Hello,

Here’s all the about you’ll ever need about me and the blog. If you still have anything you want to ask me you can always leave comments. If I feel that that information needs to be here I ‘ll edit this page.

ME:

I am Manjith Krishnappa. I have worked in the games development industry for about 7 years now and during this tenure, I have had the good fortune to work on a lot of different technologies and platforms.

I always found video games to be an excellent form of entertainment because of the interactivity that it provides the player. When I found that developing video games was a career option I didn’t think twice. I completed my M. Sc. from Staffordshire Univerity in computer games software design.

History and Background:

I started my games development career working on C++ and DirectX (9) and at the time I even worked on creating some homebrew projects for the Sega Dreamcast. This, however, was a very short period of my life. Soon after this, I started working for a company that wanted to develop for Xbox live platform and so the chosen technology was C# and XNA. This company did not sustain for a very long time. After this, I wanted to work for myself making games independently.

I started an indie game development studio called Phantasm Games with the idea that I would create tools and technology that I could license out once I was confident that it could go out. It is here that I did a lot of learning being the only programmer. We mainly used C# and XNA for development of games. We created most of the tools like level editor etc in Maya using MEL and Maya API. We went to the extent of having a WYSIWYG viewport within Maya by importing all our shaders and materials. After completing several games here for XBL and PC downloadable platforms, I found that the market trends were changing. The consumption of games was shifting to hand-held and across platform support and social features were becoming very important. At this point, I took up full-time employment again.

Now I mainly work on Unity3D engine developing for iOS and Android platforms. In my spare time, I work on C++ and OpenGL projects. I have a long way to go before I can consider myself an expert on any matter (generally or specifically to games development).

About the Blog:

I really just thought of maintaining an online journal of all the things that I try in game development and everything that I learn in the course of the week. As I started to think about this more and more I think it might be a better idea to present what I have done in a more of a tutorial format that might be useful for someone. What I would really love to have is to get to learn from others where I have gone wrong. I am sure there will be a lot of such instances.

Right now I am thinking of having topics in the following categories:

• C++ / OpenGL (Mac, PC, iOS)
• C++ / DirectX (PC)
• C# / XNA (PC, XBOX 360)
• MEL / Maya API
• Unity3D
• Shader programming HLSL and GLSL
• Optimization Techniques

Sincerely hoping that this blog will help someone out there!

-Manjith a.k.a DarkRyder

Current PC Set-up: