Madison remains a pretty classy place, and summer here was a pretty excellent experience. That’s one of the nice things about the Midwest – as miserable as the winters tend to be, the summers often manage to make up for it. Once particularly nice thing was that the days of incredible humidity that characterize summer in southeast Michigan don’t seem to be a factor here. I’m not sure if that’s a regional difference or if I just got lucky this time around. Ask me again in a year, I suppose!

Work remains a significant portion of my life and time (not always by choice!) but, unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to talk about…well, any of it really. NDAs are common in all technical fields but, in m brief experience at least, people don’t usually want to know about the gritty details of HVAC assembly code or telephone directory systems. Game development, on the other hand, is one of those things that people like to ask about and, when confronted with NDA talk, tend to get even more curious. People that probably haven’t played a game other than Rock Band in decades, mind you! I recently had a sixty or seventy year old lady start interrogating me at a local deli.

True story.

In an attempt to get ahead on some matters of student-related debt I’ve started doing freelance web development work in addition to my day job at Human Head. How long I can sustain this is an open question but contract work is one of those areas in which you can pull down relatively big scores punctuated by long periods of complacency. If that’s your <em>only</em> source of income it’s a problem; if it’s supplementary, the ability to turn it on and off is a wonderful bonus. The project should start up officially early next week, and in celebration of this I’ve updated my web resumé and added a (very small) portfolio containing selections of sites I’ve designed over the years. If you care to take a look, it’s right here.

Oh, and for those of you wondering: yes, I’m still a fatass.

That probably puts me in the same boat as thousands of other Americans – the primary difference being that I’m attempting to do so via lifestyle alterations rather than expensive surgeries or shady supplements. Of course, I have a semi-rare advantage in this area: I already did it once before so I know it can be done again.

During the seven or so months I spent living in Japan I managed to drop a significant amount of weight. This was entirely by accident and, if you can believe it, I actually recall being surprised when I caught a glance of myself in a mirror whilst touring China. The weight loss was the result of lifestyle changes that were made completely unconsciously and enforced by the culture I was living in and the circumstances in which I found myself (poor). Of course, upon my return to the States I gained most of that weight back within a year or so but eventually managed to reach equilibrium by removing soda from my diet in all its forms.

Since moving to Madison, though, old habits returned. Of course the blame really rests with my own lack of self-control but, in true American Spirit, I will instead blame the cooler at work. It is chock full of succulent free drinks – fruit juices, vitamin waters (how fucking stupid are they?) and sodas of all kinds. Their low cost and ready availability would be my demise, along with the general stress of being a working man in a new city. Getting home tired each day, the thought of actually preparing healthy foods generally lost to the ease of frozen French fries, boxed macaroni and cheese, hotdogs and Pizza Hut. Combined with the typical sedentary office life, these factors conspired to make me…well, kind of a fatass. Let’s not pull punches here.

Anyway, I decided something had to be done a few weeks ago and, thus, set out to change my lifestyle as best I can. The first two major changes: strictly enforcing a 1600 Calorie daily menu and riding my bike to and from work twice a day (in the morning, home and back for lunch, and home in the evening). The former started out very rocky. Having gotten used to eating way more than I should, I found myself almost constantly hungry. However, the thought that I’d certainly existed on a similar diet for half a year in Japan reminded me that if I could only get used to the smaller, healthier portions again things would get easier. And, I’m happy to say, they mostly have.

I’ve managed to stay pretty much on this program for an entire month so far, during which I’ve dropped around 6 pounds. In the past two weeks I’ve added a 22 mile bike around one of the local lakes to my Saturdays which should, hopefully, help me increase that rate. Having bought a fairly accurate bathroom scale was also a good idea. I was on the fence at the start. I knew I was overweight – that much was obvious just by looking – but it didn’t gel until I saw the dreaded number two in the hundreds column of that seven-segment display. I have never, at any point in my life up until now, weighed that much, and the realization of such galvanized my motivation.

The long-term goal is to get down to around 170, which should put me safely in the healthy weight range for my height. For now I’m just hoping to see 189 by the time I head to my little brother’s high school graduation party in July. That’s a pretty conservative target, I know, but I figure it’s better to aim low and surpass it so as to keep myself motivated.

