About Hexops

Hexops is a little place, and eventual company, for creating games.

I’ve led an arduous journey into game development, spending 4 years learning about game engines full-time, then 7 years building developer tools and a thriving startup (Sourcegraph). Over the past few years, I’ve been working double-time writing code 100 hours/week working towards eventually executing on a self-funded 10 year game development do-or-die plan.

Motivation

Despite spending ~4 years writing my own game engine full-time back in 2015, when I finished university it was clear to me that gamedev was just not a viable or good career. Instead, I chose to go into developer tools joining Sourcegraph over 7 years ago.

Since then, I’ve learned so much, seen so much, and solidified my view that the gamedev industry is fundamentally broken: companies like EA games* edge towards literally getting children addicted to gambling, those like Telltale Games* violate federal labor laws, those like Blizzard* have rampant and systemic sexual harrassment in their DNA, and the entire industry creeps more and more towards a house-always-wins casino gambling ring of profit-driven motives than actual care for players.

I’m regularly dumbfounded by how slow and bureaucratic these companies are. By how players want them to listen to them and bring the game in a better direction, all while being ignored or getting an empty promise from a PR team. Quality of games are sufferring.

Game companies are in a race to the bottom-I’d like to flip this on it’s head, and release games you want to pay for.

* Allegedly, these are opinions not facts

State of Hexops today

Most of my time goes to Mach engine, laying the groundwork for future games I want to publish. Development of Mach engine is pretty much full-time for me, with ad-hoc part-time contributions from others. I still hold a full-time position at Sourcegraph so I’m working double-time, 24/7.

In the coming years, I anticipate shifting 100% of my time to Hexops and embarking on that self-funded 10-year journey to make some decent games. We’re not there yet, though.