Recent content in Hi on Jamie.sh

 Believe it or not - I used to be full of optimism. I grew up in Plymouth, UK (the original one) - and it’s a very slow town. There isn’t a huge amount going on down there - the counties of Devon and Cornwall are, in England, often the places people go to retire. The average salary is £39.8k ($51.5k USD) - which was much less in around 2010 when I was sitting in my mom’s garden…
I wanted to build a fun little project. That project was spacetime . 
 I actually built most of it over a couple days, and over the decades I’ve gotten pretty good at spinning up full-stack web apps from idea to deployment quickly. This time, I wanted a mostly SPA experience, but I’d use Supabase on the backend to try and escape as much API code as I could. I ended up wanting to…
https://spacetime.cv 
 Explore thoughts across space and time. 
 Technologies used: 
 - React
 - React Router v7
 - ThreeJS (React Three Fiber)
 - Motion
 - Cloudflare Workers

2023 
 Every year at some point I like to give my website a little revamp. It’s usually around January when I’m full of motivation and creativity - and I tell myself I’ll actually commit to writing more often. Writing really helps me solidify my thoughts and learning, so it’s usually a well-intentioned spur of motiviation. Inevitably - as the year goes on and as work…
Some background 
 I recently migrated my personal website from WordPress to Zola , a Rust-powered static site generator. I’ve used static site generators in past versions of this site - but opted for WordPress in the 2020-2021 version because static sites do come with some extra manual work no matter how you cut it. WordPress with its online admin interface abstracts a lot of that away -…
It’s been a while since I last wrote anything about game development. I often think about writing something new I’ve learned or an idea I had along the way - but never do. 
 I do however think there is value in writing - even if I’m writing into the void. Writing thoughts down is a good way of solidifying thoughts. You can be retrospective and even learn something new along…
I wanted to create a set of chunks in a grid along the X + Z axis in Unity (with the power of DOTS). To track which chunks I have already instantiated, I created a NativeArray<float3> named chunkPositions . I set the size of this array to my world size (width by height) and I have a job that loops through all of the positions on the screen, checking which exist in chunkPositions . If the position…
I’ve had a lot of thoughts as to what my game might be, and I have some interesting ideas of cool gameplay mechanics. When approaching new projects (not just in game dev) I always have a general “feeling” of what I’m trying to build. I can’t always visualize or explain the feeling, but I’d be able to tell you if I saw it. 
 Over the past week in my evenings…
To get started, I want to first outline my goals for the foreseeable future. In my first post, I mentioned that I have limited time to spend on my game dev ambitions so it’s important that the hours I do spend are productive. I watched a GDC talk by David Wehle ( The First Tree ) who mentioned he spent roughly 10 hours a week on his game, due to work commitments and real-life - and that he…
When I was in my early twenties - with not much going on in my life - I decided to make a change. I remember being in my parents garden on a sunny day kicking a ball around with Ziggy, the dog. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, I’d quit my job and spent most of my days sleeping and playing video games. 
 I used my first computer at age 5, a Windows 95 machine my…
Here are some games that I really enjoyed - they aren’t necessarily inspiration for my current project - but games that inspired me and captured my imagination (and time). I expect to add to this list over time. 
 Ecco the Dolphin 
 One of the first games I played. Loved the feeling of diving deeper and deeper into the unknown (might be why I enjoyed Subnautica so much).