The ability to convincingly lie to oneself is probably the single greatest success factor in weight loss.

Sufficient to say, so far, that things are going about as well as can be expected. The apartment is satisfactory and everyone at Human Head has been friendly and helpful, thus far, so I’m pretty happy with that. I haven’t had much of a chance to explore Madison for multiple reasons, not least of which has been the ridiculous weather this week: sub-zero temperatures pretty much every day. Things are supposed to warm up after today, though, so hopefully I’ll be able to do more of that in the near future.

Further updates to come over the weekend, for those of you still interested.

Of course, until recently that was all theory. Now I’ve got to actually make the move and, perhaps more importantly, leave behind the comfort zone of familiarity. Close friends that I’ve known for years will stay behind, and though this sort of thing has been the case ever since I started college at MTU (and studied abroad in Japan, for that matter!) this time it feels different. With school and with Japan there was always the background knowledge that I would be returning to the Novi area for a summer, or for long holidays, or whatever, and that things would, if only for a few weeks, return to old-fashioned normalcy.

I’m not afraid or even worried, at least not in the traditional sense, but then the feelings themselves are tough to pin down. Soon I’ll be in a new city and a new state, working a new job in an industry I probably don’t know as well as I think I do and performing a task for which I’m almost certainly not as prepared as I think I am.

I guess this is growing up.

For example, one of the things I’m in the market for is a queen bed. According to this listing (chosen at random) on a local retailer’s website, this mattress that they sell for around $700 is apparently worth somewhere closer to $1400! There’s no indication of where I would expect to see this higher price and, in fact, all of my browsing leads me to believe that $700 is the average price for this product. So why the prevarication? Are some customers really credulous enough to look at that and think they’re getting a phenomenal deal?

At least in the case of this retailer, all it did was cause me to almost dismiss them as an option when my cursory glance revealed that they were (it appeared) way over priced.

I also dropped by Circuit City to make use of various Christmas gift cards. In an incredible stroke of luck I managed to pick up a pristine copy of Okami for less than $10 and, equally surprising, a copy of Puzzle Quest for only $20. Both of these are excellent titles that I’m somewhat ashamed to admit I haven’t yet partaken of, but getting such good deals on tough to find games makes me feel just a teensy bit better. There’s still some money left over on my gift cards that I’ll likely use to grab a wireless router for the new apartment – I’m leaning towards the tried-and-true Linksys WRT54GL, but if anyone has any other suggestions I’d love to hear them.

Finally, I couldn’t let this heart-wrenching trailer slide by without comment. I know, mentally, that this is hardly the first time Soul Calibur has included unlikely, non-canonical guest characters but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m witnessing the final gasps of this series.

The place itself is decent, not perfect but it’s inexpensive and will allow me to build up some pretty substantial savings by the time the lease is up in August. It’s a one bedroom place of moderate size with a decent kitchen, something that might not seem important but was actually pretty tough to come by. There are several downsides, of course: communal, coin-operated laundry facilities, baseboard heating and a location that’s pretty far from downtown. It is, however, closer to work than a downtown place would have been (more or less right in between the two locations).

Although I’m very excited to get started at HumanHead, I must admit that the pace of this is becoming a little bit stressful. In reality it’s been almost a month since I got the offer, but with the holidays falling right in the middle it feels like I’ve been running non-stop for quite some time. As it is I’m slated to start working “as soon as I can get out there,” which could be as late as the end of the month but it definitely feels like I shouldn’t drag things out that long. Next week makes the most sense because it’ll give me the long MLK day weekend to get things organized and under control, after which I can get started for real.

Sorry for the mundane nature of the past few posts, but this felt like a good way to get back into the swing of regular updating. Once I get moved in things will (hopefully) move in a direction that’s less generic descriptions and more entertaining.

That is to say, unlike the automotive industry or the military industrial complex, the game industry doesn’t have many well-established routes of entry. Oh sure, you can put together a kickass mod or create a quirky indie game and get lucky – and you’ll hear no end of stories describing this track – but that’s hardly a tried and true method. Aside from the big publishers like EA and Microsoft, spamming out copies of your résumé is a good way to feel like you’re tossing bits into an invisible black hole. And, unless you’re fortunate enough to live in California or Seattle, odds are your university’s career fair doesn’t have any game companies in attendance.

