Phew, I have to take a breath or two before I get into this article. The last month and a half has been a whirlwind of exciting events, opportunities and work.

Motivation Burst

I have to say a massive thanks to all the people who where extremely positive and gave us all here at the Flax Project a great bust of motivation to continue our work on the Flax HTML5 Game Engine and the blog. In no particular order we would like to thank the following people.
  

Johnny Ryan, for showing such interest in Flax and of course mentioning myself and Carl in his highlights of the Dublin Web Summit in Wired UK.

“The most enterprising, such as undergraduate developers Ciarán McCann and Carl Lange, find their own ways to make themselves relevant. McCann and Lange were at the Summit in the hope of impressing prospective employers with Flax, the open-source HTML5 game engine that they built to prove their real-world skills.”

Beth Kocher from Brando Digital who we met at the Pub Summit. Beth again showed much interest in Flax and we have since visted Brando Digital and gave a quick presentation about what we do here at Flax.ie, all thanks to Beth.

Alan O’Dea we met at the Dublin Web Summit 2011 from Simple Lifeforms and had a great chat after the summit about social gaming and game development in general.

CEO of DataHug, Connor Murphy. What can I say? Connor is a great lad, myself and Carl met up with him and all the team in Dublin at DataHug’s current HQ and went for lunch.

Gavin Duffy and Paul Smith from 3DSim Games who we met at the Dublin Web Summit.

Paul Powell, a Game Development lecturer from Sligo IT.

The team from Fluid UI, Ian Hannigan and Dave_Kearney. Two great guys working on some really cool HTML5 mobile interface mocking software. James Kelly a blogger here at Flax.ie recently got on board with Fluid UI and is working as an intern with them for the summer. All the best of luck to the guys and James.

Eoghan Jennings an angel Investor who gave us a good grilling and was interested in what we were up to, great guy. Again thanks to Johnny Ryan who introduced us.

Pedro Tavares, myself and Carl work with Pedro in R&D at Ericsson. Pedro has 25 years experience working as a programmer and is really great guy.

Joseph Kehoe a lecturer from IT Carlow who got us the office space last summer in the college to work on the Flax HTML5 Game Engine.

The list really does go on, and do forgive me if I have’t mentioned you here. It’s hard to keep track when there is so much happening. We met so many great people at the Pub Summit and the Dublin Web Summit I find it hard to remember, plus there was free beer.

Its almost Flax.ie’s Brithday

Yep, on July 7th, 2010 I posted our first article Hello, world! – The Flax Project . So on the 7th of July 2011 Flax.ie will be 1 year old. And I must say I am quite proud and pleased with how far we have come. We have some great plans for the future of the Flax Project, which are really exciting.

Special Thanks

Since its almost Flax.ie’s birthday I would just like to take a mintue to thank a few people for their support.
 
I would first like to thank my co-Founder and good friend Carl Lange. Carl always says to me these days that he doesn’t deserve any of the praises we get for Flax, because I wrote most of the code for Flax Game Engine and built the website. And what I say to that, is bullshit! Without the team effort the Flax Project wouldn’t be where it is today. Flax has always been a team effort and will continue going forward into the future to be a team effort. (Plus I intend to heap a load of work on Carl in the next few months, just don’t tell him that. Oh wait he’s the website’s editor… shit!) Anyway I just want to say a big thanks to Carl, couldn’t have had a better co-Founder. Oh, and follow him on twitter @csl_
 
I would like to thank all our bloggers here at Flax.ie for their great articles about their game development projects as well. I really hope we can help them launch their careers in the game industry. Also shout-out to our newest blogger Keith Cully, who is also a game development student on our course at IT Carlow And of course I would also like to thank all my family and friends for the support and words of encouragement, they are very much appreciated.

Where’s the Flax Game Engine Ciarán!?

To the 4,943 people who have clicked on the Flax Game Engine menu at the top in recent months and found no new posts I am sorry. Luckily I have been working quietly for the last month on the engine, and in the coming weeks myself and Carl will be hopefully doing fast iterations to get more features finished to form some kind of demo which you guys can play around with.
 
So here and now I am making a commitment that 2 weeks or less from today I will post a the 10th dev diary in which will be a link to a live demo which you can mess around with. So make sure to tweet us @FlaxProject @C_McCann @csl_ to keep us working. However, I am taking a three day break for Oxegen, effectively my summer holidays. Oh and we also work during the day. This is going to be a tough 2 weeks, oh well.
 
So do remember to watch this space as in the coming days we have some extremely cool looking articles lined up for you guys. Thanks!