Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, now back to work!

It's been around three weeks since I've done some serious game development work. I somehow survived the holidays and now I can finally get back to work. The contract with my current employer ends on March 31st so I see this as having 2 months of heavy game development work and 1 month to heavily market my self to game development companies to put my self in a position to get job offers around the time my contract runs out.

I have 3 objectives in the next 2 months:

• Create 2 fully functional games
• Networking, Networking, Networking (the majority of this is going to have to be online due to a lack of in person events in my area)
• Get a firm grasp of how to develop for the iPhone.

The first step is pretty straight forward.  Pump out a game a month.  I'm setting hard deadlines for myself on these, because I need deadlines.  My plan is to finish the Tetris clone by the end of January and create another game in February hopefully using code from Tetris clone as a good base.

Step 2 is where it gets interesting.  If you're reading this hopefully some of my networking ventures are working.  Dallas is rich in game development companies, including some heavyweights like Id, Gearbox, and Terminal Reality, but for some reason, the local Dallas IGDA chapter is practically dormant.  So my networking assault is going to be mostly online.  I'm of course writing this blog as a means of networking and self promotion, but I've started by trying to find anyone I've ever worked with for game development on social networking sites so I can connect with those already in the industry.  Hopefully by the start of March, I'll have a lot of momentum on the networking front.

The last one is a bit diffrent.  There are quite a few iphone dev's here in Dallas, and while I do own an iPhone, I've never developed an app, so inorder to broaden my chances, I wan't to learn objective-c and maybe make my third game an iphone game.  There is some overhead costs I'll have to incur here to do this (like buy a mac). But you have to spend money to make money right. 

So thats the 3 month "Game Dev Blitz" I've set out for myself.  Call it a New Year's resolution to break into the game dev industry.  Should hopfully be pumping out these blogs nightly as I start some serious development on my games.  Very exciting!