Ladies and gentlemen, we’re pleased to announce that we have a new team member! Jussi Sammaltupa is joining the Ctrl Alt Ninja team as a programmer, essentially doubling the coding performance of the team. Personally I’ve programmed solo for so long that it’s refreshing to get to do team work and work together on those really hard coding problems that appear from time to time. Without further ado, I’ll leave the keyboard to Jussi so he can say hi. Welcome aboard Jussi!
So, I have been programming and developing software professionally for nearly 20 years. The last 10+ years I spent developing procurement related software. As challenging it was, I felt I needed a change. I mentioned this to Petri, who invited me to pair program with him for a day. We got quite a bit done that day, and here we are!
The first week has been quite humbling. There is so much to learn! During the first couple of days I felt I am never going to be productive in this environment, but towards the end of the week, I was already more comfortable. Live coding with the Shinobi game engine is such a great experience. Need to experiment something quickly? Just write a few lines of code in the text editor, press a hotkey and you are ready to test your experiment directly in the game. No long build times, no need to wait. You just keep the game running the whole day and update it live with new code and assets.
The downside is that the feedback loop for the entire product – the game – is a lot longer than in the enterprise world. We don’t get to ship versions all the time and tune the game based on real feedback. That’s where you, dear blog readers, can help us. So keep those comments coming, we read them all!
I am pretty amazed by what these guys have accomplished in such a short time. The game is already fun to play, and there is a lot of good stuff coming up.
-Jussi
Good luck and happy coding 🙂 can’t wait to play this game 🙂
Thank you, glad to hear that!
Great news, good luck!