What I will not automate
Boundaries for an agent production system: judgment, relationships, irreversible risk, and the work that stays human on purpose.
Dave Voyles
Recent content on Dave Voyles
Latest posts
Claim safety: evidence before metrics
How I keep public numbers and authorship honest — on the site, in agent output, and in tools like an evidence-backed resume workspace.
From Xbox SLAs to agent fleets
Builder-first TPM craft transfers: critical path, multi-team programs, and SLA pressure map cleanly onto eval gates, orchestration, and human approval.
Twenty-plus containers and agent-operated ops
A Dockerized homelab is not a toy rack — it is the host layer for an agent production system: runtimes, runners, dashboards, and hardened defaults.
Human approval: the merge button still matters
Autonomy is earned per action class. Where I keep a human on the critical path — and why that is a feature of agent production systems, not a failure of them.
Eval gates are not optional theater
Automated checks before merge — tests, policy, claim safety — are the product, not a checkbox. How eval gates fit an agent production system.
How I run an agent production system
A claim-safe walkthrough of the multi-agent production system I operate — orchestrator, eval gates, human approval, Docker, and Azure — not a résumé timeline.
We're Back
It’s been about six years since the last post here — heads-down at Xbox/Microsoft will do that to a blog. I’m picking this back up. Expect more content soon, mostly around AI and agentic workflows, the models behind them, engineering best practices, and video games — the same mix of tech and games this site has always been about, just with a few years of new things to say. Thanks for…
Hello Vault
This is the first note in the vault – a short, atomic, interlinked reference note, distinct from the blog’s long-form posts. Proves the vault content section (plan 0004 / D4) renders correctly end to end; D8 seeds the real content and cross-links once wikilinks (D5) and backlinks (D6) land. Cross-links to [[Wikilinks]] (a real note) and to [[Nonexistent Note]] (not a real note, proving…
Unity
Unity is a cross-platform game engine, widely used across the posts in this blog’s archive – from early indie prototypes through the [[UWP]] and Xbox One era. Microsoft partnered with Unity as part of the ID@Xbox program to make porting Unity games to Xbox One straightforward for independent developers.
UWP
UWP (Universal Windows Platform) is Microsoft’s app platform spanning Windows 10, Windows Phone, and Xbox One from a single codebase. Building a [[Unity]] game against UWP was one of the more common paths indie developers used to bring a game to Xbox One during the ID@Xbox program’s early years.
Wikilinks
Vault notes cross-link by title – double square brackets around the exact note title – rather than hand-typed URLs; see [[Hello Vault]] for the note this one links back to.
Hello World
Welcome to my blog! This is the first post on my newly rebuilt Hugo site. I’m excited to share my thoughts, projects, and insights here. This site is powered by Hugo and deployed to GitHub Pages, making it fast, static, and easy to maintain. More posts coming soon!
Tutorials: Creating your first website with Azure
My Tech Evangelist colleagues, Joe Raio and Brian Sherwin , have create a great set of video tutorials on how to create your own website using Azure. This is part of Microsoft’s Choose to Code campaign, which guides your middle and high school students through a series of online tutorials walking them through the process of creating and publishing their own website. If you are using Azure Passes,…
My 10th weekly newsletter is out!
