My year in review:
Pretty strange year, this one. Started out with a mix of bad and awesome, with the first thing to happen in the new year be my engagement to Ei-Nyung. Was sadly unemployed at the time, though, which was no good. I don’t really remember a whole lot about January, to be perfectly honest. Ran a lot of errands and such, and was dealing with getting the power to the downstairs working, and finished. We moved into the downstairs sometime in January, I think.
In February, we got a dog, which we named Mobius – you’ve probably heard of him by now. Half Husky, half American Eskimo Dog. That was the weekend before I started my job at Maxis, which at the time was in Walnut Creek, and later moved to Redwood City. The commute sucks, but the job that Ei-Nyung got later in the year helps, because we can commute together. Very nice. She’s happy with her new job, too. After that, a lot of the rest of the year blurred together. We had a fence put up outside the house, so that Mobi could run around during the day, and I put a dog door in, which was a tremendous pain in the ass. The front windows leaked, but since most of the year was sunny, it wasn’t much of a problem until just recently.
We also got a new bed – a California King, which is both ridiculous, and awesome. It’s way too large for two people, but with two people and a sort of obnoxious dog, it’s perfect.
Work was hectic at times, but entertaining as well, and in November, I shipped my second game – The Urbz, for the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox. In early December, Paper Cup Games also finished its first game – Aura, which was submitted to a gbadev.org competition, and at least at this point, hasn’t been eliminated from potential publication yet.
Met a bunch of new people this year, either through work, or extracurricular type stuff. First year in a while I think I’ve made a couple new friends. Working in a new place has helped that a lot, and it’s been a good experience.
What do I want for the coming year? Some time to do some artistic stuff – outside the sprites and music for Aura, I didn’t do much in the way of purely creative stuff this year – no paintings, no comics, etc. Harder to do with work being as crazy as it is. I’d also like to get married next year, though finances will dictate that somewhat, and I’d like to finally get to Hawaii, Paris, or London, which I’ve been putting off for like, five years now, due to a lack of time and money. Yeesh.
Well, there you have it. A purely vain post. But it’s been a pretty crazy year – lots of big changes, far as I can tell, all of them good. Hope the next year’s as interesting.
Hey, I don’t know if it’s gauche to respond to an older post in the comments section of a new post, but I don’t know if you go back and look for comments on older posts. So….
I just wanted to say I liked what you were writing about game design (the designers you work with coming at it from a writer’s perspective, and not really being *designers*, etc.). It seems like no one majors in game design, and there’s not a clear standard “path to becoming a designer”, or even a standard way to teach someone how to be a good designer, so people end up as designers for random reasons. One cynical view would be that they don’t fit anywhere else in the organization or don’t have specialized skills that would point them towards an obvious other role.
Or maybe because writers are more involved with the “plot” of games, and plot design is confused with game design?
Similar to managers in engineering– I feel like many of my managers at companies might have been good engineers but were terrible managers– they didn’t study management or think critically “what are different ways I could manage? What is best?”, they just ended up in that role through a chain of inciental events.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting, thanks.
I feel like these are the sorts of conversations they should have at IGDA meetings.
doesn’t have his own blog to talk in,
-m