January 1st, 2008
Happy new year! Guess what? In addition to my current DS project, I'm helming an original WiiWare game for WayForward. And our game is mentioned (with a few concept art shots from the incomparable FSC) in the latest issue of Play Magazine. LIT is a horror puzzle game that revolves around a high school kid named Jake, trapped in his school as it's overrun by dark creatures resembling the school's students and staff. It's up to Jake to make his way through each classroom, breaking windows and turning on light sources (in typical puzzle fashion) in order to bridge the darkness and reach each exit safely. Go track down a copy now!

Working on Shrek Babies (which became Shrek: Ogres and Dronkeys) was a very unique experience. Firstly, because it was my first time directing a game in 3D, other than that DS horror demo I worked on in 2006. And second because it was my first real kid's game. That might sound odd, since I've worked on Barbie games, Tak, Spongebob, Incredibles, etc. but this was the first time we worked on a game designed for young kids, as opposed to a typical action game simplified for them. The idea was to create something for the Nintendogs/Tamagotchi crowd, but we actually created a very developed AI system with an Xbox-like achievement system superimposed over it. The goal of the game is to buy toys for the babies, which they can then play with. Each time a baby plays with a toy in a new way (such as throwing a ball), that action is logged and the player is given a point for it. More points afford more toys, which means more actions, more points, and so on. In addition each toy has a list of about 10 difficult-to-perform actions that yield 10 points instead of just 1 when performed.

With the game, we really wanted to reach as wide an audience as possible, and I think the game pulled that off pretty well. Young gamers can interact with the babies and earn points, older gamers can get really inventive and pull off more challenging baby actions, and the youngest gamers (old enough to hold a DS but not do much else) can sit and watch the babies play around in their playpen. The AI in this game is pretty fascinating, and while it's not on the level of anything like Black & White (obviously), there were a few moments where the AI performed actions and sets of actions that were a surprise to us. The game also has outdoor exploration and 5 minigames. It'll be interesting to see how people respond to it.

So now that Shrek has been put to bed, what am I up to? Immediately after Shrek I did design work on a Leapfrog action title that'll be finished later this year. I also started work on an original game for the Wii. Woohoo! My first professional gig working on a game with characters and scenario designed by me. It's a collaboration between myself, James (my director on Barbie Princesses) and Brian (who worked on the horror DS demo), so the project is definitely in good hands. It could best be described as a horror puzzler, which in my professional opinion is definitely an underrepresented game genre. It's such an odd concept to be working on a game, doing designs and art and then having no one (other than my higher ups) to get them approved by. If all goes well, the game should be completed mid-2008. I'm also starting up work on a licensed DS game next week. It's a return to action games and to 2D, which (as interesting as Shrek was for me) is definitely my comfort zone. The game's not announced, but the license is unbelievable. As in, if I had to create a list of dream licenses to make a game of, I probably wouldn't include this one because I wouldn't believe it could actually be a possibility. Should be a blast.

I've been gaming a lot on the 360 (gamertag DamnTyranny), and seriously enjoying Bioshock and Orange Box (especially Portal). Both amazing experiences that have really changed how I think about storytelling in games. Played through Halo 3 (dug it) and am currently running through Halo 2, which I bought on release and never got that far into. Both games are huge fun.

Semi-annual advice: Make lotsa friends. Half my contacts in the industry are people I've never even worked for. It's a very, very small industry with plenty of bumping into familiar faces, so the more faces you become familiar with, the better your chances of staying financially afloat are. Take as many gigs as you can handle, bug companies you want to work for, and regardless of the situations always act profesionally and helpful. More than a couple times I've been lined up for a job, and have either had to withdraw from the project or the project fell through. In situations of the former, I try to recommend a few other artists the company might approach who could do the job well. Employers usually respond very positively to this, and it A) Gets your pal a gig, B) Displays your helpful nature and C) Lets the employer know you're connected in the industry. Another piece of advaice is never turn a job down, just apologize for being unavailable or unable to fill it at that time. Keep all possibilities open and keep in contact, because it's always good to have a few prospective places of employment that are friendly with you in case you ever fall on professionally hard times.

