Antonin Carette

A journey into a wild pointer

2023, in a nutshell

Posted at — Dec 25, 2023

In my last year’s blog post I wrote

2022 was a strange year for everyone I think.

I do think, as game developers (or just computer developers), we can agree that 2023 was way worst than 2022, maybe one of the worst year since a long time actually.
Despite records sales in the video game industry, and record earnings, the number of layoffs in the field was incredibly high (more than 6000 jobs lost in 2023 only so far, recorded from January to November 2023). Also, E3 communicated a few weeks ago they are definitely closing their doors, sounding the death knell of an era of physical celebration for the video game industry.
I am very sad for all developers who lost their jobs this year, and I sincerely hope that the industry will recover quickly from this.

Professionnally I ported two video games for 5 platforms each, one game engine (and another half for 2024), and I helped porting two game engines to fix bugs in upcoming and released games. Not so bad! The main challenge of this year was porting SHINORUBI and its game engine called V3X, developed by RealtechVR for five different platforms: PS4, PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles. The work for SHINORUBI began in September 2022, ended in late-November 2023, and the release is planned for January 2024. Apart from that I helped to make fixes for existing game engines but the games have not been annunced yet by RedArtGames so I can’t tell anything the games and game engines (yet).

I continued my own game engine in my spare time, but more and more I tend refocusing the game engine to a renderer-only project, with a Vulkan and Metal backends.
Also, I just finished the 2023 edition of advent of code, an annual program (in December) of small programming puzzles to solve “for fun”. As always I did not participate to the competition, mainly because I had to get up at 6AM to get a chance to participate (too early for me), but also because I wanted to do AoC for fun and without any stress. Except the Day 24 Part 2 I did everything the release day, using Swift. This year I put on my list Rust, C++ or Swift, and asked to a friend to choose a number between 1 and 3 (included) - he choosed 3… so Swift :)
My AoC repository is available here.

I did not changed my computing environment: a M2 macbook air only, which I use for everything except gaming. This machine is pretty incredible: great power & excellent battery life, perfect combo!

I played a very high number of good games this year:

I do not expect anything from 2024 except stablization in the game & software development industry: let’s keep it simple.

Time for me to close the lid, wish you the best for 2024!