Fractal Live Generator - Live wallpaper for Android

In my previous post I had mentioned that I was working on an Android app to be released soon. I have since released my first Android app to the market place. This app is called Fractal Live Generator and it is a live wallpaper for generating animated Mandelbrot and Julia sets.

You can download it from the Google Play Store here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chrissteinberg.fractalwallpaper

And for some pretty pictures:

To test the waters of Android development I wanted something fairly simple and non-expensive to develop so that I could get an understanding of the publishing path for the Android market place. I felt that a live wallpaper would both be fun and straightforward to develop. I was right on both accounts. Doing a fractal generation application in OpenGL 2.0 was something I had planned on writing for a while regardless, but the excuse to put it on my Nexus 7 was too great. The biggest issue I ran into was determining what customizable features to add to the initial release and to keep feature creep down to a minimal to actually get the app released.

The actual process to release an app on the Google Play store was surprisingly simple. Once I had done a little research to determine what was required and what I was agreeing to in all of the legal documentation, actually producing the release apk and uploading it to the store was much easier than I expected. The major pitfall that I did run into was not being able to test on multiple devices since I only have the Nexus 7. It turns out that this is an issue as there have been multiple reports of people's devices not rendering correctly. Until I can get my hands on one of these devices that are not working properly, I simply have to accept that there will be people currently who cannot use my software. This was a valuable lesson to learn early however, as I now know that for future Android applications that the OpenGL ES 2.0 standard is not implemented or supported the same on all devices. It is much cheaper to have issues like this on a free app that I only spent a few weeks of spare time developing than in an app that I potentially have invested money to develop and months of effort into producing. I will have to invest in larger ranges of devices for testing and budget accordingly.

I do plan on doing some more live wallpapers as I think that the wallpaper is a great canvas to make some eye candy shader toys. It is also a great way to experiment with OpenGL ES 2.0 GLSL shaders in the mobile space. So definitely keep an eye out for more of these types of things from me.

2013 Year End Update

Once again it has been a while since I last posted here. Many reasons for this, mostly due to career changes. The last time I had posted I was working for a company called Zebra Imaging. After a good run in holography, the call of game development was pulling me back into the field I love...

At the start of 2013 I took a contract position for EA Sports. I worked on franchise mode for NCAA Football. This was a great experience for me, very rewarding. I was able to be a part of the NCAA 14 release and earned my first console game development credit. Working for EA was a wonderful place to work and the engineers that I worked with were very bright. It isn't easy building a AAA game every year, and even more difficult to take the same game and re-envision it each iteration. The team was very good at handling both of these challenges and in being a part of this process, I have learned much about production schedules and distributed development.

Unfortunately, this year EA has decided to end the development of the NCAA Football franchise of games. It was a shame as the next iteration promised to be great as well. I, being a contractor at the time was unfortunately not retained as a member of a different team. I was in the situation of looking for work again. Luckily, as a software engineer in Austin Tx, finding leads for new opportunities was not as difficult as I was imagining. It only took me about a month to find a new position. My new home is working on a contract with Aristocrat Inc. A world wide manufacturer of slot machine games. This work has turned out to be much more interesting than I had originally anticipated and the experience has also been quite rewarding. I am learning a lot about hardware drivers that I never knew and much about the Windows low level operating system features that I never bothered to investigate in the past but have found that the understanding of which has greatly improved my understanding of how the operating system handles distributing and managing of resources that my applications are requesting. I was very sad to have to leave EA but I am glad that I have found a new home (hopefully not as temporary) in a place that I find interesting and engaging.

On the personal development side of things, I have been doing a wide variety of side projects. From helping out a friend work on preparing his kickstarter, to working on a Unity platformer title here and there (to be announced by me sometime in the future in more detail), some additional side contract work when I can find it, and finally for Christmas I received a Nexus 7 from my wife which as spurred me to dabble in some Android development. The Android development stuff I hope to be releasing in the early part of 2014 as some smaller apps for sale or for free on the market place.

All in all, as a software developer, I feel like 2013 has been a year of growth for me, both intellectually and professionally. I look forward to 2014 with some hope that it will be a little less stressful, but at the same time with greater ambition for completing some of my personal side projects. I also wish for the best for my friends and family for the new year. Who knows, maybe I will be a little more ambitious with this site or maybe a rework of the site/new address is in order. All of that is speculation however as I have put little thought into the blog in a while.

Happy New Year
-Chris