Day: March 2, 2009

Speaking of Becoming a GameDevDad…

It’s time to congratulate my long-time friend Jari Komppa and his wife Mia – they’ve just had their first child, a boy named Niklas Antero!  Both mother and child are doing well, and I’m sure Niklas will be coding logic simulators in no time.


So…What’s Being a GameDevDad All About?

It’s…

* Having a wife who can whip a guild into shape and get them running Naxx in no time flat.

* Having a fourteen-year-old daughter who can beat you at your own game.

* Having a seven-year-old son who can spot a bad game at a thousand paces.

* Having a four-year-old daughter who can visually tell the difference between a GBA cart, a DS cart, a GameCube disc, a PS2 disc and an Xbox 360 disc.

* Watching your four-year-old expertly navigate through menus she can’t read yet in order to heal her party in Blue Dragon.

* Discovering that someone has drawn all over the bottom screen of your DS in blue crayon.

* Hearing your fourteen-year-old use terms like “invisible geometry”, “bad camera design”, “buggy”, and “shelf-level event”.

* Realizing that your seven-year-old has spent all your Microsoft Points.

* Having kids who never have to wait for anything. Games boot up instantly and the movie is always starting.

* Having trouble debugging your own game because as soon as you start it up, one of them appears at your elbow and wants to play it.

* Coming back from a trip to discover that your original System Shock 2 CD has been snapped in half.

* Watching your four-year old (who still can’t read, mind you) expertly navigate through your home LAN to find the movie in a shared folder that she wants to watch.

* Being scared by how tech-savvy your kids are.

* Having your kids point cool things on the internet out to you every once in a while.

* Smiling when your older daughter tells you she got extra credit in her Reading class for playing Odin Sphere.

* Signing up for a VOIP service so you can cheaply talk to all the friends you met online who live nowhere near you.

* Buying a mint copy of Front Mission 3 off Ebay…and then discovering the disc a week later face down under the rug.

* Watching your son expertly scale a Colossus.

* Keeping your copies of the Grand Theft Auto games on a shelf so high even you have trouble reaching it.

* Having more game discs than DVDs.

* Having your oldest daughter tell you the basics about the Cuban Missle Crisis (which she learned in school) and then telling her that the Soviets really instigated the Crisis just so they could get Sokolov back.

* Having your kids constantly pester you to take them to work, in the hopes of playing (or getting!) something they shouldn’t be able to yet.

* Waching your oldest daughter play Spanish Castle Magic on Expert.

* Being the neighborhood Cool Dad 🙂


Who Moved My Personal Blog?

I swear, I didn’t do it!

Oh, wait…yes I did.

AnthonySalter.com now points to both this blog and the final destination (really!) of my personal blog: GameDevDad.com. I was really pleased to get that URL 🙂

I promise that this will be the last rejiggerings of my blogs. For a while.