Thus, my summer this past year consisted largely of what I’ve just described – sending dozens of digital resumes and cover letters to die friendless and alone in the wilds of the internet. It’s hard to overstate the psychological toll this eventually takes…the almost complete lack of feedback one receives, aside from the occasional flimsy rejection letter, is tough to deal with. Indeed, I think I stuck it out a lot longer than most would have and possibly longer than I should have, but I’m happy to say that it seems to have worked out in the end!

As of a week ago I’ve accepted a position as “technical level designer/game programmer” at HumanHead in Madison, Wisconsin. Odds are that title means very little to most of you. I’ll confess that it doesn’t mean all that much to people inside the industry either! This is another of the many problems aspiring game developers run into when trying to find a job – the lack of standard, comprehensible job titles makes it almost impossible to figure out what kinds of positions you should be applying for. In any case, it basically means that I will be supporting more experienced level designers in creating scripted sequences and events as well as small gameplay elements. Because HumanHead is a small company and my project team is also small I’ve got a very real opportunity to have a direct creative impact, something most entry level game developers would kill to get.

In a lot of ways this represents the dream job. It’s about as close as you can get to an entry-level game designer position, and game design is exactly what I want to be doing in the future. Because there’s scripting involved I also get to apply my CS degree to some extent. Most importantly, I get to work on a big title with a small team on which I can make a real, noticeable difference. The people I met at HumanHead are all friendly and interesting and we got along great. The atmosphere of the studio is very non-corporate, with casual dress and direct interaction between normal employees like me and the actual owners of the company.

I’m really excited to see what the next few months bring. I’m also considering writing up an short article detailing the path I took into the industry and discussing the value of networking outside the industry itself and how the contact that gets you the job can come from the most unlikely of places. I figure it might be of use or interest to others who want to break into the industry themselves.

A lot has happened in the past couple of weeks, some of which I’m eager to talk about and some of which I’m not. Telling it all in a single post would probably be overwhelming in the “too long, didn’t read” sense of the word. As such, the plan is to break things up over a few posts knowing full-well my track record regarding this sort of scheme. I don’t know what order or how many there will be, but I’m almost positive that they’ll end up achronological. This is a word I’ve made up to mean “out of temporal order” because I didn’t feel like typing that phrase out and, honestly, I sort of thought it might have been an actual word to begin with. I was wrong, but that has not stopped me from using it anyway. Such is the author’s dark power, I suppose.

Back to the matter at hand, I currently find myself in Madison, Wisconsin in the midst of a furious apartment hunt. Darth has come along for moral support and to provide much appreciated experience on the matter of finding a place to live in a city you’ve never visited before this moment. We can get on to the matter of why I’m moving to Madison in the next post, but for now it should be sufficient to know that I am. Finding an apartment in a new city is always a chore, I imagine, but in this particular case the problem is exacerbated by what must be the most asinine arrangement in the country: every single downtown and near-city rental property leases in August. Not just sometime in August, mind you, but specifically on August 14th.

What this means is that anyone moving to the city at any other time than August is completely fucked if they want a decent place downtown. Or, at least, if they want a decent place that falls within their price range and space requirements. My needs are not extravagant, and I think I’ve put myself into a range where apartments certainly exist – I know this because I have seen the listing myself. Unfortunately, none of them are available now.

After several days of hunting (and one more remaining on Monday) it seems that I’m probably going to be limited to one option: take a cheaper and less than exciting place until August and resign myself to going through this entire silly operation again except, this time, with an eye towards summer availability. There is some appeal to this plan…I can save a lot of money for the first half of the year if I go for a cheaper place, money that can be put towards the paying of student loans, buying of furniture, saving for emergencies, traveling, hard drugs, and that sort of thing. What’s more, I’ll have time to do a truly thorough search of downtown and will likely have a lot more options to choose from. I’ll also (theoretically) have a better idea of what it costs to live in Madison in the first place.

So, not an ideal situation by any stretch of the imagination, but maybe it won’t be so bad. I can also decide to go the irresponsible route and choose the only nice downtown place I’ve found. I really like the landlord (she actually lives in the building!), the place itself is decent with a great view, and it comes fully furnished with shockingly nice stuff and brand-new appliances. It is also, of course, at the far end of what I can afford.