May 3rd, 2007
Hey, someone speedran our last game. Bad-freakin-ass! For those of you who don't know what speedrunning is, it's when a gamer plays the game (usually through an emulator) and attempts to set an alltime low for how long it takes to get through the game. They also try to break the game and exploit bugs wherever possible (as you'll see a few times in here). This run was done in one, continuous take - pretty impressive!

Almost weekly advice: Feast or famine. To make it as a freelancer, you have to take on as many jobs as possible, because odds are a number of them are either going to fall through or get delayed. When I freelanced 100%, I usually tried to book at least twice as many projects as I could comfortably handle. This is to ensure that when one or two projects don't materialize, you can still pay the bills. If they all do materialize, well then you'll be working 80 hour weeks, but maybe you can save up or buy that new game system you wanted. But it's essential to overplan. At the very least, treat every opportunity as a real possibility, until the final commitment. It never hurts to tell a client 'Yes, tell me more', even if you have a feeling you might be booked on other things. Even if you don't end up having the time, you've made a new contact or reinforced an old one, which means more work possibilities down the line.

April 17th, 2007
Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww...dammit.

I was lined up to design and direct a game on Wii, starting basically now and wrapping up a year or so later. This is significant for a number of reasons. 1) It's based on a helluva cool license. If I had to pick the top five licenses I'd want to work on right now, this would be up there. 2) It's got a lengthier schedule. Creating a game in half a year (as is done on GBA and DS games) is stressful, and I was really looking forward to an 18-month dev cycle and what we could accomplish in that time. And 3) This would be the first major console (non-handheld) game for WayForward since 1994. Not that there's anything wrong with handheld games (in fact if I had to choose, I'd probably choose handheld over console). But with console comes so many great possibilities.

So, for reasons I obviously won't disclose, the Wii game unfortunately went away today. We've got some fantastic games coming up, possibly the best round of games we've ever had at once, but it's down its console game. I'm a little over halfway through directing my current DS game, so it'll be at least four months until I'm freed up to focus on anything else fulltime anyway. But that golden opportunity waiting for me this summer isn't available anymore. It's a shame because when I first heard the news, and was offered the opportunity to lead the game, my initial response was doubt. This was a big game, on a big system, and a GBA/DS guy like me couldn't wrap my head around it. Since then, I've had the game in my head constantly and it's been forming pretty rapidly. Any doubt has since been replaced with absolute excitement and determination. I know exactly what the game would be, how to do it, and how to craft a great gaming experience for the player. I guess I can look forward to transferring these ideas to some other games. And trying to stay positive, every time my professional career has taken a bad turn, a better opportunity has miraculously waited around the corner.

On a positive note, Thomas from Progressive Media (see the entry below) emailed me back today. I went ahead and emailed him last week after making my somewhat petty post below. He understandably wasn't thrilled to see what I had written, but offered to cut me a check for my work, which is very nice on his part. He also pointed out the emails from our last discussions and it turns out I was off on a number of points, so I revised my post below. What's interesting is if I do get a check out of this, it'll technically be my first paycheck in the games industry. Once that thing's cashed, I'm totally gonna frame it. Best to Thomas and his company, and apologies for taking the low road somewhat with that last post.

Weekly advice: Demo small. No one successfully creates a massive, sprawling, ambitious RPG as their first hobby project. Plenty of people, however, create fantastic platformers and puzzlers. A small, focused, manageable project is a lot easier to accomplish, and will probably be a better showcase of your work to prospective clients because it's easy to wrap their head around. Even if you're diehard about working on a hobby RPG, give yourself small goals. Start with a battle system, for example, not a massive intertwining story. The smaller the game or demo is, the more you'll have to focus your ideas, boil them down to what's core and what works, not to mention the more likely it'll be that you actually finish it.

April 11th, 2007
Well, apparently I won't be updating every seven days. :P Oh well, one missed week isn't going to kill anyone. Our DS game is still going well. We're about halfway through an 8-month dev cycle and pretty much all the assets are done. We're just going through everything now and applying the big programming push. It's so nice with 3D that you can do whatever you want with it. In a 2D game, if you have all the assets done and you need to make a drastic change in design, you're screwed. In 3D it's all good. An idle is an idle, a run is a run, from any direction and any camera angle. It's nice to know that we have the freedom on this game to adjust the design without having to go through massive redo's on the art side.