If you find some links that you think would be useful, feel free to share! You can always subscribe (or unsubscribe) by clicking on the MailChimp widget on the right-hand side of this page. Here’s a link to the original file. Gaming The Flame In The Flood – Adventure game on Kickstarter Here’s Why We Need Video Games In Every Classroom “How Long To Beat” -> useful site that tells you how long it…
prime[31] Azure plugin for Win8 Unity games (Part 3)
RESOURCES: You can find the source for this project on my GitHub. Power point slides Video Walkthrough Get this working on Windows Phone In part 2 of my tutorial , I showed you how you how to set up the initial project with prime[31]. Now that we have it built, I’m going to walk you through the code, as well as how it all works. Insert Let’s test this out by running the project from Visual Studi…
TIL: Unity has way cheaper pricing for students / faculty
I was at Unity’s Unite conference in Seattle this week, and I learned from their education team that Unity has far cheaper licensing for students, faculty, and schools. In partnership with Studica, Unity has discounted costs. Here’s a link to the page. Also, Autodesk, creators of Maya, 3DS Max, etc., also have FREE versions of their tools for students. Where was this when I was in school, learning…
Unite 2014 keynote recap
I’m still at Unite 2014 this week, so I thought I’d deliver a quick recap of the Unite 2014 keynote, courtesy of Jaime Rodriguez , of Microsoft. Here was my favorite talk of Unite as well: [Unite 2014 – IL2CPP: The next generation of scripting in Unity](Unite%202014 - IL2CPP: The next generation of scripting in Unity) Unite 2014 – WebGL Deployment in Unity 5 Opening stats: [David Helgason, CEO]…
BizSpark: Free software and cloud services for your startup
Jennifer Marsman wrote a great post on her MSDN blog about the benefits of BizSpark and how to get started with the program. This step-by-step tutorial can help get you enrolled as well. Perks of the program: http://wootstudio.ca/startups/bizspark.aspx Windows 10 developer accounts (Xbox, Windows) Visual Studio Ultimate licenses Windows licenses (multiple versions) Office 365 developer account…
My third weekly newsletter is out
HTML5 Free Udacity course: WebGL and Three.js Microsoft will join Khronos and will participate in the webGL working group The power of WebGL – Assasin’s Creed Pirates, using BabylonJS Gaming / Game Dev Night Trap Revamped Kickstarter How to get your game covered by YouTubers – Gamaasutra Xamarin’s new 2D C# crossplatform gaming framework Universal Apps in Unity – Unity Blog Marketing tips from…
prime[31] Azure plugin for Win8 Unity games (Part 2)
RESOURCES: You can find the source for this project on my GitHub. In part 1 of my tutorial, I showed you how you how to set up the initial project with prime[31]. Now that we have it built, I’m going to walk you through the code, as well as how it all works. Now that we have the project built, let’s open it up the metro folder, and launch the Prime31 Visual Studio solution.
Boost productivity: Convert YouTube videos to MP3
I’m an avid runner and cyclist, but I can’t stand exercising in silence. Sure, I have tons of nerdy video game music (woohoo, Yuzo Koshiro), but sometimes I also want to learn. I peruse YouTube for different things to learn every day, and generally listen in the background as I work. I find that tech talks from user groups are the best. ( Check out this video from David Catuhe, on how to write…
Microsoft BizSpark Orientation WorkShop at City Coho Philly Nexus
Time: Wednesday August 13 2014 | 4:00pm to 6:00pm Location: City Coho Philly Nexus http://www.citycoho.com/ CityCoHo | Philly Nexus 2401 Walnut St. Suite 102 Philadelphia, PA 19103 Microsoft’s BizSpark is an innovative global program that unites Startups with global entrepreneurial and technology resources in one community, with a common goal of supporting and accelerating the success of a new…
Stacey Mulcahy writes: Internet of Things with Unity3d, Arduino and Spacebrew
My co-worker, and web dev ninja, Stacey Mulcahy ( @bitchwhocodes ) put together a great series of blog posts on how to use Spacebrew ( a web sockets solution built on Node that enables you to create interactive spaces with several clients ) with Unity3d and Arduino & Processing. This is the beginning / start of next week’s bit where she shows how to build your own DDR mat and hook it into Unity3d,…
Join my newsletter for gaming, HTML5, and tech
it was only a matter of time before I created my own weekly newsletter. Rather than constantly spam folks on twitter with my links, I’d much prefer to just bunch them up into a weekly letter, and share them with you. Here’s a peek of what is in the first one: Gaming Dev Gamasutra annual game dev salary survey – Gamasutra How to use an Xbox One controller on your Windows PC Resources for HTML5 game…
How does Microsoft compare in the Fortune 500?
