Category: Self-Improvement

Antiversary

October 16, 2009
Self-ImprovementThe Game BizUncategorized
0 Comment

It was one year ago today, on October 16, 2008, that I had the ventricular tachycardia that could have killed me.

I remember thinking multiple times in the weeks after, “I wish it were a year from now”. Well, now it is.

And if you’d told me last year, “Okay, you’re going to almost die, but your pacemaker is going to save you by shocking you about twenty times over the course of three days. You’ll spend weeks in the hospital while doctors puzzle out what exactly is wrong with you. You’ll undergo multiple procedures only to be back in the hospital a day after release. And two months after you seem to be okay, you’ll lose your job.

You’ll spend the next nine months in extremely difficult financial circumstances, doing whatever contract job you can find and mooching off everyone who cares about you. You’ll struggle with anxiety. For a long time the only place you’ll feel safe is in your own bed.

But as time passes, your anxiety will lesson. Regular exercise will make you feel much better, even if it doesn’t result in rapid weight loss. You’ll find even more joy and solace in your programming than you used to.

And a year later, you’ll be one day away from embarking on a huge adventure, travelling across the country to start work at the job of your dreams.”

If you’d told me that, I’d have said, “Uh, is there any way I can just kind of jump to the good part at the end?”

No, seriously, I’m poised to end up with a much better life than I had a year ago. I won’t say that getting put in the hospital and losing my job were good things, but they led me here, and I like where here is. Or where here is going to be when we finally, finally get moved.

But I’m not going to mark this day every year. As the title says, this is an antiversary – a date to forget.

To Stardock and Back

September 28, 2009
Cool PeopleGamesSelf-ImprovementThe Game Biz
13 Comments

No shit, there I was.

(Forgive the expletive, but my friend Nathan Regener is of the opinion that all great stories start with “No shit, there I was” and I concur with him.)

Okay, both of my previous posts were made when I was exhausted for one reason or another, so I’m going to start over and tell the whole story.

No shit, there I was. Tuesday night before the flight, I go out and buy a rather nice netbook called a Gateway LT31 so that I can stay in touch with my family and show my interviewers at Stardock any of my previous projects that they might want to see. I spend practically the entire night scrubbing Vista off it and putting XP on, installing Visual C++ Express and Visual C# Express, syncing with my Subversion server and then making sure all my stuff compiles. Um…while Warcraft III and World of Warcraft install in the background. I also get my certification from Apple to install games I’ve compiled on actual devices so I do some updates on Inaria (it’s > < this close people, really) and install it on my iPod Touch. (Which is actually Ryan's but let's not get into that again.)

So I get very little sleep, but honestly, can you blame me? I finally fall asleep around 4 AM after everything is proven to work (except WoW which continues to download for another three or four hours; that game has just gotten out of hand).

I wake up at 7 AM and help my wife get the chilluns off to school. I then pack (which I should have done the night before, of course, but I was too busy fiddling with the computer). I bring with me some books to help me review, including Effective C++ and Game Coding Complete, Third Edition. I get to the airport around 10 AM for a flight that leaves at noon. I kiss my wife good-bye and enter security.

Now, I haven’t flown in ten years. You’ll notice that that’s before 9/11. I knew security was going to be tight, but I was surprised that I had to take my belt and shoes off. Once I escaped from security I went to my gate and, of course, had about an hour to wait. I thought I’d get online and send a message to Jamie telling her what was going on…when I realized that the airport did not have complimentary wi-fi. No, they had wi-fi service for four dollars an hour. Since I was going to be there less than an hour I figured it wasn’t worth it, and decided to call her.

That’s when I realized that I didn’t have the cellphone. I’m not in the habit of carrying it everywhere, so I’d left it at home. This is not merely inconvenient, it’s really going to bite me in the butt later on; you’ll see.

So the flight boarded. I was pretty worried. In the end, I’m not afraid of flying per se, I just hate takeoffs and landings. And…I was worried abut my anxiety level. But despite feeling afraid, nothing bad actually happened to me. Unfortunately I didn’t have anything to listen to (I hadn’t thrown any actual music on the iPod) so I basically just sucked it up the entire flight. I did get a little sleep, but mostly I was scared the whole time.

