Tycho

I got to meet someone who I have great respect for today: Jerry Holkins from Penny Arcade.

Greg sent me a text this afternoon asking if I wanted to hang our with Jerry Holkins. I was like, "Are you serious? Totally!" I wouldn't go so far as to call Jerry a hero of mine, but I'm certainly a huge fan.

That doesn't really sum it up though. I've been reading Penny Arcade every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for the last 4 years. I've been to the last 2 PAX events and only missed this years due to my current financial situation with being in school. I have every book they've released and will be buying the next on release day. I own several of their shirts and I'm kind of considering picking up a copy of this years PAX DVD since I missed out.

So, yeah, I'm a big fan.

It was a very cool experience to be able to chill with him. I made sure to avoid all of my geek clothes and just dress like a normal person. I restrained myself from any kind of star worship and just enjoyed talking and hanging out with him. It was especially cool for me because my buddy James already works with him on a regular basis for the game their making so I got introduced directly and was able to just join in with the conversation.

As many of my friends can attest, I love to talk about design and industry trends. I can sit and trade opinions for hours on the current state of games, ways to improve them, ideas I've got... you get the picture. It was awesome being able to have these same conversations with someone I respect as much as Jerry. He's a very interesting, personable guy and it was a really awesome night.

It's awesome being so connected.

Emancipation

Funniest video I've seen in a long time. Every time I watch it, it just gets funnier. Make sure you have sound on when you watch it.

Orange Money

What valve is doing with the Orange Box is really pissing me off. It's an obvious money grab and it's a slap in the face to their fans.

I am a huge, huge fan of Valve, Steam, and the Half-Life series in particular. I'm even one of the few people whose ass doesn't hurt after paying 30 bucks for 3 hours of game play with their expansions. That having been said, I'm having a really hard time justifying purchasing the Orange Box.

For those who don't know, the Orange Box is a collection of Half-Life 2, HL2 Episode 1 and Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2. It costs 50 dollars which is a pretty sweet deal for all of those games. The problem is that this is the only method of purchasing Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress

Already bought Half-Life 2 AND Episode 1? Why thank you loyal fan. Now fucking buy it again and thank us for the privilege.

Even without the bullshit surrounding having to repurchase a game, the totally fuck over anyone who just wants to play Portal or Team Fortress 2. And they know exactly what they're doing. Episode 1 was a grand fuck up and expectations for Episode 2 are low. If they were to offer Portal or Team Fortress 2 on their own, they would lose huge numbers on sales of Episode 2. By packaging them this way, they make more money and inflate their sales numbers of the other products in the package.

It's dirty and I don't like it.

The Challenge

There's always a struggle in my posts here that makes things a little frustrating. As this is basically a public forum that anyone can view, I tend to have to censor myself in unfortunate ways. I'd really like to be able to just spill everything out here, but I know that if I do, there's always a chance that the wrong person will read it and it'll cause problems.

Relationships and dating are probably the touchiest for this; And, unfortunately for me, it's generally what I want to talk about the most.

There are even some pretty funny, disturbing, or just plain horrifying stories that I'd like to be able to relate in my whimsical fashion, but I simply can't without hurting one person's feelings or another's.

In other news, the party last night was fucking rad. I think there was about 25 people here at the busiest point. Our current neighbours are pretty chill about noise too, so we can get pretty rowdy and not have to worry about pissing them off. Good tunes. Good times.

Approved

After a busy, busy 3 months and a lot of work, or game engine was approved this week. This basically means that we've proved that we're not going to utterly destroy the team we work with and we can now begin work on an actual game based on our engine. Exciting times indeed.

We also finally confirmed our team. Well, most of it, anyway. The group is obviously inexperienced and they don't seem to be excited for the project. It's a disappointing contrast with the code team. Regardless, I'm sure that, by the end, the designers will have learned enough to be passable, although it'll be quite some time before any of them will be on a professional level.

I'm not very excited for the game idea itself. It seems like it's going to be fairly generic, which is unfortunate. It really doesn't affect me on a professional level, however, so I don't care all that much. It would just be nice to come out of this with a game that's fun to play, rather than just an example of my coding abilities.

This week wasn't all fun, though. We had to cut Darryl from the team and that was total shit. Darryl is a good guy, but he's just not in the right mindset for this project. He's not motivated to work and he puts things off until the last minute. We simply can't have a person like that on the team without them dragging us all down with them. Hopefully Darryl understands where we're coming from and won't hold it against us.

Overall, though, a very good week. I'm stoked to get some designs from the rest of the team so I can start coding me some gameplay. Should be an awesome 6 months.