Before I joined Microsoft, I was an engineer at Comcast, on their COAM (Consumer Owned and Maintained Devices) team, where I worked on their Xbox 360, Xbox One, and SmartGlass apps. Now that I’m at Microsoft, another Fortune 50 company, I’ve kept a close eye on all of the large tech companies, to see how they weigh against one another. Here are some results from the recent Fortune magazine…
Philadelphia Unity Game Dev Meetup
I recently put together a new meetup for Unity game developers in Philadelphia . This will likely be held at City CoHo Philly Nexus , 2401 Walnut St., Suite 102, Philadelphia, PA ( map ), and on Monday evenings. The location is ideal, as Drexel University and UPenn are right down the block, and public transit is close by. You can either get off at Suburban Station (Comcast Center) or 30th Street…
Examples of apps published with the Web App Template
A few months back, I wrote a piece on a high level overview of Microsoft’s Web App Template. I’ve recently learned that it not only works on Windows 8, but is also applicable to Win Phone 8, with Universal support coming soon. So why would anyone ever wrap their site and turn it into an app? Well for one thing, it can quickly and easily net you 300+ 4+ star reviews on the store, and takes no more…
Switching from the iPhone 5 to the Lumia 1520
Today I made the switch from the iPhone 5 on Verizon, to a Lumia 1520 on AT&T. I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem for the last 3 years, so making the change was nerve-wracking, to say the least. Calculating the cost I have a number of AT&T devices through work, but I could never use them outside of locations where I had Wifi, because I was locked to Verizon. To weigh out the cost of switching over,…
$100k worldwide Unity contest
Today, Unity and Microsoft announced a new world-wide contest with $100K in prizes to bring Unity games to Windows and Windows Phone. The rules are pretty straight forward, and he contest site is hosted at http://unity3d.com/contest/windows , so feel free to head over and submit your games!
Windows 8 app development for beginners
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Finishing the Web App template
You can download the app from the Windows 8 Store, for free. In my last post, I mentioned that I began using Microsoft’s new Web App Template, to quickly and easily create an app out of my website, while using very little code. Now that my app is finished, I wanted to walk you through the steps, so that you can do the same. In total, it only took me about 2 hours to have my app created from…
Apache Cordova integrated in Visual Studio for Multi-Device Hybrid App development
I’ve been pushing HTML5 cross platform applications for some time now. I frequently give talks on how to use tools like Telerik’s App Builder, Adobe’s PhoneGap Cloud, and my personal favorite, Intel’s XDK. You can find my open sourced Cordova app here. Previously, Cordova was a cumbersome command line tool for building cross platform HTML5 mobile apps. it was not fun, and was incredibly painful to…
Intro to the Web App Template
You can find Part 2 of this tutorial, here. I’ve also compiled a list of great apps published with the WAT. On Venture Capitalist Chris Dixon’s blog, he recently highlighted the decline of the mobile web. “People are spending more time on mobile vs desktop, and more of their mobile time using apps, not the web This is a worrisome trend for the web. Mobile is the future. What wins mobile, wins the…
Professional Game Development Tools
This post is part of 3 week series giving current and aspiring game devs the tools, resources, and advice they need to get started building for Windows. We also have a great video course on [game production basics](http://Game Production Basics) at Microsoft Virtual Academy. Visual Studio Community Edition visual-studio-logo You need an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, to write code for…
Unity shmup template (JS and C#)
I’ve been a huge fan of shmups for as long as I can remember. If it’s good, I’ve played it (and it’s probably Japanese). I wrote my last one in JavaScript using the Impact.js framework, but this time around I wanted to do it in Unity and really test the performance of the engine. When looking for Unity shmup templates, I came across this great set of posts on the Shmup-dev website. One post…
Super Rawr-Type is released for Windows 8
Play Super Rawr-Type for FREE in the Windows 8 Store Super Rawr-Type, my 2D sidescrolling JavaScript shooter, is finally available for Windows 8. I actually finished working on it in August, but needed to change a few lines of code to have it pass certification, and completely forgot to resubmit. On Friday I made the final necessary changes, submitted, and it’s up in the store today. The project…
How do I get my game on Xbox One?
Update 3/29/16 With today’s announcements at //BUILD, some of this information will be out of date. I will make changes in the very near future. Updated, 9/24/15 TLDR : Middleware engines work great and support for Xbox one is continuing to grow within new tools each day. I have a more recent post with more information following Microsoft’s presence at GDC 2015. Here is the latest. For developers…
How to write engaging second screen experiences, using SmartGlass or Win8
This ties into my previous post, where I spoke about how to get your game or app on Xbox One. Microsoft unveiled quiet a bit of information regarding SmartGlass during BUILD 2012, and much of it is available ** via this Power Point presentation. **Ignore most of the C++ in there; I never had to touch any of that. All of my work was done via JavaScript and it worked fine. I also spoke about…
Start making games, even if you don't know how to program
“I want to get started with making games, but I don’t know how. Where should I start?” It can be overwhelming when you are starting off, because there are so many options available to you. I mean just look at plethora of game making tools at Pixel Prospetor , and you’ll see what I’m talking about. If you have zero programming experience, then I’d suggest starting with Construct2. Construct 2…
Welcome, students of Philadelphia!
