I am Daniel Cleaton, a fairly long-term veteran of the Scottish game development “scene”: having worked in game QA at several Dundee and Edinburgh studios a number of years ago; being a mature student graduate of the University of Abertay, Dundee’s Game Production Management degree; being the founder of the now-defunct ObSkewer Games and having a stab at releasing my own games on Xbox Creators Club back in the XNA days; and other gamedev-related jaunts along the way. I am currently the QA Manager at YoYo Games, where I have been for the last 10 years-ish.
However, I have only been dabbling in deep learning using Fast.ai for about 18 months - although, there was a whopping gap in the middle of this while I waited for v2 to be released and become mature before restarting/diving in properly to fill up the free evening times that Covid brought to my world. Realistically, since early March 2021, but with a bit of messing about and understanding of the basics before that.
So… I am going to use this blog primarily as a way of documenting my own research into deep learning (and later, into more general machine learning and dev diaries for the cool little projects I hope to make with all this knowledge).
I hope you enjoy my content and find at least bits of it educational. Maybe even inspirational.
Fast.ai
I am currently learning how to use the Fast.ai framework with PyTorch in order to figure out deep learning, play around with some new skills, and generally have some fun along the way.
And I should say just now that it’s thanks to Fast.ai that I have created this new GitHub Pages blog today, using their fantastic guide to taking the same tools I now use for doing my deep learning and making them do double duty as my blog-authoring software also. In this way, I hope to have posts showing the behind-the-scenes detail of the work I am doing and the actual results I am getting at the time.
If you’re interested in deep learning and haven’t tried Fast.ai, then you can find out more info on this completely free, easy-to-learn and extremely powerful library at their main website. You can check out their free 2020 video course, and their free book to accompany/expand upon the videos. Note if you wish to save your eyesight and spend some time away from your screen, you can also buy a physical or Kindle copy of the book off various bookstores and Amazon (as I have done).
GameMaker Studio 2
YoYo are the developers of the popular GameMaker Studio software with which you can create your own games and get them onto stores so people can play/buy them. Feel free to check that out if you’re into making your own games or fancy giving it a go.
Note that even though I say about GameMaker in my introduction to give context about who I am, this blog is not intended to be a GameMaker blog or anything to do with my day job, so please don’t follow this blog or contact me here if you’re looking for GMS2 stuff - although, I may from time-to-time post the odd snippet or dev diary for something game-related I am working on.