share some of your knowledge and experience with us too.

As we grow, we hope you’ll grow right along with us.

What that said, I’d like to present our first post of “Tales From the Frontline”

Vancouver Unity User Group off and Running.

Mike and I had a great time attending the kick off to the Vancouver Unity User Group tonight down at District 319 tonight. Wow, quite the cool venue, I must say. If you have a big event you’re holding and you need a swanked out theater style setting, with a full access bar, they are definitely worth booking out!

We were really impressed at the turnout, which had to be well in excess of 100 people, which is a fantastic start! I looked like about maybe 1/4 of the people attending we actually using or starting to use Unity with the remainder extremely curious about what Unity was and what it had to offer. We got to finally meet Tom Higgins, which was really great (thanks for the plug on our Unity For Flash Dev’s tutorials Tom). For those of you who don’t know, Tom is Unity’s product evangelist. He is a very approachable guy, who really loves what he does and is always willing to lend a hand when he can.

We’ve been using Unity for over 2 years now and built our first Unity based iPhone game called “Turtle Match” way in back in January. We’ve also done 2 iPhone SDK projects since then, which will really help us kick it to the next level once the next version of Unity iPhone comes out, which will allow us to tap into Objective-c. Both Mike and I are convinced more that ever that Unity is the future of Indie game development.

Just like to thank the sponsors for putting on a great event and say that we look forward to helping grow the Unity 3D community here in Vancouver and beyond.