Ryan
Chasing greatness

I think most people know I’m a geek and a nerd. The differences of the two are deserving of their own post.

If by chance you don’t know that, you have never spent any time talking to me. Don’t worry though, I’ll clear that up right now.

The truth is, I like role-playing games. I like them a lot. I don’t mean WoW or Final Fantasy 9000. I mean games like Dungeons and Dragons. I never write about it, because I find it hard to take any pride in it.

I think, that I’ll write about it anyway though because it’s one more topic for me to blather about and, well, I really shouldn’t give a shit anyway.

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I was laid off.

Now before anyone does something silly like try to tell me how sorry they are, please read what I have to say first.

I’m not upset, and I haven’t stopped working for the company. Here are some highlights of my 11 months of being employed: I went to SOE and worked with their engineers for a week, I’ve been on tech calls with senior developers at 3 different MMO companies, I’ve spent the day with some of Valve’s team and got all of their games for free (Though I still need a computer to run them).

Crazy right? Here’s the deal. We knew for a while now that our company was out of money. We kept going because we thought we were going to get a break. Unfortunately we didn’t get the break before it was impossible to make payroll again. So we were all laid off.

That isn’t the end of the world because we knew it was coming. Also, not two days prior we had a meeting where we talked about, “If you had to swing one time for the fences, what would you do?” I had previously voiced my ideas, and they were tolerated but not accepted. However, someone else had a really good idea that we just had to give a fighting chance.

I’m not going to talk about what that idea is, but since getting laid off a few weeks ago we have come a long way in getting it done.

Enough talk of that though, because I have had a second interview with a pretty cool company and I think I’ll be able to get a job with them. Then everything will be gravy again.

I started an iPhone game a few weeks ago, something I’d tinker with on the weekends. It’s been coming together at an alarming rate and I hope that as soon as I get some art for it it will be a quick turn around to get it on the app store. Though the cruel reality is that I’ll just abandon it like many of my other projects.

Since nobody reads this, I feel fine writing about it here.

I have nearly finished a little experiment on player immersion. I got the idea when I was listening to Robert Rice‘s talk on video game immersion at TGC. He broke down elements of immersion and helped draw connections between technology and it’s impact on player’s experience.

Anyway, I still have 3 things to do. I’m going to be getting art from Ciara Livingston, someone I work with at the bookstore, whose style is perfect for this, edit all of the text for better style and impact, and finally get the final voice recording for the closing.

I can’t count. The fourth thing I need to so is create a Google form to collect information on the experiment so I can get an idea of how good it is or how much of a waste of time it is.

Anyway, here’s the link.

Well, here we go. I hope this isn’t horrible and doesn’t require too much editing, but essentially, I’m posting through TextMate. It’s a great editor, and the more I use it, the more I love it.

This is a new paragraph.

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So I’m making white chicken stock for the first time.  I guess it isn’t technically hard to do, but then again neither is boiling an egg, but most people can’t do that right either.  So we’ll see how this turns out.

After being inspired at the Triangle Game Conference, I decided to open up some projects.  First, I’m writing a simple little experiment that will hopefully prove some ideas I have on immersing players in a story.  I’ve already done the technical work, so I just have to create content.  Thankfully I made it a point to do this rather low tech, so it wont’ require much, but I have got an artist to help.  Her name is Ciara Livingston and I think her artwork will only make this better.  I’ve also convinced my wife to do a voice recording.  Exciting stuff!

In the job world, I’ve started a project that involves actual software development.  Web development specifically.  I’m creating a web tool that will modify apache configurations live.  I don’t think anyone has done this before, mostly because it isn’t something you want a lot of people to go around doing.  Either way, it’s an exciting change of pace from my normal system administration work.

On Sunday my wife and I will have been married two years.  Holy shit.