Which, frankly, was stupid because all in all, it was a great flight – smooth takeoff and landing, very little turbulence and we landed twenty minutes early because we had a good tail wind.

So I get off the plane into the largest airport I’ve ever seen. They’ve got people movers. They’ve got a tram. They’ve also got this long tunnel connecting one half of the airport to the other that has frosted glass on the walls that light up different colors in time with the muzak that is playing overhead. Seriously.

That was very cool and surprisingly calming.

But still, I’m in Detroit, Michigan. I do not know a soul. I have no phone. And while I’ve got an address for my hotel I’ve no idea how I’m going to get there. I don’t even know if it’s in Detroit or closer to Plymouth (the town where Stardock is).

So I ascend an escalator just outside the Tunnel of Sound and Light and as I get off it I look to my left. There I see – and I am not kidding – a stand for the Traveler’s Aid Society. And here I thought it wasn’t going to exist for another three thousand years.

Taking this as a sign, I approach them and take out the address for my hotel. And they kindly, kindly give me a map that has both Canton Township (where the hotel is) and Plymouth on it. And point me in the direction of the cab stands.

Now, the direction of the cab stands was also the direction to the shuttles that ferry people to the car rental places. Since I was going to be driving out of Detroit and back I figured I’d do better renting a car than taking a cab everywhere. So I take a shuttle to Budget car rentals. There I am informed that renting a car will be $126 and can I please see your credit card? I hand the nice lady my card; she runs it and frowns.

Now, you see, I don’t have a real credit card. I have a couple of check cards tied to two different bank accounts. Both of them had enough money to cover the rental, but because they weren’t “real” credit cards they couldn’t be used to rent a car. So…no car. I’d been dragging my bags around for an hour now, and I knew Jamie had to be getting nervous because I hadn’t contacted her yet. So I ask the girl at the counter to call me a cab.

I cabbed to the hotel, which was pretty easy to find. As I entered the hotel parking lot I noticed the nearby White Castle restaurant, which also bode well. I paid the cab driver, went inside and said, “My name is Anthony Salter. I have a reservation.”

I’ve always wanted to say that.

Checking in to the hotel was painless and they had free wi-fi. They’ve also got these things called “phones” in each room, so I call Jamie. I tell her everything that has happened so far, and of course, now I’m about to drop dead from exhaustion. But I’m also starving, so once I get done talking to Jamie I walk out to the White Castle and get four of them, which I then bring back to the hotel room and eat with relish. Uh…not really with relish, just with great enjoyment. A White Castle already has pickles on it, it doesn’t need relish.

ANYway, as soon as my stomach is full I cannot keep my eyes open any longer. I plug in my laptop so it can charge and I hit the hay. This was at about 6 PM local time (Michigan is in Eastern Time, an hour ahead us here in Texas). I set the alarm to go off at 9 PM.

Which it does. I start boning up for the interview. I skim through what I think the most relevant parts of Game Coding Complete 3 will be (tools, matrix math and debugging, mostly). I do this for about two and a half hours and go back to bed around 11:30 PM. Interview is at 1 PM the following day.

I wake up at 3:30 AM. I toss and turn for a half-hour before I realize I’m not going to get back to sleep. So I get up and do some more preparation for the interview. I answer some C++ trivia questions online. I read through parts of Effective C++ again and also skim some of my questionnaires that I still had from previous interviews. I shave. I realize that I left my nose hair trimmer at home so I spend a painful half-hour doing some hand plucking. I upload some music to the iPod, thinking it’ll help on the trip home.

Around 6 AM I start feeling sleepy again. I set the alarm clock for 9 AM and get back in the bed.

I wake up at 11:30. The alarm clock had been set to radio and the static that was issuing forth wasn’t enough to wake me up. My interview is in an hour and a half and I am in my underwear.

Now I’m panicking, not only because of my interview but because check-out time at the hotel is noon. I shower really fast. I throw on my nicer clothes and lace up my stormtrooper boots. I throw all the detritus that I’d spread around the room back into my clothing duffel and my backpack, hoping I don’t forget anything. I call the front desk and ask them to call me a cab. I race downstairs and check out just before noon. My cab arrives. I go out and throw the bags into the back of the cab. The cab driver says, “Where are you heading?”

