This post was supposed to come out at the beginning of November. However, I’m not very used to uploading consistently to any platform with a post button, so that is something I must work on.

What’s happening this November?#

This November, I’m continuously updating R.C.M.M. to what I’d consider an acceptable state to leave it in for a short while. Simply put, here’s the rest of the content I’m working to add/improve upon:

I’m also continuing my job hunt, as I am going on 5-6 months of job searching since June.

I can’t lie, some days it gets difficult to even press on. You do work towards certifications, build projects, try to tidy up your resume before sending it out into the rat race of other applicants, all while [the US] economy is basically about to hit or is already in a recession. There’s pressure everywhere. But more than not, there’s self-made pressure as well.

I have a lot of plans and ideas that I wish to share with the world, but I need a job for stability and growth potential. Right now, only one company has bit my line, and then I wasn’t prepared for the competitiveness of the other applicants to swoop up the positions last minute. It gets demoralizing, honestly. The fact that, in order to have outreach and have a stable start to your life, you need something that feels genuinely unobtainable unless the whims of fate smile upon you. Fate has not been kind, unfortunately.

When it comes to my projects, I’m fiercely passionate. If you put something in front of me and say “I need you to architect, develop, and deploy a solution for this”, I will get after it and relish in the whole process. It’s how I had to build most of my game development career, where the projects I’ve contributed to needed someone to design and polish new mechanics and new ideas. The whole process of design to deployment is an art and a science, where you must know your context in order to create something that fits and you must know the heart of the player to create something that will give them long-lasting memories that they won’t forget. You create to engage, to delight, to improve upon life in such a way where the impact becomes timeless. That is why software development is special to me. Even if I’m not explicitly developing games for an audience, I still wish to improve upon people’s lives with software that connects to people in a real way.

ThirdSpace was my attempt at this. While it has been a few months off of working on the project due to my small team and I being busy with other endeavors, it is still a project I wish to see to completion. I guess this is as good of a time as ever to give the story of ThirdSpace.

ThirdSpace: putting the humanity back in social media#

One day, I was watching videos about the old 2000s era internet. Being someone born in 2003, I got to experience the midpoint to end of this era (I was using the internet right about when YouTube started, for reference). Back then, things were much more scrappy. Not just because the technology wasn’t as advanced as it is now, but because the people behind it weren’t concerned with being the most professional or proper. They wanted to be themselves. The farther along we’ve come in making technology, the more we’ve lost what parts of ourselves went into it. There’s just too much of a corporate feel now when it comes to your modern social media platforms. Corporations were built on efficiency first, not humanism. They way they see it, the minute you focus on humans is the minute you add chaos to the order of things.

Not being the most avid social media user, the issues that this mindset posed was lost on me until I heard a lot of my friends complaining about not having a real platform for themselves and their art/works. Everyone is categorically the same in terms of setup, bar their picture and banner at most. This makes it all too easy for someone to lose track of what sets them apart from others, which with the original goal of social media being “express yourself” and the opposite being what’s true today just ruining the precedent.

Thus, the concept of ThirdSpace spawned out of a yearning for expression, art, and being who you really wanted to be.

At first, a few ideas were thrown around for the main concept of the app. One idea was connecting the digital world to real life by mapping out physical locations to sites on ThirdSpace itself, allowing users to chat with people who were physically at that location or digitally connected to that location. Privacy concerns did exist, so that one was thrown out.

The website idea came around while working on creating a new website for Sonic Riders Tournament Edition, where we needed full flexibility to create our own layout, but the simplicity of creation and publishing using Wix was desirable as well. The problems with Wix were payments to host the site, creation being slow and laggy, and page management being somewhat clunky overall. By taking the good parts of the site (the GUI editor) and combining it with the flexibility of something like MySpace had, then we could create a site that made hosting yourself as easy as possible with all the extra bits and bobs people could think of. Thus, our main idea was born.

Even after all of this, there’s still more work to do in setting up the whole system from top to bottom. As I am learning to become more proficient on frontend, the backend constantly changes due to database schema being updated over time. This is why we do UML diagrams after all. I’ll be getting back to this project soon.

Making Content?#

I have always wanted to create content and post it online. The few times I’ve made a YouTube video, or made a guide, or anything of the sort, it was the most enjoyable payoff at the end seeing people interact with it. While I am currently jobless like most of my other recently graduated peers, it might behoove me to create more content on what I know. My interests are somewhat niche after all, and from what I have gathered from peers, they would also be interested in, well, my interests.

Namely, the Sonic Riders series and Ollie King has a lot of information that I’ve gathered from reverse engineering and researching them over the years, and not a lot of people cover the technical side in-depth. That’s where I would come in, demonstrating the underlying systems that keep those games running.

Riders in particular is an area that is barely covered on the technical side while having so much research done for it (Ollie King has some research, but not enough right now to explain the gameplay systems for it). Most of the other Riders devs that have existed to create mods like TE and DX are no longer active, unlike me, who is still kicking after 3-4 years and making new tools like R.C.M.M. to allow others to interface with the game on a deeper level.

One thing I’d really want to talk about is the actual code itself. Although somewhat messy in it’s vanilla version, now that a decompilation exists, we can detail how almost everything in the game works. What’s more is that I’ve been recompiling parts of the game to C/C++ code over the years while working on TE, making it easier for others to comprehend and write supporting code. Many gameplay systems such as the state system, gear mechanics, 3D movement, and other mechanics have so much potential for videos, yet I’ve never fully committed to making any. There are a lot of players who

I’m not the best at editing by far, but I love writing scripts (just as I’m doing right now writing this). It’s not something I share with others often, but ever since I’ve set up this website, it gives me a space to express myself more without being restrained in character count or formatting. I’ll be working with others in order to try and make some videos soon, no date on those since I’d have to stick to a schedule first.

Going into December#

I’ll be starting up some old projects again in December (namely ThirdSpace). It’s about time I start making software for all, and I’ll be posting my ko-fi link soon for tips. Before, I was able to get on just fine without requesting much from my audience. But as the economy looks shaky, the option will now be present. No tiers, no subscriptions, just if you like what I make, send a ko-fi (I think that’s how they say it).

I wish to start making games again in January, but I’ll see how December goes first. Already have some design documents made, might revisit an old idea.

Thanks for reading November’s update! Stay tuned for beginning of December if I don’t get wrapped up in projects again.