I came up with an original DS game idea over the weekend. It's called 'Death by Pixels'. If produced I think it would be a very interesting experience, and kind of combines a lot of ideas I've had over the past couple of years. I'm so iffy on my original ideas. That's why it's easier to just pour myself into licenses I love, like X-Men or Flash. With original stuff I tend to get very passionate about an idea, believe that it's the greatest thing I could ever possibly create, and then fall out of love with it a few weeks later. There are a few game ideas that have stayed with me for a while now. One is called 'Sonique' and it's a music-based 2D game. One is called 'Wash Your Hands' and it's sort of a flattened, flash-style game. And, hopefully, now there's this new one. It's just a matter of carving out enough time to write them up and do some artwork, then pitch them to the right people. Busy busy busy...

March 28th, 2007
Our game's going pretty good this past week. Lots of progress on getting the art done, and damn if our team isn't insanely talented! I think the transition from 2D to 3D is what's been my greatest fear since I got into game development 6 or 7 years ago. I had this impression that I knew pixels, sure, but unless I got 3D under my belt, I'd be left out of game creation. I ended up taking a class at UCLA in 2005, designed by Autodesk (or whoever owned 3DSMax at the time). The class sucked, and cost a lot of money, but I got enough basic skills under my belt to not be entirely clueless when it came to 3D. Last November I got to direct a 1-month 3D demo on DS, and now we're about halfway through the production of a full 3D DS game.

I got to do some 2d pixel animations today, something I haven't really done on a WayForward project since X-men GBA, over a year ago. Animation can be a bit tedious compared to game design and direction, but the satisfaction that comes with a finished, moving creature is pretty awesome. And for how small his animation set is, the character I animated will be pretty cool (in an already pretty cool game). I guess to a degree I miss pixels a little, but 3D is just so versatile it's hard to justify 2D games anymore. Being able to model a character, animate him and continue altering the model indefinitely is something impossible in traditional pixel animation. I remember when Colossus' costume changed slightly in the X-Men game (he basically just lost his shoulder sleeves) and I had to spend a few hours going through every one of his animations and repixelling the shoulders one by one. Blech.

I just got a new business card today. We usually get our cards supplied to us by the company, but since we're at a new address I didn't want to have outdated card info. That and I just enjoy producing things, so I ordered up a batch of these:

They came out so gorgeous-looking, I can't even begin to describe it. $25.39 after tax and shipping for 100 double-sided glossy cards. Go OvernightPrints.com! Not that I have a constant need to pass these things out, but we do trade cards each time we meet with publishers so it's nice to have something really slick-looking to hand out next time.

Hmmm, what else is new. I've been reading a helluva lot of comics lately, mostly Geoff Johns' Flash work. Ever since our Flash game I've been pretty immersed in that whole world. I really like his characterizations of Flash's rogues gallery. Gamewise I'm playing war games with work folk (Rainbow Six, Battlefield 2) and a few DS games. I just bought EDFX (aka "Earth Defense Force 2017"), the Xbox 360 sequel to a fantastic budget series in Japan on PS2. It's a lot of mindless fun, it's just a real shame they couldn't include online multiplayer.

Weekly advice: Want more frequent paid pixel work? Write a resume', get an AIM/MSN chat account, compile some pixel art samples, then register a website (something professional, not PixelFukker.com) and slap everything on there. Voila. One of the best things you can do to get regular work is carve out a 'where' for yourself online. Developers so easily lose track of which artists are which, who illustrated what, etc. If you have a reliable, obvious place you can point potential clients to, with some of your best art and a list of what projects you've worked on (hobby and pro), you'll get far more offers than you would've otherwise. Pixel artists are forgettable - ensure that you're not. See business card above. ;)

March 21st, 2007
Holy crap, have I seriously not updated this section in 6 months? That's just shameful. I'm going to try and write a little something here at least once a week from now on. You know, for the 2 people who check this site twice a year (you know who you are).

