This question might be too broad, but how would you compare the infrastructure, English level, technical talent, etc. of Rwanda with other African nations?
Africa is a huge, huge place, it is hard to even fathom how big and varied it is. East, West, North, South are all really really different. Within East Africa, Rwanda fares well from an infrastructure point of view, lags a bit in English due to being Francophone until recently and on talent, I'd say most are at similar levels. The talent is everywhere, but really the skills are far behind the west pretty much everywhere as well.
I think it also depends on the type of operations you're looking to hire. I've found that people with stronger skill sets (for example, engineers), are very difficult to hire for swing or overnight shifts, even if salaries are double or triple the daytime shift.
(I run 24/7 operations in Vietnam, I'd love to talk shop.)
A cross-platform game engine sounds awesome. But I wonder what kind of game can truly be write-once, run-everywhere, and considered "fun" on all platforms.
A few major challenges:
- Designing a game that is fun and intuitive to play with a wide variety of input controllers (touch, mouse, keyboard, joystick).
- Handling the entire spectrum of screen resolutions, from older iPhones to high-end desktop computers. The game would also probably need to work in both portrait and landscape modes.
- The QA effort alone could be huge. Testing on quirky desktop browsers or buggy Android devices alone could be a dealbreaker.
- I'd argue that the time spent trying to figure out a game design or technical workaround for a particular platform would be better spent focusing on one platform and making the game more fun. In my experience, trying to make a fun game involves a lot of trial and error and iteration, and I personally don't think I could do it if I also had to keep in mind multiple distinct target platforms.
I can envision a couple one-button games like Angry Birds or Tiny Wings possibly having a chance, but even in those cases, I'd argue it'd be better to nail one platform first and then incrementally add other platforms instead of spreading oneself too thin.
I am writing a simple puzzle game, and am doing a totally different UI level for even mouse and touch. For example when dragging, with touch it is nice to offset the piece so it is easier to see, whereas with mouse you probably want it dead-center.
- Designing a game that is fun and intuitive to play with a wide variety of input controllers (touch, mouse, keyboard, joystick).
It was actually a platformer. SDL has great support for Joysticks/Keyboard so that was no trouble. The same goes for JS. As for touch screens, I found a good alternative control scheme that takes advantage of the touch screen. You are still right, but the game was designed to be straightforward enough to handle different control schemes.
- Handling the entire spectrum of screen resolutions, from older iPhones to high-end desktop computers. The game would also probably need to work in both portrait and landscape modes.
Impressive, this was actually major issue. The game requires no specific aspect ratio, so that wasn't a problem. Still, we don't want it to look tiny on HD monitor while looking normal on an iPhone, so the resolution of the images in the game can scale up and down at different sizes (1x, 2x, 3x) depending on what's ideal.
- The QA effort alone could be huge. Testing on quirky desktop browsers or buggy Android devices alone could be a dealbreaker.
No problems with modern browsers, if they supported Canvas, they supported the Javascript that was needed. I admit Android might've been a problem, I can't test on everything.
- I'd argue that the time spent trying to figure out a game design or technical workaround for a particular platform would be better spent focusing on one platform and making the game more fun. In my experience, trying to make a fun game involves a lot of trial and error and iteration, and I personally don't think I could do it if I also had to keep in mind multiple distinct target platforms.
That was actually the original plan. I ended up porting it to some new area whenever I would get stuck on some other problem and got caught up in that part of the project instead because I found it fun. Since the requirements were so intentionally minimal it wasn't very hard. I didn't know anything about iOS or Android development going in for example, they each took about 2 weeks.
The pressure to censor content often comes from advertisers. A lot of advertisers don't want their ads showing up next to photos with even minimally offensive content.
(This doesn't explain everything for Google, but I'm sure it was a factor.)
I used to work at an affiliate network where an advertiser's ad ended up next to a satirical video for "Tourette syndrome Barbie". Some national Tourette syndrome organization called the advertiser and threatened to boycott them. They pulled the entire campaign from us, despite our ability to make sure this particular affiliate would never promote the ad again. Long story short, knee jerk chain reactions are the norm. Advocacy group or other consumer group overreacts, advertiser is forced to overreact to avoid a boycott or press incident, publisher gets screwed out of a good campaign, picture of guy flipping off nobody is banned forever.
In other words, you're half-right. Don't blame Google. But probably don't blame advertisers either. Blame some overly sensitive consumer group or advocacy group for having no sense of humor and throwing their weight around because they have nothing better to do.
Google maximizes profit satisfying advertisers in my personal detriment. Of course I can blame Google for that. I never care about businesses making money, I only care about my personal comfort and welfare.
Lets be clear here, we're talking about Google removing a particular picture with an offensive gesture shown.
This is not to the detriment of your personal comfort or welfare. Please stop hamming this up beyond the reality of the situation. Google run a private service and while they should not censor political speech or genuine opinion, they certainly have the right to determine what they consider offensive.
It's okay for Google to make their site advertiser-safe.
It's not okay for Google to delete the image, without warning or notification to the user. They could have easily reset his profile pic to null and sent him a note.
- Starting from different points in the piece also provides a good subtle variation.
- Playing the piece at different octaves.