Hello Internet. This is one of these rare and festive moments.

A new, admittedly rather short, blog post is happening. What is the occasion? There would have been some occasions for blog posts in the last couple of months. Be it my current NodeJS Dev Job at Microtroncis, a company pushing the borders of technology around the hyped term "Internet of Things" and making it accessible for the general (dev) public. Or it could be about finishing my master programme which led to a thesis about "CORE ASPECTS OF EFFICIENT CROSS PLATFORM MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT - researched based upon a hybrid example application". Okok, pretty much a jawbreaker, but i am very proud. Or the fact that I again started caring more about my guitar, putting more time into old loved hobbies like gaming and sometimes streaming these games to TWITCH. More for my self than for anybody else, but why not. For 2021, I have planned to rework the Jelly prototype, maybe with some help from good ol Sebastian. And finally, this blog would need a redesign as well. It is not a very good thing that a Frontend Evangelist like myself uses a boring old Joomla Blog for himself because he was too lazy to work something better. But not without pride let me point out that this Joomla Blog gets a google page speed scoring of 97/100. Wich is insanely good for a php cms like joomla and a little secret what miracle work I did to make this happen.

Michael, stop babbeling, nobody cares. What is the reason for this spontaneous blog post? Yeaaah, I get asked on a regular basis, since I work at Microtronics "What is it you are doing?" or "How can i imagine the IoT?".

Webdevelopment is great. Webdevelopment is tiresome. Both statements are true. It is the best feeling to engage in so many different technologies, libraries, best practices, tools and the underlying toolchain. The knowledge to grasp and understand todays web technologies is awesome. Every major development has a vibrant, seething community behind them which have already answered most of the questions possible to arise, and if not, they sure enough have the answer within hours for you. On the other hand, developing for the web means a constant high stress level, staying up to date, replacing outdated libraries, build new toolchains bc the old api's broke and often times learn more core concepts (again). On top of this all is another "problem". There is not THE way of doing things or THE toolset to solve a problem, but a zillion. And every single one of them is better than every other, at least if you believe the communities on the backside. One could get a little bit nostalgic, thinking about times when jQuery was the only thing to know. The one and only true multitool and there were no (or not so many) questions about deployment, dependencies and task runner.

In February of 2018, I decided that firstly I want to work more with Unity, secondly I want to share my knowledge about game design and thirdly I haven't worked enought with them students of mine. :D I concluded these thoughts with the idea to create a new Unity game with a bunch of interested students. Found the right people right away. As things turned out, many of them are stupid talentet and possess an unbelievable good basic knowledge about game mechanics. Motivationwise, there is work to be done tho.

After some meetings and hitting our think tank, we came to the decision our game should be a tile based platformer with a story arc revolving around technologised animals. The single levels should be held together by Mario or Rayman Origins-esque overworlds wich concludes in a bossfight each. Our title is Radventure and our main character is a red panda called "Rad". :D The player expands his skillset through milestones within the game's world, where he gets upgrades and new abilities. The battle system should feature melee as well as ranged attacks. Because we only work on this in our spare time, the planned project duration will be rather long and the primary goal is to create a runable demo and learn something about game design.

It's Tuesday early afternoon. I just watched the c-tv keynote speakers at college. Now I am sitting in the park, writing this lines on my laptop. How is this possible? Easy. I'll start my major university course "Web and Mobile Media Design" at the Danube University Krems. Upcoming friday, I'll bid work goodbye and will spend a year on leave for further education. Until then, I am consuming my vacation days. Yes, you heard correctly. I am about to start my student days after 10+ years working in software development.

I just thought, I'll let you know what I am up to these days. Hi. So yes, I am still existing and constantly occupied with several very interesting technologies and projects. Turns out I am not the guy who keeps his blog updated on a regular basis, though. Working on that :)

As you may already know, I decided to send my favourite project, the Jump'n'Run Bound-By-Magic, to sleep for the time being, because we haven't got an artist for the graphics and I don't want to use store graphics for something that important to me. In the long run, I am sure we will some day find the right partner to work on this again. The storywriting and the conceptional work already done will not lose quality over time, so this is not a big deal for us. We already created a proof of concept with Unity3d and some asset packs. You can download this early prototype here if you are interested in trying it out.

Althought it is a little bit sad to suspend the work on Bound-By-Magic, on the other hand now I got the time to continue on another prototype I am eager to work on: Jelly Bubbles.

Check out this first VLOG about the game Bound by Magic. We are talking about many important stuff, like game mechanics and features, story, who we are, why do we make this game and so on and so forth. We even show off some nice gameplay footage from our early alpha proof of concept prototype version. Give it a try and watch the video. Also, check out the outtakes at the end of the video. They are hilarious!