It is then that I realize that I cannot remember Stardock’s exact address. All I remember is that it’s in Plymouth. But I know exactly how to find out; it’s all on Stardock’s web page. I pull out the iPod, run back into the hotel, and try to look it up.

Except that suddenly the hotel’s wi-fi has stopped working. It keeps connecting and disconnecting, never actually bringing up the page. The cab driver honks, so I jump in and say that I want to go to Stardock Corporation. The dispatcher can’t find a listing for it. Finally I say, “Let’s just head to Plymouth and we’ll figure it out from there”. I’m hoping that we’ll drive by an unsecured site long enough for me to bring up the page, but that never happens. Finally we get to Plymouth and I jump out and enter a small coffee shop. It doesn’t have wi-fi, but it does have a phone book.

Which doesn’t have a listing for Stardock.

At this point it’s a few minutes to one. One of the things that I think defines me is that I am never, ever late to an appointment. Ever. And here I am, about to be late to one of the most important ones of my life!

So I ask the nice girl behind the counter (notice how nice everybody has been so far? It’s almost like Texas) if she’s got a computer I can use for a minute. She can’t let me, but I write “Stardock Corporation” on a piece of paper, she goes back to the back and her Google-fu is obviously mighty because she comes right back with the address and phone number. I am so grateful I nearly cry.

I hop back in the cab to discover that the cab’s dispatcher has also looked the company up on the internet and discovered the same address. So now all we have to do is follow the GPS.

Right.

When we got to where the GPS told us to turn, it was closed off with a chain. There was a McDonald’s right next door, so I knew we had to be close (Brad used to talk all the time about eating at a nearby McDonald’s on the Poweruser Podcast). I suggested that we turn into the road next to the McDonald’s. The cab driver says, “Nah, nothing back there but McDonald’s parking.” So we find another way into the complex with the chained-off entrance and drive around the big building there. The cabbie stops someone coming out and asks him if he’s ever heard of Stardock. Nope. Then he asks him what the address on the building is. It’s 14990 and we’re looking for 15090.

So I ask the cabbie, “Please can you turn into that road next to McDonald’s? It’s got to be there!” The cabbie grumbles, “All right, but I don’t think…”

Please observe the following map image.


View Larger Map

Notice that while it denotes the address, it does not give you any information about how to get there from the street. So let’s switch to satellite view!


View Larger Map

The building just east of Beck Road with the green roof is the McDonald’s. Notice how the road next to it keeps going past it, dips down a hill and ends up at a mysterious building!

And thus, I arrived at Stardock Corporation, about twenty-five minutes late. I gave the cab driver a huge tip, picked up my bags and walked inside, certain that I was doomed from the start.

A nice HR lady instantly finds me and gives me a place to put my bags. I apologize profusely about my tardiness; she brushes it off and tells me that she was late to her own interview for the same reason. She then sat me down in a conference room, brought me a glass of water and summoned my interrogators – uh, I mean, interviewers. Once again I was talking to Scott Tykoski, Cari Begle and Jesse Brindle.

And thus began one of the best interviews I’ve ever had. There was nothing difficult or confrontational about it. They asked me again about what games I liked to play. They asked me very, very little about my previous work history, preferring to focus on the games I’d done for myself on the side. I told them about how Inaria had started as a forty-hour challenge and then been ported to the iPhone. I passed around the iPod and they all took a look at it and seemed impressed. Scott asked me if I’d done any other challenges, so I told him about the One Page Game I wrote.

To my utter, utter surprise, at no point was I required to answer C++ trivia questions or write code on a whiteboard.

Indeed, after a very pleasant conversation with the three of them, Scott and Jesse got back to work and Cari took me to see Brad. Again, I had an incredibly pleasant conversation with him – not about my previous work, but about what games I’d played and enjoyed and why.

Then Brad asked if I wanted the tour. Did I.

Brad showed me around the very nice office space at Stardock. He told me that the building had been built for lawyers and doctors but they had trouble renting (possibly due to the fact that it’s so darn hard to find) and so Stardock has been slowly buying the whole place up. The building is gorgeous and is surrounded by not one but two ponds. (Ponds! Standing pools of water that don’t instantly dry up! What a concept!)