So Justice League GBA came out and got a lotta great reviews (four 8/10's, a 7.9 and a 7/10, woohoo!) one mediocre review from Nintendo Power (5.5, meh) and a really, really bad one for some reason (2.8?? WTF!). I'm really pleased with how the game came out, especially compared to X-Men. I cut my teeth on X-Men and boy did I learn a lot, but the final product just never came together (for a number of reasons, most of which stemmed from my inexperience). On JLH we had slightly more than HALF the dev time of X-Men and managed to pull together a nice little title. A lot of it had to do with the talent and passion of everyone involved, but something has to be said for a small game, too. We had about half the levels and half the bosses in JLH (as compared to X-Men), which gave us more time to polish and perfect everything. So even if the playtime is a little reduced, it's a much more enjoyable experience on the whole. That's just excellent advice in general - keep it small, keep it focused. Hell, my favorite game is Ico and that only takes like 4 or 5 hours to beat.

So what've I been up to since JLH? Well that ended around August and after doing 2 projects back-to-back (I ended X-Men on a Saturday and started JLH on the following Monday, already a month behind) I got a bit of a break. I wrote a heckuva lot of treatments, which is always fun - you basically just take a license, and spec out what you imagine the game might be in 1 to 6 pages, which is then used to help secure the license from the publisher. After that I got to work on an absolute dream demo for the DS. Not only did I get to try my hand at 3D (which was surprisingly easy on DS), but it was on a demo for one of my favorite licenses ever. Unfortunately, nothing happened with it, but it was a blast to work on for a month and I'm really proud of what we came up with. After that I jumped onto my current game, which I've been on since December.

The new game is also 3D on DS. It's a younger license (something new for me after Sigma Star, X-Men and JLH) but we're coming up with some cool ideas. The AI in particular is turning out to be just amazing. I have a feeling the game might be pretty polarizing because of the design, but we'll see. If nothing else it's a very, very different beast than the action platformers I'm used to and has been a pretty consistently engaging process. Typically our GDDs are just 30 pages or so but this one is 65 pages and climbing, due in no small part to all the AI planning. This project doesn't wrap up until August, which is a helluva nice, relaxing schedule and we're kicking butt on getting the assets done early.

Beyond this I've got a few game ideas I want to demo up (including one long-overdue project with comics artist James Kochalka that I need to get back in production). I'm going to be co-designing/overseeing 2 licensed DS projects in the near future, as well as potentially directing a game on the Nintendo Wii. :) I won't say more because I don't wanna jinx it, but the license rocks, we'll have over a year to work on it and it's gonna be great. In spite of the occasionaly development headaches, life is pretty good right now.

Weekly advice: Want to get a foot in the games industry? Then start knocking on doors (virtual ones, anyway). Head to a site like IGN.com (that lists developer info for each game), write down the websites of any devs you like, email them a polite inquiry about freelance work and don't give up hope. I've gotten several awesome freelance gigs by blind-emailing places like this. This business isn't just about who you know, it's also who you meet. If you're curious about game developers in your area, this site is fantastic: *LINK*

October 27th, 2006
Woohoo, IGN loves us: *LINK*

October 26th, 2006
Hey neat! The Bonk game I worked on has a trailer: Click!

Flash is out in stores now. No reviews yet, but the fans online seem to like it. Right now I'm mostly doing a lot of treatments and pre-development, waiting for my next game, which'll likely be DS. After 2 superhero games back to back, I could go for a change. Although the characters are so fun, I would probably miss it a little. Hand-to-hand combat is just so difficult to nail in an action game. A lot of game development isn't really getting something right on the first try, as much as experimenting over and over until it feels good. It's much easier to tell what's wrong in a game than what's right, so systematically removing the wrong until only the right remains seems to be the approach to go with. A shooter would be fun to work on, although my favorite genre is really action puzzlers. Ultimately I'd love to do something like 'Ico' in my career, a beautiful little self-contained original puzzle game. But that's probably a ways off, if it'll ever happen. Oh well, I'm young...

June 7th, 2006
Our current game got announced. *LINK*

May 12th, 2006
Well my site got hacked this week. Boy, that was odd. Something about a 'Turkish Hacker'. Luckily I had the front page in cache in another browser so I restored it okay. I got an email from catalog.com which mentioned a large number of their customers' websites getting hacked. Way to go, Catalog. Ah well, I guess you get what you pay for ($35/year for domain and hosting). At that price I'm lucky the site's still up.

