The Change
Thank you for visiting my site. I lived in Amsterdam and really enjoyed living in the Netherlands. But since a year my wife and myself have decided to go for a change in life. As such, we have started 12 months ago the emigration paperwork to get a Greencard for the United States.
I have been a product manager in mobile services for about 6 years and I have always been excited about Silicon Valley and being part of the action :). So we have decided to quit our jobs in the Netherlands and plan for a big move to the Valley.
We had both employers which are not located in the Bay Area, I worked at Vodafone and my wife at MTV Networks. So we took the bold step to quit our jobs and pursue a new start. Just to be clear we didn’t hated our jobs or we weren’t stuck in our careers. No, we both liked our jobs very much, we just wanted something different, something new, and something exciting.
At this moment we left our jobs, our apartment and our life in Amsterdam and we are enroute to California. Going through this decision gave us the realization to pursue another dream. We both love to travel and experience different cultures and countries (we actually met in Finland a few years back). So we decided not only to emigrate to the US, but also take this moment in our lives to travel for six months through Asia.
In the next one or two weeks we will board our plane to Nepal, this will be our first destination. We have an idea of the countries we want to visit, but we rather keep things open and see where we end up during these six months.
Rolly Bear World Plan:
Being on the road for 6 months, I will get some moments that I rather have something else to do. Therefore I decided to have a side-activity along our travels. In the last years I have self-taught myself to code. I started with Java and Android, and for the people who are following me for a while, probably noticed that I recently started to learn Lua and Corona SDK. One of my problems in the last years was that it was difficult to have focus on one project as I had only a few hours per week to work on my hobby projects. Since I will be travelling in the next months I came up with the idea to create a mobile game in the six months we are traveling in Asia.
In the next posts I will explain what mobile game I will develop and what exactly the gameplay will be. But I have already decided to create a physics based game and to call it Rolly Bear World (more in the next posts). As six months is also a short time to develop a mobile game, I will try to plan a bit ahead by creating some high level requirements. I want to keep the creativity part of the process, but having outlined the scope of the game to some extent will actually help me to succeed in the goal to develop a game in this time frame.
I have “rebranded” my blog into “code and travel” to capture what I will be doing in the next few months. I hope you like it, beside the code tutorials, which I will be sharing along the development of Rolly Bear World, I will also share some of our travel photo’s and stories. All the existing tutorials are still available for you, just use the navigation on the top of this page.
Goals:
Throughout my travels I will update my site with my progress but will also share all the code so you or other people can take the code and use it for your own.
So the goals for Rolly Bear World are:
- Developed across countries in six Months
- Have to some extend a clear scope before the start of the project
- Learn more about the Corona SDK Framework and Lua programming language
- Share as much as possible with you
- Have a lot of fun!
Keep following me for updates! It’s gonna be a lot of fun!
Christian
Really cool what your doing. I follow your Corona tutorials
I will follow your tutorials for a while and they are great, Good luck with your plans!
Thank you for your tutorials christian. Amazing work.Safe travels.. :)
Wao.. I like the concept and more then that the scintillating part is the Idea to have an extra activity for yourself during your holidays. Could’n think of anything more cool then this as a side activity.