Writing this post is a bittersweet moment for me. I'm excited by what the future holds for Windows Phone, and looking forward to my chance to be part of that, but also sad to leave a team and product that have given me so much satisfaction. There'll be no going back once I hit that Publish button a few minutes from now...
I feel an urge to wax nostalgic about some of my favorite times with XNA:
Staying up all night to watch Michael purchase the first ever Creators Club subscription.
The first Dream Build Play competition, when we got to see the first actual games made with our technology (Dishwasher FTW!)
On stage with Mitch at Gamefest, where I wrote a network game 'from scratch' (if you ignore some minor snippet cheating :-) in less than an hour. I'm still blown away by the fact that our APIs were simple enough to make this possible. Also amazed that the demo actually worked, considering what an unstable early build we were using! Unfortunately there is no video of this, and the slides don't do it justice since the whole point was the live coding demo.
On stage once more at MIX, demonstrating XNA graphics on the new Windows Phone with a frighteningly last minute demo cobbled together just a few days earlier using a hot-off-the-presses build of XNA on an even more experimental frankenbuild of the phone OS. Then rushing back to my hotel room to blog about the new features coming in XNA 4.0 (which, modesty aside, I still think is some of the best design work I have done to date).
Trying to decide, of all the lines of code I have written in my life, which one has been executed the most times? I think it must be the default SpriteBatch pixel shader.
Last but not least, spending time with y'all on forums and this blog, where I got to know so many great people and see the amazing things you create.
I'm not yet sure what this means for my blog. I want to keep writing, but will probably cover more general graphics and game development topics, and will obviously no longer have inside scoop on XNA implementation details. I'm also not sure how much time I will have for writing, especially in the early months as I settle into the new job, but I will do my best.
Ok, I'm off now to meet some new people and learn my way around a whole new product.
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