My goal right now is to build a network for students around Philadelphia to work on projects together, ask questions, and share their work. Feel free to ask me questions. I’m here to help! Want to know how to get started with an HTML5 project, mobile apps, or how to get started in the games industry? Ask me! I met some of you this weekend at the Global Game Jam , and others at the** Tri-Co…
Some books at the top of my list
I’ve taken a bit of a break from playing games lately, and instead have been cranking through books. A lot of this seems like “self help” or “empowerment” books, but I’ve chose to keep those silly things off of this list. Instead, I wanted to focus on books that actually offer some sort of practical and useful knowledge. Here’s a few of them, and why I think they would be worth your time:
2013 year in gaming
I don’t write much about gaming anymore, which is disappointing, but I instead fill my time with development, and an indie development podcast. So this is my one chance to round up my brief, if not disjointed, thoughts on gaming this year. Here’s a quick list of things I’ve played recently, and most of which in the last week. I had 12 days off from work after Christmas, so I cranked through as…
My next game will be made with Unreal Engine 4
So now that November 15th has finally arrived, I can say what I’ve been working on lately; a new game with the Unreal Engine 4. I’m still under NDA, and I can’t post any screens just yet, but rest assured that the engine is vastly improved from what UDK was, in terms of both usability and performance. Epic has a number of videos available online, so you can see what the workflow is like.
I started a new show – Indie Dev Podcast
Twice each month, I interview independent developers in the gaming industry. I felt that there was a niche not being served, in that I wanted the inside scoop behind many of the developers I interact without over the years. This 30 minute show is a casual conversation between a developer and myself, where he or she illustrates how they got their start, what their current and previous projects are,…
Former 2d shooter sample, now working as a C++ / DirectX 11 sample
Charles Humprey ( @NemoKrad ) was kind enough to help me get his 2D side scrolling shooter sample working in C++ / DX 11 this morning. You can find the source code to the project here. He’s a fellow MVP who has been extremely active in the XNA community, and provided numerous samples in the past. You can find more of his work here. Requirements: DirectX SDK (June 2010) Visual Studio 2013 Windows 7…
Super Rawr-Type Redux is released for the browser
Click here to play Super Rawr-Type Redux Source Code: https://github.com/DaveVoyles/Super-Rawr-Type-Redux I’ve spent the last 3 months working on the follow up to my previous game, Super Rawr-Type . It was a simple side scrolling 2D shmup, which I wrote in JavaScript and also ported to Windows 8. One bug prevents me from getting it into the store, and I’m not able to replicate it, so who knows if…
Hacking jQuery to work in Windows 8
For some time now I’ve been building HTML5 apps for Windows 8. I had previously done work in C# and XAML ( Spell and Speak , Pizong, and two Unity games), but prefer HTML5 and JavaScript for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it allows me to build apps for multiple platforms while only having to make marginal tweaks for each one. Naturally, each platform comes with its own ups and downs, but…
After 10 months, I've finished Persona 4 — A game you should all experience.
10 months. 80 hours. That’s how long it took me to play through Persona 4, and with my severe video game ADHD, if I play anything for more than a night, then that’s an accomplishment. Well, it really took a bit more than that, because I earned all 3 endings and died a few times, but we’ll go with the official game time of 8o hours. The last time I put this much time into a game was Dragon Quest…
Console wars of 2013: Who will win big?
Yesterday’s E3 conference was perhaps the most interesting one I’ve seen since 1995’s Sega debacle, where they thrusted the Saturn out of the gate, 6 months ahead of schedule and unbeknownst to developers. Microsoft came out of the gate with a strong lineup, a solid piece of hardware, and certainly some clarification on their policies which people were understandably curious about. Yesterday…