I went to E3 the past few days. I'm skipping out tomorrow though; I've seen enough. Dead Rising was a ton of fun and the video of Final Fantasy 13 blew me away. Wii was awkward and didn't add to gaming as much as just approached it differently. I'm pretty sure every Wii game I played could have been controlled more easily and precisely with an analog stick. And if that's the case, what's the point? Sony's got a more rudimentary motion control system in their controller anyway. Between that, MGS4 and FF13 I think they've got my money on this one. Yup, even at $600 (although it'd be nice if the price came down just a little between now and launch).

Watching "Man on Fire" right now. What a fun film. Despite its flaws and sometimes weak plot, it's just endlessly enjoyable. Who doesn't love a good old revenge flick? Plus Denzel Washington's just about the greatest actor alive right now. I love how he can create sympathetic characters who are still slightly offputting (see "He Got Game" for another helluva performance).

I feel a real need after wandering E3 for two days to create an original game. I miss the hobby scene sometimes. I want to just go balls-out action on this one and create something that's at once visceral, musical and inventive. I think I'm going to self-finance a demo - do all the design and as much art myself as possible, farm out the rest as I can afford it. I want to go very asset-heavy before I even consider programming, and even then finish animated gif's of all gameplay just so there's nothing left to question. Well, we'll see...maybe in another week I'll already be bored with the idea.

Want to know how to make it in the games industry in the art or design side? Okay, here it is. Network, resume', website. That's it. Notice how I didn't say portfolio, ability, creativity. These things are somewhat implied already, as you wouldn't have a resume' to speak of without them. But really, jobs are given to those developers who have already had jobs. I've gotten freelance offers many times where the publisher or dev never even saw my previous work before inquiring. Resume' is everything. A website is also essential, mainly as just a place to slap your resume'. The only thing a good website requires is a resume', a bio and an email address. Everything beyond that, including a gallery, is just fluff. Okay, you say. How do I get an art job without a portfolio? Doesn't every place expect those? Well I've been doing this for about four years now, have worked on 30+ games and I've never had even a partial portfolio. How do you get around it? Simple, just tell them what you'd really like to do is give them an audition piece instead. Rather than judging you on some outdated, irrelevant hobby work, you make a proactive offer to create some new, original work to spec. The pub/dev then instantly knows how you work on assignment, which (so long as you don't totally botch it) might actually put you ahead of the competition. Will you get paid for such an audition piece? Probably not. But come on, it took you like 2 hours anyway, right? Lastly, contacts. Networking. Want to know how to be essential in gaming? Know a lot of people. The more people you know (other devs, artists, programmers, etc) the more important you are to any one company. If you have the potential to staff your own games, and bring in new talent, you become more essential. If you know more devs, you have more potential jobs when your current one goes sour. Nothing last forever, so put your eggs in as many baskets as possible. Even when you're in comfy-mode, with a great job and making fat sacks of cash, never let up on keeping those contacts fresh. Keep on freelancing, keep on making friends, and your well will never really run dry. So there it is. Everything you need to know to make it in this industry. That's really all it takes. Well, that and a little talent and creativity maybe. But really, those things alone will only get you so far. Life rewards the ambitious. Get hungry for your career.

April 26th, 2006
Hey neat, Bonk got announced! *LINK* That was a fun little project I did for Collin at Two Tribes (the Toki Tori folks). I think we were shrinking the Bonk sprite and adding some detail, but Collin was nice enough to let me really kind of reinvent him and he came out pretty cute, I feel. Can't wait to play the final game.

E3 is almost upon us and there's a chance we might have not one, but two games we worked on shown on the floor. Time will tell. X-Men GBA is long done so I'd be surprised if it wasn't somewhere on the floor, but our new game, only a month into development, is already looking very solid. Enough that the publisher was willing to look at a rom and, if they think it's solid, it might get announced. Fun times! If it is announced (and not a closed doors thing), I'll name it here when that happens so any curious E3 attendees can check earlier than planned it out. The game's going great overall. About 2/5 of the levels are in, all of the hero's moves are in and one crazy-ass fun boss battle, so I'm really excited to see it get some attention. Except for the absence of lead programmer Larry on this one, it's essentially the same staff as our X-Game. More info soon.