He took me around to meet all the developers, artists, and support and marketing teams. I saw the Whiteboard Wall and even got a brief look at Elemental. He even took me out to see the bees, which was awesome. Then we headed back to his office.

It turns out that Stardock shares something in common with Valve, Bungie and Irrational Games – they don’t have dedicated designers. Everyone contributes to the design. This is why they needed someone competent at programming, but also very familiar with game history and design.

Which is why he then offered me the job. In fact, I found out from Cari later that they’d pretty much decided I was the right guy after the phone interview and just flew me up to make sure I was who I’d presented myself as on the phone!

And while it may take a while for us to get up there (we’ve some things we need to take care of here) we’re definitely going. I’m going to work for Stardock on Elemental and have a White Christmas this year.

Eating White Castles.

The Sojourn, Part 2

September 23, 2009
Self-ImprovementThe Game Biz
2 Comments

Amount of sleep I got last night? Very little.

Amount of anxiety I experienced on takeoff? High.

Fortunately the flight was uneventful…but attempts to rent a car were stymied by the fact that I don’t have any real credit cards. I finally had to take a cab to the hotel, which is in a little town called Canton. (Stardock is in a little town a little farther out called Plymouth.) I’ve got my laptop, wireless internet, and WHITE CASTLES for dinner. White Castle doesn’t exist in Texas. We don’t even have Krystals in Texas. So if you want teeny-tiny burgers smothered in pickles and onions and you’re in Texas, you’re pretty much out of luck.

This by itself might be a reason to move to Michigan. Also, the weather is nice, the trees are…trees (as opposed to Texas, where our trees are simply tall bushes) and it’s nice and cool. Yes, I know, that cool is going to turn cold but right now it feels great.

Stardock tomorrow at 1.

The Sojourn Begins

September 23, 2009
Self-ImprovementThe Game Biz
2 Comments

In about three hours I’ll be at the airport. In about five my flight leaves. In about eight I’ll be in Michigan.

It is going to be hard keeping my inner fanboy in check. If I’m not careful I’ll end up giggling excitedly the whole time I’m at Stardock.

Updates will follow, mostly posted from my brand new netbook. I had several people tell me, “Just try it, you’ll get used to it” and when I found out that there were some netbook models that were slightly larger than the typical ten inches I decided to go for it.

So I ended up with a Gateway LT31, which I’d never heard of until I saw it at Best Buy. To my surprise, it had almost everything I was looking for. The screen is 11.6 inches at 1366×768, and while it’s widescreen I’m not having that much trouble reading it. The keys on the keyboard are nice and big, it’s got a 250-gig hard drive, an AMD processor, two gigs of RAM out of the box and a dedicated Radeon graphics chip instead of the awful Intel 950 integrated graphics most models of this type are stuck with. And the price was $379.

Cons? It came with Vista, which I had to scrub and replace with XP. And the AMD processor and graphics processor suck up a lot more power than your average netbook, so the battery life is only about five and a half hours…which, goshwow, is more than enough for me.

Visual Studio Express installed just fine and Planitia compiled cleanly (though it runs a little slow, surprise surprise). Warcraft III runs just fine, but I haven’t had a chance to put it to the WoW test…that game takes a long time to download, dontcha know.

The Renewing of your Mind

September 11, 2009
Self-ImprovementThe Game BizUncategorized
4 Comments

In many ways I feel like a wind-up toy.

I wind up, I get excited. I’m going to do it this time. (It being lose 50 pounds, finish Inaria, clean the house, whatever.) Then as I start to work I wind down, and I always wind down before I’m finished. Thus I have to finish the task when it doesn’t excite me at all; it’s now drudgery.

But then something happens! I get wound up again! And this time I know it’ll last! This time I know I’ll succeed!

The thing that winds me up the most when it comes to game development is talking about games. Not making them – the effort of making them tends to unwind me. But discussing games, reading about game design, reading other people’s development blogs – all these things wind me up.

But I’ve had a hard time getting wound up since…well, pretty much since the Great Unpleasantness last October.

