Wow, it really has been 12 weeks? Dang. I stopped counting around 10, I had to check the calendar. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so busy! Well maybe when I was working on the first Game Programming Gems book. 🙂 I’m working to keep on top of all the things being done by Google that are game-related – things like iGoogle, Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, GoogleTV, and a number of APIs that are extremely game relevant – and that’s just a heck of a lot of material coming my way. I’m slowly getting better at surfing the waves of email and docs coming at me, but some days I still get overwhelmed with all the info I’m trying to assimilate as I ramp up at Google.
Today was a nice day, I stayed in the San Francisco office instead of heading down to Mountain View. Most days I take the shuttle down the San Francisco peninsula in the morning, from San Francisco to Mountain View – it takes roughly an hour. The shuttle has wi-fi, which is great, but it is a bit difficult to get serious work done, with the bus bouncing up and down as it does. I have numerous times accidentally deleted messages when the bus has hit a particularly rough patch of road. Makes me very appreciative of UNDO, let me tell ya. But by and large the shuttle is a win, since it makes me more productive than spending an hour cursing at the traffic on the way down and again on the way back.
One of the things I’m really excited about at the moment is the Chrome Web Store. Later this year, we’ll put a store within Chrome, to enable developers to more easily distribute and sell web apps. Of course, I’m thinking all about games, I want to make sure we have lots of games in the store for the launch – Flash games, HTML5 (Javascript) games, Native Client (C++) games – so I’ve been talking to a lot of game developers and tool manufacturers.
It’s been fun for me to slowly get more up to speed on the world of HTML5, although I do have C++ flowing through my veins. 🙂  The thing is, it doesn’t matter what I like – it matters what game developers are using, and I think it’s pretty damn cool that people are making HTML5/Javascript games. The Google Pacman Doodle is a Javascript game, for example, and it is pretty awesome.  I’m looking forward to seeing more games made with WebGL, too.
Well I’ll keep this short for now. I’m planning to ramp up the blogging again, for realz this time. So many interesting things going on that I want to talk about 🙂