I happen to be idling currently, and could use a little something to keep my design skills going, so I would like to join a project for a short while.

About Me
To give you an idea of who I am and why you might want me, here's a pretty weak self-assessment. I have been programming for 9 years, starting very casually with DM and DarkBASIC. From this I moved through PHP, Perl, C++ and into Java when I joined university.

At university I studied Software Engineering for 4 years, giving me a great opportunity to learn not just programming languages (Java, C, C++, Scheme, AspectJ, ... ), but how to program, and hopefully, design a system and program it well, test it etc. Similarly, this allowed me 60 hours a week to practice my skills for the full 4 years.

Upon leaving university I joined a small British company called Graffica Ltd, working for the past 2 years on one of their new operational air traffic control projects, called LARA. Under this role I took on development of safety assured software, and all the design back and forth that goes with it. I sign off test readiness reviews as part of the safety testing and release process.

An important thing to note is that I don't actually write DM very often, so don't know the whole of the DM reference and procs off by heart, for instance. However in my experience of helping out people's game designs, good logic is fairly universal. So I don't think my lack of experience here will be a burden to anyone who'd like me to work with them, it just slows things down a little.

Regarding work to show off, I only really have a collection of blog posts and my library Event Scheduler. The library has been used well by a few people, in particular Valekor used it to increase his RPG game's server capacity from 50 - 70 players to up to 150.

About You
Unfortunately, I can't really work for Anime games. Aside from a personal opinion that we have quite enough already (but I'd love to see a really good one), I do really struggle to muster the motivation to work on them, even for the challenge of the complexity of the good project people were running.

I will happily work on most other things though, including improving libraries with you, if you'd like. Another area I'd like to work in is existing games, that have been released. I do like the idea of improving a game with a community, no matter how big or small, so that players can see the benefit.

I will not join a team or project for any great length of time. I would imagine that at best, I would probably spend 3 months working with you on particular systems you'd like developed / improved, improving the overall performance and design of your code, improving it's robustness or whatever else you feel would benefit from my skills. It may be less, depending on how I feel. I'll agree a leaving date in advance with you, so you can plan okay.

Compensation
This one is easy. I would quite like with being credited for my work, in whatever way you usually credit people who helped your game out. Just a little something somewhere that says "Yeah, Stephen001 did X, cheers" will do me fine.

I would like to retain some ability to blog about and show examples of the work I did for you. So if you're really paranoid about your source code, we can't really work together. I believe that people learn best through real world examples, so I'd like the option of using my work to teach other programmers, if I feel like doing so later. I will discuss this before doing it, and give your project / game due credit and mention in my blog.

Contact
Let me know what you think, and drop some contact details in the comments if you need to speak with me one-on-one. I'll probably choose the people who are most open with me about the work they want doing and what their project is.

So for example I will view someone posting a quick description / link to their project and telling me what they'd like me to work on in the comments to this blog as very good. A simple "MSN me" with no explanation is something I would probably look at last, if I get a few replies I may not even look at it at all. I like people who are honest and upfront with me.

Of course, maybe everyone is okay for programming help at the moment, which is cool also.