I’m writing after a really long time. Approximately after a year.
Do people still read blogs? Not sure, but I’ll still write one!
It’s been a long year, lots of reasons to celebrate, and lots to think and ponder over.
The year began with a visit to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco last year. This was my first time at GDC and it was a great experience being around creative talent from the gaming industry and learning from them. I came back to India feeling a lot more motivated to start working on good ideas.
One of my games won a Brandon Hall Gold Award for the ‘Best Use of Games and Simulations for Learning‘. Brandon Hall Awards are one the most prestigious awards in the field of learning, so winning a GOLD was quite exhilarating. The game that won an award is called ‘Develop Your Drug’ and it takes the player through an end to end development cycle of a new drug.
I became part of the NASSCOM Special Interest Group for Applied Games and got an opportunity to learn about some very interesting serious games and their best practices, specifically those from the Dutch Applied gaming industry. My shift from the commercial gaming industry to applied games enabled me to speak about my projects at the first NASSCOM SIG Applied Games meet-up at TCS.
I started developing games with Unity. It was long overdue since my focus till recently had be the Adobe Flash and AS3 platform. But the web just made Flash the bad guy, so Unity and HTML5 is what naturally came next!
Jordan was a destination I had been planning to visit since a long time. But the plans never transpired because I had my apprehensions about visiting a country whose geographic location is in the center of the Arab Spring chaos in the Middle East. But then in an instinctive moment, I went ahead and booked myself a trip last November, and thought I’d take each day as it comes. Turns out, it was one of my best decisions and the time spent in Jordan was indeed fantastic and memorable.
I spent lesser time online and sometimes never got online. But a digital detox always does good, right?
As the New Year is running in full swing now (a month has already gone by), I have no plans set for the rest of the year. But I do intend to write more, travel some more and build some great games.
Cheers and keep reading my posts!!
Mariam
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