If it's not Raven, it's crap...

So, what were we talking about? I honestly didn't mean to leave my last post up in the air like that. Oh, yeah, storyboards. As I mentioned, Thursday was Sandbox day for game design. We had taken a hiatus for summer vacation reasons and whatnot, so it's been about 2 months since the last one.

I had a couple of big and fairly last-minute ND deadlines last week that cut into my after work plans, not once, but twice. As you can imagine, I was pretty salty about that, so I didn't work on any game stuff (game backlog, research, etc) once I got home. It was all a bit of pointless passive aggression on my part that neither hurt, nor helped anyone. One of the week's big assignments was a set of 50 high-level "grind" quests, which are relatively easy to write, since you don't have to wrap it all up in a story. It's just essentially tedious, "Find/build/produce x amount of y object". The second project was basically a re-work of a game entry tutorial, which isn't easy at all. The game tutorial is, usually, the first thing that a player encounters in the game. It can mean the difference between sticking with the game or rage-quitting right away. If your tutorial is being re-worked then it's probably because it sucks so bad that players are...

This month's show was a semi-first, but an experience upon which I'd like to build and repeat. For the first time, I set the playlist over a week in advance of the show (instead of the night before). One of my goals is to make more solid transitions from one song to the next, rather than just fade in/fade out transitions. It's a work in progress, but getting better (I think). As far as "workflows" go, I think I've found the one for me, but I really need to stop mixing inside of my headphones. It all sounds janky as fuck on the studio speakers after I've mixed everything on my headphones. And then I have to try to balance out the sound in the studio, which leads to the volume bullshit that you can hear in the playback.

Nearly two months later, I'm back on the subject of my birthday. It's been years since I've thrown a birthday party on my actual birthday. Calendar dates aren't very important to me and I need to be in the mood to throw a party. Often, I've waited until I've felt the desire to throw a party, which is around May, June, July, etc. And then, my actual birthday is more or less an afterthought. I wish that I could stress how much that I want my birthday to be the afterthought and just a vague overarching theme, but I still get presents (and I don't complain...presents are wonderful). As I mentioned previously, this year, I wasn't in the mood for a party, so I didn't throw one. I chose to spend the evening of my actual birthday with one great friend (who is the bee's knees) and that was perfect to me. But some people really wanted me to throw a party.

How fucking insane is this new banner for my radio show ? I think it was definitely worth the wait. There's still some tweaking to do, because it's not quite Facebook cover pic material (though I think I have a temporary solution for that) and I've gotta come up with a better layout for the show's tumblr (plus, I forgot to log out of my main tumblr account, so I accidentally erased that layout). And there's eventually going to be some kind of logo. Still, it's pretty sweet, right? This is the second big step in my radio re-vamp (after changing the name). Look at it...I mean, really look at it. It's me, but I'm an actual bird...and there's smoke coming out of my damn headphones. I definitely can't take the credit for this. The homie Mario brought my shitty concept doodles to life, far exceeding my expectations. Listen to the show on Friday, the music is gonna be legit good and I've got a cool picture now.

Remember when I wrote about the game Geoguessr and how it kind of seemed like it would make a good kidnapping sim? Apparently an indie developer in Hungary had the exact same idea or they're big fans of my oh-so-highly-influential/only-tangentially-related-to-gaming blog. Who knows? Let's just go with the latter.

About two months after our company moved from our office space in Eppendorf/Lokstedt to our new building in the middle of the city, management decided to introduce a weekly event, now known as Beer Thursday. Not quite two years later (perhaps my chronology is off), it's a company institution. The premise is simple. Every Thursday (unless it's a bank holiday) starting at 6pm, employees can mix and mingle in the atrium and drink free beer. It's intended to promote intra-company interactions/collaboration/socialization, which can be difficult with some 600 people. Not bad in theory (or even in practice, really). The tendency, however, is for most people to group together with the people who they already know and collaborate on a daily basis. However, I've found it useful on a number of occasions. Especially if you're really curious about a co-worker's area of expertise or job responsibilities. I know you can just walk up to someone and strike up a conversation...

This week, I cleared the six-month, post-breakup hurdle that I set for myself. By "cleared" I mean, I had set a date (May 31st) last December and put it in my calendar and then, as the passage of time is wont to do, the date came and went. It's more symbolic than anything, because six months ago, May seemed impossibly far away and the hurt and self-doubt seemed so impossibly big. But here I am. In the time that's passed, I've realized that six-months is still just a drop in the bucket and I've still got a ways to go - I'll update on that at the end of the year - but the overall prognosis is good. Currently, I'm still in the process of  Project Girl-Get-Yo-Shit-Together, which will be on-going (possibly till infinity), but bit-by-bit it's coming together. Project GGYST involves tackling all sorts of crap that I've been putting off for years for a variety of lame excuses and that I need to fucking saddle up and get it done. It also involves fig...

Thanks, Mad Men ! It only took 190 days for me to find the perfect screen caps to sum up everything. Minus the stabbing, of course. The f2p game industry is more or less the same thing as advertising.