For a long time after my surgeries, I had anxiety problems. Bad anxiety problems. I-don’t-want-to-get-out-of-bed-because-that-might-trigger-my-pacemaker anxiety problems. At the time, when just driving to work at Aspyr would trigger a panic attack (what was I going to do if it went off while I was driving?) I yearned for it to be a year later…after my anxiety had resolved and my heart was doing fine and everything was okay.

Well, it’s almost a year later. My anxiety problems are almost completely resolved (though I am still on some medication for it). My heart is doing fine.

But everything isn’t okay.

If you’ve been reading my professional blog, you’ve probably seen the decline in both the quality and quantity of posts over there. It really does feel like I’ve lost something – like my heart problems knocked something off me that I haven’t recovered. Or perhaps I’ve gained something; something that has mired me into almost not caring about game development any more.

Almost.

I need something to wind me up. Sitting at home working on stuff isn’t doing it. Perhaps what I’m saying is that I miss the social experiences that come with game development.

And…I’m back to reading accomplishment porn. That’s never a good sign. Right now I’m reading Mike Hommel’s development journal (and watching his Behind the Dumb series of videos) and it’s great stuff. Mike just keeps everything so light and airy and fun and I just don’t feel like I can do that any more without it feeling forced.

A year ago I wished it were a year later. Now I still wish it were a year later. Or that I could shake this malaise that is preventing me from finishing Inaria and Let’s Play Starflight and that video on Startopia I’ve been wanting to do forever…or even posting a new Name That Game, which would take, like, fifteen minutes.

There’s a Bible verse, Romans 12:2 : “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”

Now, I’m not terribly big on religion, but the phrase “the renewing of your mind” sounds like just what I need. I just don’t have any real idea how to get it.

Pulling the Trigger

July 28, 2009
Game ProgrammingInariaSelf-Improvement
8 Comments

Today I registered my sole proprietorship, which means I can now do business using the name “Viridian Games”. Before this it was just the name of my blog, but now it’s the name of my company – something I rarely thought I’d ever have…

Tomorrow I’ll pay the $100 to become an official Apple developer and fax them the registration form. Then I’ll be ready to submit Inaria when it’s done.

I will tell you what I’ve learned over the last eight months – never have a single revenue stream. I wish I’d learned this when I was twenty.

Dumpage

May 25, 2009
FriendsPTFSDSelf-ImprovementUncategorized
1 Comment

Well…I haven’t been posting here much.

Why? Has nothing happened to me?

Oh, no. Quite the opposite.

But none of it has been good.

I don’t like posting about bad things…but the thing is, I created this blog so I could post about anything…and then I haven’t been using my newfound superpower.

Before you ask, no, I haven’t had any more heart problems.

But I now have some anxiety problems. I’m currently on some mild medication to help, but the thing that would really help is if some of the sources of stress in my life would resolve.

Unfortunately, none of them want to.

The job situation is dire. I’ve had exactly one in-person interview, and even though they really liked me, I didn’t have the necessary skills so they hired someone else. I’ve had several phone interviews – some went well and some went poorly, but none of them have resulted in employment. It’s as if the game development scene in Austin has dried up and blown away. I’ve had dozens of recruitment calls for companies all over the country, but I currently don’t feel like I can move because Jamie’s mother is currently in a nursing home…and David’s doctor is here (he’s supposed to be one of the best in the world).

My son, David, has been acting out increasingly at school. He’s mildly autistic, and something at school is just setting him off. He’s exhibiting behavior there that we never see at home – screaming at the top of his lungs, turning over furniture, thrashing wildly on the floor – and at this point I’m putting him on the bus, waiting an hour, and then getting a phone call from the school for me to come get him because his behavior is already out of control.

I consoled myself with the fact that within a few weeks the school year would be over and while he’d be in my hair, I wouldn’t have to worry about him accidentally kicking his teachers in the face.

And then last Thursday, Child Protective Services knocked on our door.

Now, the things that I hate about CPS are:

a) We cannot ask them who called them,
b) We cannot know exactly what they are looking for, and
c) They have the power to arbitrarily take our children away from us.

This seems a bit unconstitutional to me.

