Skip to main content

My Plan for this Blog

This is my first post!

I'll admit, this blog is just another project for me, and a large number of my projects end up being abandoned when I come up with new ideas. We'll have to wait and see if this one survives.


Here I'll outline my intentions for this blog.

The primary purpose for this blog will be to provide development updates of my current projects which I am commited to finishing (a devlog). At the time of writing, these are VoiceAct and INGA (+ a couple of other small ones).

I also plan on making some more interesting posts relating to development workflows and services I use, new technologies I am passionate about (like Blazor), and tips for other developers. I may also make some spontaneous posts about things like Cyber Security, Blockchain, Quantum Computing, Machine Learning, etc.

About Me


I'm a University student in the UK. I am a very academic person but I like working on projects on the side. For the past 5 years I've been running a small business, selling products on the Unity Asset Store for the Unity Game Engine. You can find out about them here. I've also worked on a range of other projects and published some of my work on GitHub.

For a lot of the work I've done, I am not able to talk about here. If you would like to find out more, please contact me and I may be able to send you a copy of my CV.

Here are some bigger projects I can tell you about:

INGA


For the past 12 months I've been Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of INGA Ltd, boss of ~9. INGA is a student run company. We currently have around 15 students involved in total.

We raised over $10,000 from crowdfunding the idea, see here.

'INGA' is the name of the service we are developing. In two words it's an 'investment platform', think of it as a cross between crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, and an exchange like NYSE.

Basically, businesses sign up and each business starts off with a certain number of tokens. Those tokens act as a digital currency for the businesses. i.e. the businesses and users can buy/sell their tokens in a market. This works in exactly the same way as selling shares, except the business does not give away any equity. Instead the tokens come with certain perks which the business provides.
For example, holders of 10 tokens could use a certain perk, holders of 100 could use a better perk.
It differs from usual crowfunding sites as there is no 'investment target'. Instead investments are more of an ongoing process.

It's more of a Proof-of-Concept for how an alternative market could function rather than a money making venture.

I'll be releasing more posts to explain this better in the future, but in the meantime you can find out more here.

VoiceAct


VoiceAct is another idea that I've been thinking about fot the past 18 months. This is one I am attempting on my own. I completed the design stage last month. Development is begining soon.

Many content creators, small teams in particular (like indie game developers), struggle to find voice actors for their games/videos/apps/films. VoiceAct will be a platform where content creators can go and post jobs to hire voice actors.

Anyone can become a voice actor on the platform. By opening up voice acting roles to the public, there will be actors available for every kind of regional accent, every language, with audio of any desired quality level, made available to all small and indie studios across the world.

VoiceAct will be intially released as a web-based service, with Unity Game Engine integrations. I will focus on expanding integrations more in the future to get into content creators development pipelines. I also intend on creating a mobile app for the actors.

Again, I'll be posting more information about this soon. You'll be able to register your interest here soon.


Enjoy!

I hope you are able to gain something from this blog!

There will be a comments section at the end of every post for any questions you have, and you can always contact me at james@jam-es.com


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Terminals in Sublime Text 3

TL;DR - Need a quick answer on how to create terminals in Sublime Text 3? Scroll down and watch the video or read the instructions below it. A while ago I started a series on YouTube of 'Sublime Text Tips'. Sublime Text 3 is one the best code editors currently in existence (fact), but most people just install it an use it without realising how it can be customized and extended to meet your needs. My aim was to release a series of videos explaining some of these widely unknown capabilities. I got as far as the third video and then got distracted with other things 😅 But recently I noticed the 3rd video I made has been increasing in popularity. For at least 6 months it sat at less than 200 views, and over the course of the last 2 months it has shot up to 850 (at the time of writing). Perhaps it's coincidence, or perhaps YouTube's algorithms have changed. Either way, there seem to be people who want this information. The video explains how to set up termin

Generating a MSI Installer for a WPF Application

This post serves as a tutorial for creating a MSI installer for your WPF Applications in Visual Studio. For this we use WiX (recommended by Microsoft). Prerequisites I assume you already have a Visual Studio solution containing a WPF Project. And I assume you have some experience with Visual Studio and XML. You do not need any prior knowledge of WiX. Step 1: Install Wix We are going to need WiX to generate our MSI. If you don't already have Wix installed, go ahead and download it from here . You'll be redirected to the relevant GitHub releases page where you can download the .exe file to install WiX.

Best Packages for Sublime Text 3 (Excluding Themes)

Sublime Text 3 is pretty good out-of-the-box but reaches a whole new level when you install some of the great packages on offer. Below I'll list my favourite packages for Sublime Text. These are all packages which will enhance your productivity across all languages, so no themes or language-specific packages will be listed here.