Tag Archives: life

Long time, no see

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Okay, so if you remember, I was working on NaNoWriMo last time I posted, making it about 5 months since my last post. Gomen ne.

Voidspiral is working on a new game, called Assault Magister Tactics. It’s combining a lot of our old projects in to one coherent idea. We’re prototyping it right now, and its coming along well. Voidspiral is also publishing commit messages from AMT to twitter, so that’s cool. We’ve also got a kanban board for development progress over here.

I’m also learning C# finally, and I have to say, I’m perfectly comfortable there already. Yes, there are things that are better in C# than Unityscript. Yes it’s more powerful. Yes, it was more intimidating. No, there’s not that much different between C# and Unitscript. All told, I’m happy to add another language to my resume. I haven’t worked in it extensively yet, (aside from about a thousand lines on AMT) but I feel like I can solve any challenge given to me with enough time. Now, if only I had some books on well structured code…

I’m also finally getting around to music theory. I bought The Everything Music Theory Book, and it’s fantastic. So is Hooktheory.com. I’m learning so much from these resources I hardly have time to actually attempt making music. I’ve been doing practices, rhythm sequences, chord sequences, etc. My sheet reading is still very slow, but I’m getting the theory at least. I want to make AMT something I can do completely myself… Thought NGui looks soooooo good. As a designer, and an indie game developer, I want it so hard. I’m really trying to be frugal on this project though, so I haven’t gotten it yet.

I’m considering going freelance at some point, to spend more time on indie game dev and design work that I can enjoy, but that’s probably a long way off.

As for NaNoWriMo, I did win, and I topped over 80,000 words in November 2012. Total, that story is almost 100,000 words. I’m working my way through editing it, but I’m a little afraid that I like the story too much and I’m not being hard enough on it. I’m always picking at the details rather than the structure or events. Well, anyway, that’s still going. Someday I’ll bookstart that thing on Pubslush or something.

One last thing,  I’ve been trying to grapple with setting up Koken and using it for a new portfolio, but I can’t get it running in my test environment, so right now its a no-go.

Still on the table:

  • Oubliette 2 (Stalled at the Kickstarter Video Phase, I’m terrible at recording myself and talking to a camera about my games.)
  • MEK (Stalled at the Kickstarter Video Phase, Same Reason)
  • PixelTails (Stalled on the massive updates thing)

Thats it for now, and I promise to update more frequently. Again.

That Equality Thing

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Misandry.
It’s the opposite of misogny.

This week I got an email from TED. This week’s theme it seems is the downfall of males: here’s the Ted Talk about women displacing men.

I may be the only person who thinks this, but I’m getting tired of reverse discrimination. I hear about it all the time, women this, men that, etc. Why is it that gender still matters? I thought we solved this in the seventies?

Anyway, statistics are telling us that women getting more degrees, higher paying jobs, and higher ranks in their careers than men. I’m not upset about that. What I’m upset about is the fact that people are still pushing. Why haven’t we hit equilibrium yet? I’m not about to say that misogyny is gone; I’m sure its not, but why are we still pushing men out of the workforce?

I don’t care what gender you are, what race, creed, or anything else. What I care about is that you can do your job. If women are getting jobs because they’re more qualified than men, great! I’m all for people having jobs they can do. I’m just sick to death of hearing what MEN can’t do and what WOMEN can’t do. It’s not your gender, its your capabilities.

Away with you, O beast of Gender. F*&) off. Now is the time of qualification and efficiency.

VIVA LA REVOLUTION.

Our Brief Hiatus

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Well, we apologize for that two week break there. Lots of stuff has been going on lately, real life stuff. Catastrophic events that must be dealt with. Etc. I hate being an adult. Anyway, some of the more interesting things that have been keeping us busy in the past days are:

one pixel
You may have noticed, but there’s a small platformer off to the right. That’s one pixel. Play it.
We’re still working on it of course, and it’s only got 2 levels right now, but we’re almost finished with the framework and soon we’ll be able to start building out more and bigger levels.

seraphiel
Sera’s still trudging along. I was particularly adverse to trying to unwrap all those scales, but this weekend I sat down and made myself do it. Now she’s completely unwrapped and if I have time this morning I’ll get her into zbrush and try some basic sculpting to see how the normal maps output. I also began setting up a little unity web player scene to show as a viewer on the site when she’s done. Or, maybe now that I’m thinking about it, before that, as a work in progress thing for the sculpt and textures.

gaming
We’ve done a little bit of roleplaying here and there, but It hasn’t been as much as usual. Life interferes.

