That combination became Greenfire, a turn-based 3D artillery game with destructible terrain, increasingly unreasonable weapons, and chain reactions that can make a successful shot a very bad idea.

Greenfire is a personal hobby project that I develop outside my normal day job and work hours.

I started because I wanted to play this game. As AI tools became more accessible, the project also gave me a practical reason to learn them. There is something motivating about having a specific idea you care enough about to keep improving after the first version works.

The game I wanted to play

Greenfire is an original tribute to Kenneth Morse’s Tank Wars, not an official remake or an affiliated sequel. I wanted to carry forward the pleasure of lining up a shot, choosing a weapon, and waiting to see what happens when it lands.

The basic idea is easy to understand. Tanks take turns firing across a battlefield. You adjust your aim and power, account for the conditions, and try to survive. Between rounds, you buy weapons and defenses. The terrain changes as the battle unfolds, so the ground beneath a tank can matter as much as the tank itself.

The part I especially enjoy is the domino effect. A shot destroys one tank. Its explosion catches another. The ground disappears beneath a third. Then the consequences work their way back toward the person who fired the first shot. Being technically successful and being pleased with the outcome are sometimes very different things.

A bigger bomb is only one answer

Of course, I included big bombs. One is called the Ridiculously Large Bomb. Another is called The Reset Button. Subtlety has its place, but it does not need the entire weapons menu.

Some of the more interesting choices do something else. Dig Your Own Grave removes the dirt beneath an opponent and lets falling do the damage. The Shockwave Launcher sends a tank flying. The Silent Precision Dart rewards a direct hit against an unprotected tank with a kill that does not trigger a death explosion. When you are standing too close to your target, that last detail becomes important.

Those weapons give players different problems to solve. Do you need more damage, a better angle, or a way to avoid being caught in your own chain reaction? I want the answer to depend on the situation, rather than always being “buy the largest explosive you can afford.”

I also added a shooting range with unlimited weapons and targets that do not shoot back. It gives players somewhere to experiment before discovering the consequences in a match. You can see examples in the Greenfire weapons video collection.

Learning AI by giving it a real problem

I have used AI extensively to help develop Greenfire, including working through code, troubleshooting, and preparing material to share the game. My role has involved deciding what I want the experience to be, playing it, noticing what feels wrong, and asking for specific changes. That process has taught me much more than a demonstration in which everything works on the first attempt.

The camera is a good example. Early versions could zoom in so closely that an explosion filled the screen while the rest of the chain reaction happened somewhere else. Pulling back solved that problem, but going too far made the tanks and their surroundings difficult to see. Abrupt turns and cuts created another problem: a camera could technically follow the action and still be unpleasant to watch.

It took several rounds of playing and adjustment to get to a view I liked: enough distance to understand the battlefield, enough closeness to enjoy the impact, and smoother movement between the two. I also caught an edge case where firing after manually zooming in on an enemy left the camera stuck too close to the target.

That was a useful lesson in being specific. “Make the camera better” leaves a lot unanswered. Describing where I was looking, what I clicked, what happened next, and what I missed gave us a problem we could actually work on.

Browser testing brought its own surprises. Something that felt smooth in one browser could pause in another. Recording gameplay introduced a separate set of audio problems. Each issue required separating what I could observe from what I merely suspected. AI made it easier to investigate and try changes, but I still had to play the result and decide whether the change helped.

What comes next

The current browser version includes configurable battles against computer opponents, local hot-seat play, a 20-round single-player campaign, and the shooting range. The Steam store page is live as Coming Soon while I continue preparing and testing the Windows version. Online multiplayer will be available in the Steam release.

I would love to see Greenfire become a game that people return to, introduce to friends, and feel was worth their time and money. Getting there means paying attention to the less spectacular details as well as the explosions: clear controls, fair difficulty, reliable performance, and feedback from people who did not build it.

For now, I have taken a game I remembered fondly and used that enthusiasm to build something I can play and share. I am still learning, and I have plenty left to improve. That is a large part of why I want to keep working on it.

If it looks like your kind of game, try Greenfire free in your desktop browser. You can also wishlist Greenfire on Steam or watch more gameplay on YouTube.

And if you try it, I would like to know: which weapon made you laugh, and what made you want another round?

The post Building Greenfire: A Childhood Favorite, a New Game, and a Reason to Learn AI appeared first on Lee Doren.

