So, this year, I think I’m bowing out of NaNoWriMo. I started with a concept I hadn’t really thought all that much through, and while I think the start of it was sort of interesting, I wasn’t really invested in it, and can’t seem to get motivated to write.

What I *CAN* get motivated to do is get back on the weight-loss horse. Since starting my new job, months and months ago, I’ve been unable to create a routine I can stick with, where I’m eating controlled amounts and getting enough exercise to keep the weight off.

So… time to start again. I know I’ve tried a couple times, but it’s pretty strange. At the beginning of the year, it was actually pretty trivial to maintain a routine, and the willpower necessary to eat regular amounts and get some decent exercise. Now…? Gotta start over, and some external motivation is always a good help.

So, here’s how I’m gonna roll:

• Gonna end up tending toward larger lunches, and smaller dinners (I generally don’t eat much in the way of breakfast)
• Count calories, like I did at the beginning of the year, maintaining a lower intake than expenditure
• Exercise regularly – swimming twice a week at lunch, and taking Mobius on longer walks – ramping up exertion levels more after losing the weight than before

If I can maintain a lower calorie intake than expenditure for the week, and swim twice a week, then I’m going for a weekly reward:

• Week 1: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare CE
• Week 2: Call of Duty 3 (free with COD4)
• Week 3: Super Mario Galaxy
• Week 4: Rock Band

Good times.

The goal is 210 by the end of the month and 200 by the end of the year.

Yesterday, I had the best day of work ever. In part, the actual day of work was largely pleasant, with work itself a good mix of pleasant and creative. We ended up getting trapped at lunch waiting for a friend to pick up something he needed, and sitting out in the sun, just hanging out was really good.

In the afternoon, I finally had a chance to pitch a concept that a bunch of coworkers and I had collaborated on a couple months earlier. The CEO had been out of town for a number of weeks, and had been really busy with the business end of things, so getting hold of his time had been no small task. But I finally nailed him down, ran him through the presentation, and it went as well as it could possibly have gone.

Like a good interview, you never really know if you got the job, but when you’ve done a good enough job that you know there’s nothing more you could have done, you just have to be satisfied with the result of your end of the process. This pitch was like that. I think the concept is excellent – the result of a broad group of ideas really gelling in the right environment – and I had been really stressed that the presentation would let down the concept due to my inexperience actually *giving* these sorts of presentations.

It all went off beautifully, it was received well, and the fact that I feel like there was nothing I could have done to illustrate the concept better is a really damn good feeling to have. On top of that, the whole process of developing the pitch had been a really fun, exciting time, and if we have the chance to continue to develop it further, I have no doubt that I’d really, really enjoy working on it.

So, yeah – good day.

So… from eingy, what I do at my job:

On a project-wide basis, it’s my job to guide the development of a game’s design. This is a mix of solo and collaborative work. On the solo side, it entails figuring out, at a high level, what the heck we’re going to make. This is often best accomplished by walking the dog, gardening, cooking, driving, or lying in a bathtub. This is where the fact that I’ve basically internalized a couple decades worth of gaming, a bunch of wacky engineering experience, and a lifetime of reading, interacting with a wide variety of art, and a whole lot of random knowledge come into play.

Still, all that stuff happens, by and large, outside work, and it only happens at very rare stages of a project.

On some projects, you start with a design written by someone else. In those cases, it’s my job to make sure the design works. This means reading through the document with an eye for the underlying behaviors, making an attempt to try to understand what the player is going through while playing the game, and determining whether the experience as I envision it is fun or not. It also often involves reading for consistency – if something behaves one way in one part of the design document, does it behave that way all the time? If not, is it clear when some sort of shift happens?

This sort of consistency checking and concept review is probably the thing I’m best at. I tend to read with an extremely critical and skeptical eye – generally coming at a document like the game is absolute garbage, and it’s up to the document to convince me otherwise.

Once inconsistencies have been spotted, it’s then a problem of trying to figure out where inconsistencies occur, what the overall *goal* of any part of the design is, and trying to rectify any problems while keeping the overall goal in mind. That’s a big part of the early stage of working on a game where you’re working from someone else’s design pitch. It’s the same if it’s your own pitch, but it’s much, much harder to do that sort of editing on something that lives in your head.