Needless to say, my stress level went off the chart. Now, it seemed like the case worker who knocked on our door was a good guy, because he agreed to an appointment the next day when it turned out my oldest daughter was in school. Thus we spent the next twenty-four hours scrubbing every surface we could reasonably clean in that time.

And then he came, had the appointment, and he ruled that there was no reason for CPS to get involved in our case. Which, frankly, I knew was going to happen…but the uncertainty just killed me for that twenty-four hour period.

And when I’m stressed, I eat. Thus my weight briefly got back up to 330 last week. Thus, no PTFSD posts. I’m currently dieting like crazy to get back to 320 (and perhaps below, if I can keep it up.)

Our financial situation isn’t looking good. Despite help from our wonderful family and friends, we have trouble making the rent and the COBRA payment (necessary for David and I to retain our health insurance) every month. As the month comes to a close and I still don’t know how I’m going to make the payments, again, my stress level spikes. At the end of April it got so bad I couldn’t sleep.

And, of course, the end of May is coming up. But I think I’ll handle it better than April because at this point I’ve been worn down so much that I almost don’t care any more. I’m on autopilot – check for new jobs in the morning, send out resumes, pick David up from school, help him do his schoolwork (he won’t do it at school but he does it fine at home), walk an hour, work on Inaria iPhone, try to eat under my calorie limit, go to bed, wake up, do it all again. All very healthy, positive behaviors that are not helping me one damn bit…but what else can I do?

Now I feel the need to apologize for the above. I’m not going to use this blog to complain about my life (at least not very often) but sometimes you just have to express this stuff to somebody.

I AM THE MASTER OF UNLOCKING!

September 17, 2008
Self-ImprovementUncategorized
8 Comments

Okay, settle in for a long, non-game-development-related story.

So I’ve got this car, see. It’s a 1996 Toyota Camry. And the Toyota Camry has a common flaw – the door handles break off. The handles themselves are made of plastic (yes, even the outside handles) and if the car sits out in the sun for a few years the handles get very brittle.

So about four years ago (when I was working for Gizmondo, in fact) I came outside ready to head home after a hard day’s Battlefield and lo and behold, the handle came right off in my hand. I could still open the door because there was a small tab of plastic connected to the latch, but eventually that broke off too. I was reduced to prying up the latch with my key every time I got into the car.

Then, not long after that, I pulled a little too hard on the inside door handle and…it broke off too.

(Yes, I am secretly The Hulk. Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me yadda yadda.)

So now to get out of the car on the driver’s side, I had to roll down the window and pry up the outside door latch from the inside.

And then…the inside latch on the passenger’s side broke off too (it made me angry). So now I couldn’t really have any passengers because I’d have to get out to let them out.

And this was the status quo of my car for a long time. The door latches were annoying, but not so annoying that I was willing to pay $400 a door to get them fixed.

So I just put up with it.

Until my car got broken into.

The thief was attracted by the wire running from my in-dash cassette player to the small storage space between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. He smashed out the small triangular rear window and opened the back passenger door, then opened the front passenger door, got inside and closed the door.

He opened the storage compartment to find a cheap $25 CD Walkman instead of the expensive iPod Touch I’m sure he was expecting. So he ransacked through my glove compartment looking for anything of value and came up empty.

That’s when he realized that he couldn’t get out of the car.

Now, if I could have just seen the look of panic on his face when he realized that he was effectively trapped in the car it would all have been worth it. I know he panicked because he tore the entire passenger’s side door handle out of its housing trying to get out.

(It would also have been worth it because I would have been close enough to administer a sorely-needed asskicking.)

He finally wormed his way into the back seat and exited through the back passenger door. Then, just to add injury to injury, he didn’t fully close the door which caused my interior light to drain my battery.

Needless to say, I was pissed the next morning. The door handles had been destroyed to the point where I couldn’t easily get out of the car either.

So again I was looking at $400 a door. Which I didn’t have.

So I did some research. This was the point at which I discovered that this is a very common problem with Camrys from the 1990’s. One website even had detailed instructions on how to replace the exterior door handle yourself.

So I ordered the parts and decided to try to fix the door myself. Hey, it’s not like I could make it any worse.