However, while reaching out to potential clients, I ended up getting in contact with Randstad, a multinational human resource consulting firm. Randstad Sourceright, under the umbrella of Randstad, were looking for someone to recruit leaders for Ericsson, a Swedish multinational networking and telecommunications company headquartered in Stockholm. I was offered a fantastic opportunity to work exclusively for them on this project. As a result, Doren Consulting will no longer be performing HR or Talent Acquisition services as of July 25, 2022.

I want to thank my clients and everyone who supported me with Doren Consulting. I really appreciate it.

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Doren Consulting is a boutique HR and Talent Acquisition firm. I will help clients with a variety of services including, screening applications, interviewing candidates, and recruiting top talent.

I want to thank my professional colleagues who have been wonderful to work with throughout the years, and I’m very grateful that many of you have already referred me business.

I hope to bring the same professionalism that people experienced when working with me as an employee to my new clients as an entrepreneur. I’m very excited to get to work.

The post Doren Consulting: I Launched A Human Resources and Talent Acquisition Firm appeared first on Lee Doren.

I discovered online that many people struggle to pass the Solutions Architect Exam, even with years of experience, and as a result I thought I would share the training and study process that worked for me. This is a brief outline of how I earned my certifications:

1) I purchased a subscription to acloud.guru, which is a leader in cloud certification training. I then watched all the applicable videos each night for 3 weeks. I also followed their recommendation to practice building a Virtual Private Cloud (“VPC”) from memory;

2) I watched videos on YouTube via Andrew Brown on Free Code Academy;

3) I took 6 practice exams from Jon Borso. After I completed his exams, I retook them to see if I could answer each question in less than 1 minute;

4) I reviewed Jon Borso’s “cheat sheets” to study major aspects of each AWS service;

5) I read several FAQs from the AWS official literature on each service; and

6) I took an official AWS practice exam the night before the official exam.

I recommend that once someone can pass one of Jon Borso’s practice exams, he or she should sign up for the official exam within one week afterwards. During the week up to the exam, continue to retake Borso’s practice exams until you can score 90%+.

While this won’t guarantee a passing score, it should significantly increase your chances. I hope this helps anyone who is interested in AWS certification.

The post How I Became an AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate in Less Than Three Months appeared first on Lee Doren.

Recently, I discovered Dan Carlin’s, “Hardcore History,” after hearing Joe Rogan recommended his work. Hardcore History is a podcast that really should be described as a series of audiobooks on major historic events or people. I started Carlin’s work by listening to “Wrath of Khans,” Carlin’s several-hours-long epic about Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. Soon, I was hooked and purchased all of his podcasts, including those about World War I, Stalingrad, the Punic Wars, Alexander the Great, the Persian Empire, The Fall of the Roman Empire, etc. Now that I am almost done listening to the entire “Hardcore History” collection, I have to praise Carlin as a genius who truly created a masterpiece.

The first time you listen to Carlin, you’ll notice his style is one of unrelenting passion and intensity. Moreover, he has an incredible ability to connect his audience with people from the past, rather than presenting historical figures as caricatures wholly detached from the modern world. For example, when Carlin discusses a particularly gruesome or important event, he’ll pause for a second and say something like, “Imagine you’re there. What does that sound like? What does that look like? Imagine this is happening to you!!”

A theme he regularly revisits throughout all of his work is that the people “back then” are the same human beings of today. For example, if you took a modern child today and raised him or her in the past, that child would grow up exactly like the people from the past. The DNA is the same, but culture and environment is the key variable on a macro level. This idea is pretty significant when you consider the horrific cruelty inflicted by people on each other throughout history. Carlin dares to explore the implications of this idea in greater detail, and he asks what it means to be human. What does the past say about us?

Laughably, Carlin regularly says that he’s an “admirer of history,” but dismisses the notion that he is a “historian.” His modesty about his own ability really becomes comical as he reads direct quotes from ancient eyewitnesses and parses through complex texts, but then apologizes to his audience because he doesn’t know how to pronounce a clan in an ancient language. In his defense, Carlin has interviewed Victor Davis Hanson for a shorter podcast, a truly great military historian, so maybe he is simply using Hanson as the model of what a historian should be.

Overall, after listening to one of Carlin’s podcasts, most people will come away with a better understanding of history than years of formal education. He manages to make it incredibly entertaining too. I highly recommend you listen to his work.

The post Reviewing Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History — A Masterpiece appeared first on Lee Doren.

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