March 31st, 2006
Man, making games is tiring. Fun but it's exhausting. If I had to guess I'd say I'm working around 12 hours a day right now, between in-office work, morning emails and evening assignments. As my Dad always reminds me though, "You're 27, you'll live." We're actually a month into the next GBA game right now. Technically, two months because for whatever reason its scheduling got overlapped with the end of X-Men. Typically, a game's staff at WayForward gets a few weeks off between games. Ha! David got one week off from coding (but still had to work) and I got jack. Hopefully after this game is done, we can take an actual breather.

Like X-Men, this one is another teenage action title on Nintendo's handheld. Maybe a slightly younger audience this time, but all in all a pretty similar style of brand. As opposed to X-Men, where I was the sole designer/producer/director, this game is a much more collaberative process. Chris Watson is producing (which boils down to me being able to actually work on the game, instead of answering publisher emails all day). The game was originally designed by Armando Soto, another director at WayForward who recently left for another company. Then I added some elements, then Armondo again, then Mark Bozon. After this, David, Robert and I designed out all the enemy types and boss battles, in addition to primary gameplay, and from there I wrote our GDD (Game Design Document). So yeah, our design credit's gonna have like 17 people listed. In addition to just being a welcome change to get some other opinions instead of designing in a bubble, we also really strived to get everything in this doc from day 1, right down to the boss modes and enemy energy meters.

In general, this game has been flying so far. After just a month we have a playable demo, every sprite pixelled, main player animation, 3 enemies, a boss and one level. Compared to the slow start we had on X-Men, this project is on hyper-speed and that's a good thing, because it'll hopefully mean we spend our last month polishing, rather than implementing.

More to come in the following months. Be sure to pick up X-Men: The Official Game on GBA when it comes out on May 16th. *LINK*

February 27th, 2006
Game's done! :) We submitted to Nintendo today. There's still that anxious period where we wait to see if everything's okay, but the game has been comparatively very clean from start to finish so I doubt anything will come up.

It's so weird letting it go. Even though I've only been working on the game for 6 months, and the team and I have been on it for 4 or 5 months it feels like it's been years. That's actually something I love about this job. There's so much responsibility and progress that time slows to a crawl. A year of this stuff has felt like five. As for the game, I think it's really good. There's only so much you can do in 6 months but I think Larry, David and Robert were really able to craft something impressive and enjoyable in this one. I hope it gets decent reviews but then again, those things are so odd anyway. We're making a game for 12-year-olds and it's being judged by 30-year-olds.

Next up is two games (not counting freelance stuff). I designed another GBA game a few months ago, so I'll be aiding the production of that. I guess my role would be something to the effect of designer/director of gameplay. And there's another game starting up now with much of the X-Team that I'll be serving as co-designer and director on (but not producer, thank God). I actually kind of got into a good producing groove, I just need a break from it for a few months.

February 9th, 2006
So our game kinda got announced. It's X-Men: The Official Game for GBA. Not too shabby, eh? Should be on store shelves around the end of April. Pick it up!

January 24th, 2006
Game's about 4 1/2 weeks from being done. Basically everything's in there at this point, just adding some Extras Modes and tweaking the enemies, bosses and levels to be as solid as possible. I decided to think up my favorite 10 games of all time (it was surprisingly hard). These aren't necessarily what I consider to be the 10 greatest games ever made, these are just the ones I love the most:

01. Ico (PS2)
02. Flashback (Genesis)
03. Grim Fandango (PC)
04. Megaman 2 (NES)
05. Dig Dug (arcade)
06. Silent Hill 2 (PS2)
07. Jet Set Radio Future (Xbox)
08. Donkey Kong (GameBoy)
09. Harvest Moon (N64)
10. Bangai-O (Dreamcast)

Honorable mentions:

Beyond Good & Evil (Xbox)
Bionic Commando (GameBoy)
Gunstar Heroes series (Genesis, GBA)
Katamari Damacy series (PS2, PSP)
Resident Evil 4 (Cube)
Shenmue 1 & 2 (Dreamcast)
Psychonauts (Xbox)
Zelda: OOT (N64)

January 6th, 2006
Happy new year. I'm exhausted. Stayed up the last coupla nights finishing all the levels in our GBA game. They're done, enemies are in there, story's done, animations and backgrounds are 95% done, all that's left is a whole lotta coding, getting sound in and the menus/extras (yup, our game has extras, and pretty cool ones for GBA, too). Larry & David (the two main programmers on the game) have really been working their asses off. The stuff they've come up with so far is just great, though. We're a week and a half away from Alpha, and send off the game in a month and a half. Almost done, almost done...