So today I went out to give it a shot. After four hours and five trips to the hardware store (“Oh, I’m going to need a torque wrench set, better pick one up. Oh, this set doesn’t have the right size hex, I need a 10 mm. Oh, this 10 mm hex driver I bought isn’t long enough to reach the hex bolts inside the door. Oh, this extender for my torque wrench is perfect, but somehow I managed to buy the 11 mm hex for it instead of the 10. Oh, there we go – finally got it right.”) I managed to replace both the exterior and the interior door handles.

And they work. They aren’t pretty (especially the interior, since I couldn’t pop the frame of it through the door panel) but they work. Pull latch, door opens! Pull latch, door opens! No more reaching through the damn window!

I’m so happy!

Now to do the other door. And get the window fixed. And buy a new CD player. Grumble, grumble…

Time to Level Up

March 18, 2008
Cool PeopleGame DesignGame ProgrammingGamesLudum DareSelf-Improvement
4 Comments

I’ve been thinking that it’s about time to start challenging myself again. Yes, yes, Planitia…but there’s something else I’ve been wanting to do.

I’ve mentioned the self-confidence problems that I’ve had in the past and while I’m a lot better (look, Ma! I’m writing in public!) there is one thing I still don’t like to do and that is compete. I shy away from testing my skills against other people, because I’m afraid I’ll discover that I suck. Well, it’s time to meet this thing head-on.

Therefore, I am hereby announcing that I will compete in Ludum Dare Eleven, which will be held from April 18-20.

Now, see, in order for this to really work I’m going to need to make a pretty good showing of it. So for the next month I’m going to be making lots and lots of small games. I’m hoping to do at least four and I don’t want any of them to take longer than a week to do. This will get me better at starting out quickly and sand over any edges in my 2D development skills.

So the bad news is that there won’t be any Planitia news for a while. The good news is that there should be lots more news on all the other games I’m doing leading up to the competition.

I’m also going to have to come up with a few good recipes, since one of the categories you’re graded on is food…

New Years’ Resolutions

January 1, 2008
PTFSDSelf-ImprovementUncategorized
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Production Resolution: Ship Planitia and at least one other project. I shipped exactly zero personal products in 2007; while I learned a heck of a lot, I can only consider that a failure. Planitia will ship this year with single-player AI skirmish and story modes as well as a two- to four-player network mode. I can’t guarantee that the gameplay will set the world on fire but the game will be available to play by the end of 2008.

For my second project, I will probably do something much smaller and lighter (and probably time limit-based like Inaria was) to cleanse my palate. It will probably be a one-page game.

I will then go on to start on 3D RPG That Really Needs a Name, incorporating everything I’ve learned so far. I do not expect to ship 3DRPGTRNAN in 2008 but I do expect to ship it in 2009.

Learning Resolution: My learning focus for this year will be on two topics: overall game engine design and networking.

To succeed at this goal my plan is to first read and take copious notes on the following books:

Game Coding Complete, Second Edition by Mike McShaffry

Code Complete, by Steve McConnell

Introduction to Algorithms, by Thomas Cormen, Charles Leiserson, Ronald Rivest and Clifford Stein

Now, I’ve read the first two but I have a learning technique that I use when I really want to absorb something, and that is to read a book while taking notes on it on the computer as I read and then marking pages read with a highlighter to track my progress through the book. I’ve used this technique before with The C++ Standard Library by Josuttis and Effective C++, More Effective C++ and Effective STL by Meyers, and that knowledge stuck very well and has served me very well.

Once these books are all complete the next step will be to implement a game engine using the currently accepted design, which separates hardware-dependent code from non-dependent code for easy porting and separates code from data as rigorously as possible for ease of engine re-use. This game engine will be network-enabled. Planitia will use this engine; again, I will work out the kinks with the engine on Planitia so that it will be ready to go for 3DRPGTRNAN.

Weight Resolution: It’s the return of Put That Freakin’ Sandwich Down! My goal is to lose 65 pounds this year, getting my weight down to 295. That will still be well above a healthy weight for me, but it will be a good start and allow me to finish next year. I will do this by eliminating sodas and mayonnaise from my diet and exercising at least twenty minutes and least three times a week.

I will be posting updates on both my current weight and how well I followed my diet and exercise goals every week.

Hmmm…it’s going to be a busy year!