If it’s not a pre-existing design, or if there are areas that need to be substantially fleshed out, I’ll spend some time doing a personal brainstorm on the subject, and try to come up with interesting ideas. Generally, this involves sitting at a computer with an open Notepad window, putting on some music, and then typing in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way until I’m happy with the results. Generally, about a 10 minute process on a good day.

Once I have a starting point, there’s a point where you have to decide who else to involve. If it’s a small thing, it’s often better to write a design spec for the feature on your own, then take it to the rest of the designers for review. However, for larger features, I’ll then organize a meeting with the rest of the designers for a brainstorm. Even if I’ve got some ideas from my personal brainstorm, I’ll generally start the meeting with a blank slate, giving the other designers a quick rundown on the subject, and let them go to town. Sometimes the process requires a bit of a kickstart, which is where the personal brainstorm comes in handy – I can throw out some starting points, and people can build off that.

Once the brainstorm’s done, I’ll either then use those ideas to write a spec, or I’ll delegate the task to one of the other designers. Once a spec is written, whether I wrote it or not, it gets reviewed by the design team as a whole. After it’s reviewed by the design team, and the idea’s been okayed, that spec then goes out to the other team leads, where artists, animators, modelers and engineers have their say. We’ll meet together and break down the feature into each team’s relevant tasks, and talk about implementation details. Sometimes, a concept artist will over the next couple days, generate a few concepts, which can then be reviewed.

Hm. This is sort of deviating from the idea of the meme. I’m just walking through the day-to-day process, and not saying necessarily what *I* do on a day to day basis.

• Concept Generation: I’ll generally spent an hour or so a day writing stuff on the project Wiki, detailing desired features, filling in gaps where detail was missing, or reviewing existing designs.
• Meetings: Each day, I attend between one and five hours worth of meetings. In the early stages of a project, there are a lot more meetings – brainstorms, reviews, etc. Takes up a lot of time.
• Scheduling: Right now, I’m doing a lot of task generation and scheduling using the company’s nigh-incompetent tracking tool. This is sort of an odd situation to be in, because it really isn’t my job to track the schedule. But fixing that requires:
• Putting out fires: This is a combination of seeing problems, trying to figure out how to resolve them, then resolving them. This can vary from someone wondering about a feature that’s missing to a personality clash between team members, or any variety of miscommunication from minor to horrific. This involves a lot of talking to people, making sure exactly *what* they’re having a problem with, figuring out a solution, and then talking to more people to make sure that solution gets implemented.
• Walking through minefields: Unfortunately, this job also requires a lot of navigating weird personality issues, ego, company history, and the like. In most creative processes, the various people who have a stake in the result are defensive or protective of their ideas. My job is to make all this stuff *work*. If someone likes an idea, but it’s unworkable, my job is to either make it work, find an alternate solution, or kill the feature.
• Dealing with people throwing bombs: A lot of people in this industry seem to think that anyone can be a designer. As a result, everyone offers design suggestions. Some are good, some are bad. Often, the good ideas come from the same people, and the bad ideas come from the same people. I have to work to incorporate the good ideas where possible, and deflect the bad ideas where possible. Unfortunately, bad ideas often seem to come from above. This means that as much as I’d like to sensibly deflect an idea, I’m often required to incorporate it to some degree. I’ve been getting better about effectively deflecting bad input from wherever it’s coming, but it’s often the most stressful part of the day.

Most of this happens with me sitting in front of the computer, either staring at the Wiki, making diagrams in Keynote (not the right tool for the job, but the rightest tool for the job that I have), looking at the schedule, reading or writing e-mails, or listening to music with my keyboard in my lap, writing.

The rest of it happens with me talking to various other people on the team either informally, or in meetings.

This isn’t a very good description of what I do, but honestly, it’s what you get at 1:50 on a Saturday morning. So F off. I’ll write a better summary of it all later. 😛

Today was exhausting. One of the most oddball aspects of my new position at work is that I end up talking to people to try to resolve problems, instead of just stewing in my own. This morning was the beginning of a festival – no – a carnival of misunderstanding, miscommunication, and confusion. It took almost all day to sort through, on top of a regular sort of workday workload, and though it only involved five conversations, working through it spanned about six hours, and wore me out.

