Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Helping those devs who are less fortunate


Sorry for the disappearence as of late.  I've been sick for a while, and game dev is one of the last things I could focus on to be honest...

See that laptop up there?  This was one of my extra laptops I had laying around getting ready to be shipped at the UPS store.  It wasn't doing much good just sitting in an unmarked drawer, was it?  So, I offered to give it away to a friend in Poland at my expense, only it needed a bit of TLC to get it running again (BIOS related issues).  Since he's been having a lot of trouble finding a job in his area, getting an affordable computer that supports core OpenGL has been a challenge.

This guy works really hard on this big war simulation game, but his old laptop is a bit of a bottleneck for him.  He wanted to buy a new computer, but due to his financial troubles, sadly could not afford one.  Wanting to do something about it, I remembered the ASUS laptop I had laying around just waiting to be fixed and used again.  So I made him the offer, and he gladly accepted it, with confidence he could get it fixed.  Afterwards, he gave me the shipping details, and I was off to the UPS store.  Although the cost to ship a parcel to Poland (and eastern Europe in general) was more expensive than I thought, it was worth it.  Fortunately, I could afford to cover such ridiculous costs...

Almost two weeks later, it arrived.  Now, he has a working comp with a decent GPU for a change!  Intel's OpenGL drivers aren't the best, especially when building a game, so hopefully he'll have less bugs to deal with.

Just thought I'd share this story with everyone and hopefully encourage others to help other devs who are less fortunate than us.  I'm not saying put yourself at financial risk to do so, but just think of a great game you could help someone else create.  In this case, I wanted to help my Polish friend in his time of need! :)

Shogun.

4 comments:

  1. Beautifull story. I hope this inspires other people to become altruist :)

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  2. Wow, so much more respect for Blue
    +rep

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  3. Now when you sold it bynbuying it for 450 usd only to shipbit to central eu, you gave me a chance to build aomething bette. Aside if failuers googke it com.artapp.demo on play store requies a phone with sdcard. Thanks man

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