(UNDER CONSTRUCTION)
My first tech job, in the 2000's
Pre-iPhone/Android, and pre-08-recession, I worked for Tira Wireless, a company that specialized in the porting of mobile games across various devices.
Those were the days of Java-based or C-based mobile apps (J2ME, BREW, etc), running on devices like Nokia S40 or Samsung Flip. Most devices had very crude web browsers and the idea of web apps didn't
Often screen resolutions were 128x128, you could play 8bit wav sounds and absolutely no video.
Payload considerations were bits and bytes. Often I'd be tasked to shave off kb's off of images just so we could make the 64kb package size for a new device.
My days were dominated by Photoshop and specialized tools to analyze color palettes and compress images.
I recall developing deep batch scripts to run through various image compressors, compare results and take the smallest output. It differed everyt time, so one could not simply chooser "compression technology x" and forget it. The make-up of every image determined how well it played wioth a compression algorithm. A noisey image will compress differently than an image being a smooth gradient.
Spent a lot of time editing audio, normalizing and removing dead space. Reducing channels and instruments in MIDI files.
Touched at least 50 popular titles, like Tetris, Wheel of Fortune, to Disney's Incredibles.
Looking back, this job was an adventure!
Too bad 2 things destroyed the venture: They were directly funded by Lehmann Brothers, one of the big bank failures that kicked-off the '08 recession. As well, Apple's iPhone came out at this time and completely revolutionized the world.
We developed a sample game in-house just. It was called BaseJumper, and below is a random sprite assembly.