It’s a strange thing. I had a lot of the same sort of tiredness, back when I was working at Maxis, simply because of the strain of the work. At the time, again, the actual *content* of the work wasn’t all that impressive. Mostly involved poking around in the develoment tools and Excel, and making sure all the edge cases for a couple systems worked properly. The kicker was that I was working on three completely different, completely unrelated systems at once, and keeping them all sorted was such a mindfuck that by about 2pm every day, I was completely blown out. Yeah – on a good day, I was good for about four hours of solid work before my brain just completely shut down in protest.

Sounds lame, I know. Talking to a couple people, navigating some hairy politically charged situations – more or less anyone’s normal workday. Bleah. Ah, well. Suck it up, learn to deal, move on. On the positive side, it looks like by the end of the day, confusion was largely clarified, the individuals involved dealt with the issues at hand, and most is well heading into a new day.

Definitely learning a lot, which is fun.

… wow. There’s really not much more I can say. Game of the Year, for me. Beats out Bioshock, which I was pretty sure was a lock. The game’s mechanic is so astonishing, and the game has so much *character*… and it simply does everything perfectly.

The characters are incredibly memorable, the puzzles are awesome, and man… perfect.

Minor spoiler, if you haven’t finished the game. Not really a *spoiler*, per se, but involves events near the end of the game.

Today, at work, we bought a small cake. We put the cake in the second floor kitchen, and took a picture. Framed the picture in a portal. Went up to the third floor, took a picture of a dude eating lunch. Framed that in a different portal. Took the picture of the dude, put it in the second floor, near the cake. Took the first picture, put it in the third floor kitchen, where we took the other picture. Wrote “The cake is a lie” over and over on a piece of paper. E-mailed the team, from “Aperture Science Research Facility” that there was cake in the third floor kitchen.

Big fun.

So… what’s up?

A friend and his family came in from Boston over the week, which was nice. Reminds me how many people I don’t keep up with on any sort of regular basis. Just weird, with essentially one group of people I still consider friends, most of whom I haven’t seen in 8+ years outside a day or two here and there at weddings.

Ah, well.

Got what amounts to a title change at work, recently. Sort of weird – one of those “New Year’s Resolutions” that’s come true in about half the time I thought it would take. Next year, I’ll resolve to become wealthy enough to retire, or something. It’s sort of a mix of good and bad. On the good side, I’m learning a reasonable amount – the new job’s a challenge, because it’s a mix of doing what I really like to do (designing games), and something I’m not terrible at (I think) but don’t really like to do all that much (manage people).

On the bad side, there are issues I won’t really talk about here, and there’s also the fact that the company’s major strength isn’t in organization and management. As a result, it’s hard (no, it’s impossible) for me to say, learn from someone whose *process* I really respect and admire. It’s not like a mentored position where I can learn under someone, grow to trust them, absorb the knowledge, and then step into the position. Instead, it’s more like, “Oh. Okay, here you go. Good luck with that.”

I think I’ll be able to deal, but thus far, it’s been odd. Essentially given the ability to do something I like to do, placed in the middle of an incredibly volatile political minefield. It’s a weird situation, for sure. Still, another goalpost knocked down. In terms of career pursuit, this is essentially the end of the road. This is as high as I want to go in my field. It’s a strange feeling.

From Niralth:

20 Years Ago, I…
1.) almost moved to San Diego
2.) didn’t fit in
3.) was incredibly busy

15 Years Ago, I…
1.) had found a community
2.) formed some of my most lasting friendships
3.) wanted to get away from high school

10 Years Ago, I…
1.) had just met my future wife
2.) was abjectly miserable
3.) was lonely

5 Years Ago, I…
1.) wasn’t sure what I was doing with my life
2.) was content in my relationship
3.) had just bought a house

2 Years Ago, I…
1.) knew what I wanted to do with my life
2.) found something I was really good at
3.) had the first person I’d consider a close friend die unexpectedly

1 Year Ago, I…
1.) got married
2.) went to England and France for the first time
3.) fixed the DAMNED ROOF LEAK

Yesterday, I…
1.) began to take control of my job, instead of letting it control me
2.) had an evening with my wife that was remarkably like the first evenings we spent together
3.) saw part of my neighborhood blossom into something new

Today, I…
1.) put some of the work stuff from yesterday into action
2.) went swimming
3.) will probably finish watching Heroes

Tomorrow, I’ll…
1.) play some Halo 3
2.) cook something
3.) do some laundry

In Five Years, I’ll…
1.) be done with renovations on the house
2.) have a kid
3.) be as happily married as I am today (which will be more work, ’cause of 2.)