December 18th, 2005
Passed my class, got an A. Actually I'd have gotten only A's except for that stupid animations class I took. Lady gave me a B when I did everything perfect. Half-assed rotoscoping teacher taught me less in three months than John at Helixe taught me in one week. At least school is done. Now I just have to finish Christmas shopping (poor) and finish our GBA game (by end of February). King Kong was great.

December 14th, 2005
Finished our most recent milsetone on the GBA game. Don't know if we passed it yet but I assume we did (we seemed to be in a pretty good spot for assets). Now it's just 2 months and 2 weeks (roughly) until we submit the final product. Should be fine, we need to tweak the game quite a bit but we have levels, progression, saving, bosses, combat, all animations, and all of that was programmed in about a month. Hopefully the programmers on the project will have some nice time to tweak and revise everything until they're happy with it.

Gameplay is really a weird sort of beast. Often times, it's easy to tell what's wrong but very difficult to make a choice as to what's right. A lot of development then is done through discovering the errors and pushing away from them, rather than pushing toward what's perfect from the get-go. Even if you have a fun design, cool moves and levels those minor tweaks, the way your character attacks and gets attacked, can make the difference between a great game and an awful one. Gamers have really a trained mind to spot when something's off in a game, and if they notice that it'll throw them out of the experience. A great handheld game will immerse you to the point where you forget you're staring at a 2-inch screen for hours on end.

Started Christmas shopping last night with Amy. As always, we're poor but we found some nice stuff already so at least we won't be forced to shop at the last minute this year. I realize I haven't played through a game in over a month. Maybe now that school, wedding and milestone are over, I finally can. Katamari 2 sounds good (and has been collecting dust since I bought it). The other game I'm working on just got its second draft of the GDD. Just designing that one, but it should still be fun.

December 6th, 2005
Stresssssed. My last class of this quarter is this Thursday night, but I still have to finish writing up my unit. Hopefully I can pull the rest of it off between now and then. I'm currently writing the design doc for my next game and finishing up some animations for my current one. The new game'll be nice because it's much simpler in scope than my current game (plus, I'm designer only instead of designer, animator, producer, writer and director). That probably means I'll be taking the reins on another game at some point, though. As long as I don't have to produce, it's all great. The way that works is directors get to create, and producers have to manage. So I'm hoping that doing design work on this new game will leverage me out of my producorial role on the second game, when that pops up. We'll see, either way I'm having a lot of fun. It's just stressed fun right now. Also, I'm getting a laptop this week.

November 30th, 2005
Just got back from Hawaii this morning at 6am. Then I got 90 minutes sleep, went to work and now I have to stay up doing homework. Hooray, my life is awesome! Actually I'll be done with school (middle school English teacher) in about a week which will be great, since I'm getting run into the ground between it, getting married and work lately. Our GBA game is going pretty well. We just passed another milestone and our game is pretty thoroughly playable now. The combat has been a little tricky to get down, but I think people are going to really like it.

Started design on my next handheld game (I'm actually just designer on that one, but it should be a lot of fun). Still need to finish up one last animation set for another project with another developer. This game-making stuff is fun but it's sure exhausting, too. What's nice is half the staff on my current GBA title are friends from my hobby pixel days. What's the word for that? Surrounding yourself with your friends. There's a negative one but it escapes me now. They're all doing an amazing job, though. Our game looks as good as it plays, and for a licensed title (no hints yet) that's really something.

November 22nd, 2005
Today, I worked some more on my GBA game. It's coming along nicely, but man is it draining. I enjoy the directing part. The producing? Not so much. This weekend I'm going to Hawaii with my new wife. Hoorah!