Ryan
Chasing greatness

It has been quite a while since I last wrote anything.  I’ve been working happily with my new job since May, and have been a bit too busy to dedicate any time to writing down anything for the few people who would consume it.  Christmas however, deserves a few words.

Let me begin by saying this Christmas was the best Christmas I have ever had.

Now, let me betray that with some words.

My Christmas started the weekend of my wife’s birthday, which is two weeks prior to the real deal.  We decided to go to Asheville to have an early Christmas with my family and to see the Biltmore Estate for the first time.  It was a great and wonderful time with my family, and I couldn’t have been happier about it.

After that warm up, it was time for the serious holiday cheer in the mecca of civilization, Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

That’s right.

Now, the truth is I would be content to live there.  The truth is I look forward to going there every time.  The truth is that is still Oklahoma.  What made it very special though, was that our three best friends from Japan came to visit.  Two of the most emotional times in my life was proposing to my wife and saying goodbye to my friends at Christmas.

We shot guns, ate BBQ and Taco Bell, saw Christmas lights, had 3 Christmases, wrapped presents, rode four-wheelers, spent around 12 hours in Wal-Mart, stayed up late because we didn’t want to waste time sleeping, and woke up early to get more time together.

They had intended to go to Manhattan to meet some other friends and check out all of that, but there was a blizzard that was the best worst news we all got.

It took probably 6 hours of being on the phone to get their flights changed, but in the end we got to spend 3 more days with our friends, and every day we had I became more aware of how harder saying good-bye would be.

Anyway, below are links to the pictures and such that we took, so enjoy at you’re leisure.

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.

(more…)

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.

So I’m home after the Triangle Game Conference 2010.  I wasn’t sure if I was going to go considering it has a pretty steep entrance fee for non-students.  In the end though, I went and I am glad that I did.

First, I should say that this wasn’t really a gathering for hiring.  It was for people to come together to learn about various areas of game development, technologies, and general networking.  Looking at the conference in that light, it was really great.

The place was crawling with students though.  I’ve written plenty in the past of the wretchedness of engineers in social settings, and these past two days were like living in unwelcome drug flashbacks of poor hygiene and awkward social interaction.  Thankfully the hotel had their  AC cranked so body odor didn’t linger long.  I also noted that a lot of the merchandise involved breath mints.  Smart move on their part.

Despite the throngs of fail walking around, I did hear some really great talks by great people.  Insomniac was probably the single largest game developer there and led most of the bigger talks.  This was really good actually as they have earned the respect of a lot of developers over the years and do things differently enough to have very interesting takes on game development.

I don’t remember all of the people I talked to, but one gentleman gave a great talk on user testing and how important it is, how it is done poorly, and how it can be done well without a huge budget.  Another was a no-bullshit talk about making a game and why every excuse you can give is utter crap.  He was from Republic of Fun and was very good.  One of the few women whose talk I attended was based on educational and intergenerational interactions.  I really enjoyed her talk, because it reminded me a lot of the process I used to make games in Japan for teaching English.  One guy I talked to specializes in rapid game development.  By rapid I mean 48 hours.  He was really great to hear and eased the fear of, “Making a shitty game,” by saying, “Oh, you’ll make a shitty game, but at least it only wasted 48 hours of your life instead of more.”  There was a guy from Neogence games who talked about game immersion who said a lot of the things I’ve felt, and I spent a little time afterwards picking his brain about various immersion techniques.

I tried to talk to everyone who was interested in talking back to me and aside from the speakers who were easily cornered, the Spark Plug Games group were fantastic.  They came with everything they needed to develop a game within the two days at the conference.  They had an artist with an eisle and a programmer with a computer.  There was also a really great guy there who was in production that I talked to quite extensively about the game market, his past, my direction, and all of that.  The programmer was squirrelly and awkward, but very gifted.  The artist was very personable and also very gifted.  It was pretty eye-opening to see professionals kicking-ass at what they do right in front of you.

All in all it was a great experience, and even though I couldn’t give my resume out to anyone, I was really glad that I went.