So, it’s been a touch since I’ve updated the blog. What’s been up? Not much, really. Work is work – kind of a mix of fun, frustrating, interesting and stupid. I guess most jobs are, but whatever. FINALLY finished watching Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica (eh, it was alright), and starting to get through Heroes (which, as of maybe halfway through the season is awesome). Halo 3’s out, which is obviously pretty big news. It’s more Halo, which is more or less exactly what I wanted. Multiplayer’s super fun, single player’s more of the same, but much prettier.

People have been complaining about the graphics. It’s almost funny, except it’s also kind of tragic. Halo 3’s about as good as I can imagine Halo looking. The people’s faces and lipsync aren’t all that great, I’ll admit, but the environments, the scale, the textures and the Master Chief all look *spectacular*, and there’s a lot of really nice lighting effects that look *right*. They don’t look next-gen for next-gen’s sake. They don’t have random bloom. They aren’t brown. They’re very impressive, but remarkably natural, and subtle looking (even if they aren’t natural or subtle). The game looks great.

The sad thing is, what it really shows is that people aren’t thinking about graphics based on some absolute. The bar’s been raised by games like Gears of War, and it’s only getting higher. The problem is, there’s only a few companies that can deliver graphical quality like that. Most game developers simply don’t have the resources to even do half, or a third of what Bungie or Epic can do – and if gamer’s expectations are so high that something like Halo 3 can be classified as unattractive, it really speaks volumes about how difficult it is to keep up with the Joneses these days. Literally, I guess (and if you get the reference, you’re at least as big a nerd as me).

Have you ever heard a presidential speech with more straw men and logical fallacies than Bush’s speech today? “Some say (something ridiculous). I say (obviously desirable whatever)!” The entire speech was basically nothing but straw men, bullshit spin, and utter nonsense. I’m sure there are some outright lies in there, as well – 36 nations helping in Iraq? Come on.

But the most stunning thing was simply how far we’ve fallen. Political speeches are often distorted – that’s not something new – but I’ve never heard a speech that I found more desperate, or blatantly, utterly devoid of sincerity as today’s address. The Democrat response to the speech by comparison was so straightforward and free of the idiotic condescension that Bush seems unable to avoid that it was a breath of fresh air.

It’s amazing that this is our “leader.” I doubt he could lead a row of ducks.

So, over the last week, as a couple of you already know, I built a stone path in my backyard. Ei-Nyung, Sean, and a friend from work helped out – Sean and M. helped move more than two tons of rock from the driveway to the backyard, and Sean helped move another whole mess of gravel. Without the help, there’s no way it’d have been done in time, but with the help, the path was finished in a week (to within two hours).

It’s basically a path of bluish-greyish gravel and pinkish-orange stone that runs from the base of the backyard, in lazy S-curves all the way up to the loquat tree in the back. I used our electric tiller to create the pathway, then poured down two coats of gravel, placed the stones, poured on gravel to fill the cracks, soaked the thing with water, then added more gravel where it’d settled.

On the slope between the first and second tiers of the backyard, I found some rebar and a collapsed retaining wall that had to be removed. Over the course of about two days, I dug out the wall, used an electric jackhammer to break up the concrete, and a sawzall to cut out the rebar to the point where it was well below the surface. I used the tiller to create a smoothed out slope, soaked the dirt with water, and jumped around on it to compact it at least a bit.

All in all, it’s turned out pretty well – it divides the backyard up neatly into more manageable chunks, makes the whole thing much more accessible, and lends it some much-needed perspective. That is, it used to be that you could look at the backyard and have no idea how big it was – now, when you look at it, you can see from the path how far it goes back.

It was definitely a week well spent. The project was immensely satisfying, dramatically improves the back yard, and though tiring, was really … fun.

Not something I want to do again for at least a while, but there’s still some gravel to haul to the back. Maybe another hour or two of work, just to clear out the driveway. Good times.