Week 1

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I’ve made it. On the board friday, someone wrote “Congratulations on [surviving] your first week.” While things have indeed picked up, I rather doubt that we’re in full swing yet.

Game Design

  • Very interesting course on how games function in the meta sense
  • We began the class with “what is a game” which sparked a HUGE debate and it was VERY informative and highly entertaning
  • Not allowed to do art homework in class, only notes
  • The class is fast paced enought that I wouldn’t need to anyway
Game Studies
  • Interesting
  • Lots of history and discussion of the industry
  • Gary Brubaker is hysterical
  • Its cool to hear about real stories from inside companies
Drawing 
  • Will take a lot of work
  • Suggested DOUBLE workload for students who want to be concept artists (OOH OOH PICK ME PICK ME)
  • Focusing on the mathematical proportions for the “average person”
  • Not as flexible as I thought, but presumably this is only the foundation we will build upon
Art Creation
  • focusing on Adobe Photoshop CS4 and 3dStudio Max 9
  • a little basic for me, but the refresher helps me settle the keystrokes
  • Preferences for Max given in class to take advantage of these new computers
The new computers are Dell XPS M1730s running Vista Ultimate. Like, 4 gigs of ram, but a slightly undersized Hdd. Since 1TB drives seem to go for like, $120 I think I’ll get one and have it installed at school. It seems to be lacking the ability to use its onboard microphones though, which is strange. Oh well. Will have Du look at that.
Anyway, I was nervous the first few days, but people are so nice that it’d be rediculous to be scared. Very frendly campus. we have classes on the upper floor but the offices are on the bottom one, along with the student kitchen. I’ll be eating there a lot I think. It’d be nice to be able to come home, but I don’t think I’ll have time when I have to use every waking hour to get work done.
I tried for student council, but Lori got it. I tried for the extra tablet Ash was giving away, but I think David got that. So after a very frustrating saturday, I finally caved and ordered a 12 inch Cintiq. I am excited for it.
Oh, and I have lots of homework already, but I think I’ll be able to handle it. I just finished the 100 heads assignment for Drawing, but I think I’m going to do it again at least once. It was recommended that if we really want to excell, we should do assignments twice to show our passion. So thats what I’m going to try to do.
I am also one of a handful who will be running a paper-pencil game outside of class for stress relief. That way I can have a little bit of a break every once in a while to hopefully prevent  burnout. More posts about that later.
Peace.

Plano, TX

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Swank. It is Swank. I, like, knew it’d be a step up. But we have a hot tub in the apt complex. The weather is fantastic. We have a garage. Real live mexican food BLOCKS away. I may have died and gone to heaven. But at least they have internet up here. And even heaven will not stop my graduate schooling. Which starts in a couple of DAYS??!! AAAAH

Wish me all the luck you can afford. Hopefully I won’t need it. Can’t be too sure though.

Engagement and other things.

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I am now officially engaged to a smart, witty, delightful and lovely young lady. I find my self grinning like an idiot whenever I think about how lucky I am. In short, to use terminology apropos to my career choice, it pwns.

Posted some stuff on DA recently, working on a new Army Hunter, getting my twitter all over my sites, and generally gearing up for the big haul.

PS the ring is beautiful. I’m proud of my selection.

What’s Up

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Alright, I’ve been working out the kinks in this major life decision today. I’ve gotten mostly enrolled in my classes, a web error aside, and I’m trying to get hooked up with my class, but the forums have klined me for some reason. I’ll grapple with that later.

Trying to figure out moving, visiting folks, and getting apartments rented and subleased. Scheduling is crazy for the next month or so. Phew. Its beginning to really hit me. Signing up for classes made everything kind of real all the sudden. I’m excited.

Oh and I’m sorry I haven’t been working on art lately. Been working.