I guess I needed a blog in order to post reports on my progress working with the kdegames team, so here it is.
First, a little bit about myself. I live in Brazil, and have been working with software and games at Tabuleiro , a company I started with Raquel Ravanini in 1994. We also produce commercial middleware for multimedia and game developers since 1996, and I have worked in a couple of open source projects on the past couple of years, on sourceforge.

During this time I have followed the development of KDE closely. I also attended the FISL conference for the past 4 years, and GDC since 1999, building experience and knowledge about FLOSS and the gaming industry at the same time.

Well, I decided that helping with the development of FLOSS projects is the path I want to take next. The success of FLOSS, and KDE specially, is even more essential in developing countries like Brazil, and fortunately I have some spare time and energy to contribute to this goal. And after 3 years of experimentation in our commercial products, my Qt skills are probably decent enough to begin hacking the kde code “officially”, so I offered to help with kdegames coding for the KDE4 release.

My first self-assignment was to help with the port of KGoldrunner to the new QGraphicsView architecture. This is going well, and the major portions have already been done. Thanks go to Ian Wadham and Dmitry Suzdalev, who helped me a lot during this initial phase, and TT for the support in qt4-preview-feedback. It is sometimes difficult to work with pre-release software, but Andreas Aardal Hanssen has been extremely helpful. Hopefully our experiences with the kdegames ports would also help refine QGraphicsView before it goes final.

Two weeks ago I decided to begin an overhaul of KMahjongg, one of my favorite kde games, and Raquel Ravanini donated her vectorial tileset graphics to the project. Then Albert kindly asked me to step up as KMahjongg’s maintainer, so there is no turning back now 🙂