Tune in next time to see how responsible I turn out to be.

It starts off with a rather savage wind storm around my current place of residence, winds strong enough that it toppled a few trees right in front of my eyes. These were not live, healthy trees, of course, but old dead ones. Nonetheless it is a pretty entertaining and perhaps slightly dangerous situation outside my window. Me being me, I decide to hop on my bike and ride around to survey some of the damage and make sure none of the trees that I heard fall (but couldn’t see) have landed on the driveway.

This is probably my first mistake.

As I’m turning onto the sidewalk and generally finding the high winds and whipping branches to be pretty invigorating my cell phone starts to ring. Being an expert cyclist I answer the phone with my right hand, a maneuver I’ve successfully completed hundreds of times in the past. I stop pedaling but the sidewalk is sloped downhill here so I’m maintaining most of my speed. The call turns out to be from my father, and we exchange a few pleasantries at which point I ask if he can hear me clearly. I explain that any difficulty he may be having is likely due to the very high winds around me.

It is at this point, no more than ten seconds after I got the call, that I hear the sound of a tree snapping. I can’t actually see it, but the sound in unmistakable. It is almost immediately followed by a bright orange flash and a very loud explosion sound, not unlike what you would expect from a particularly large firework. All of this commotion appears to be happening a dozen or so meters in front of me and to the side, and in a pure instinctive reaction my left hand squeezes down on the brake.

We can safely refer to this as my second mistake.

I realize my error almost instantly, releasing my phone (and sending it flying down the sidewalk in the process) and trying to get my other hand onto the handlebars. Unfortunately, by this time the momentum is too great to stop and shifting my weight backwards is not enough to keep me on the pedals. With my weight gone the bike comes to a swift and abrupt stop; sadly, my feet are not built to the same exactly quality as my transportation’s brakes. I continue forward and pitch over the handlebars as they catch me just above the crotch, cart wheeling in what I imagine must have been a wholly impressive manner. I do this down a few meters of concrete and eventually come to a stop on top of my bike.

The road I live on does not typically carry a high volume of traffic. Naturally, at the instant I’m making my spectacular dismount there are no less than four cars passing by on the left. The lead car pulls into the next driveway, which is a fair distance away, and out steps a very attractive young lady who shouts to me, asking if she should perhaps summon an ambulance.

I admire her civic minded nature, of course, but I also don’t think that my ineptitude requires official intervention. Thus, I attempt to stand and signal to her that I am fine or, at least, as fine as one can be after catapulting down the tarmac. It is at this moment that I realize that my bike’s seat has become impossibly wedged in the back pocket of my jeans. When I say I have no idea how it got there I am not exaggerating – the physics of the situation are mind boggling. Nonetheless, the seat remains wedged in defiance of all known physical laws and, in a very real application of the rest of them, keeps me from standing up since I’m lying on top of the bike.

This results in a very comical rendition of my stupid ass flailing about in a grim parody of intelligible sign language. I assume she either understood what I was getting at or found my seizures to be too frightening to stick around, because she quickly gets back into her car and drives off. At that point I manage to find the quick release on my seat and proceed to awkwardly slide the pole out of the bike frame, eventually standing triumphantly with the seat hanging jauntily from my pants.

In the meantime, my father has no idea what has occurred. He heard me speaking of high winds and then heard a rush of noise, then a distant female voice shouting about ambulances. He concludes that a tree has fallen on me and proceeds to leave a rather frantic message on the home answering machine wondering if I continue to draw breath and if he should, in fact, be sending emergency personnel to my location. Luckily, my phone still works even after its trip down the sidewalk and I manage to let him know that such measures are unnecessary. I then try to ride the bike back home only to notice that the chain has slipped off during my theatrics. I consider trying to get it back on, but a second glance at my bloodied and battered hand leads me to decide that wrestling a greasy chain might not be the most prudent course of action.

To assuage your no-doubt burning fears: I’m fine. I ripped up my right hand and shoulder a bit and have some nasty bruises almost everywhere else, but all in all I got off pretty well. It turns out that the explosion was the result of a large branch landing on a nearby power line.

As always, it is my fondest wish that my misfortune can provide entertainment for somebody, somewhere.

Luckily, the job search has taken a turn for the better recently in ways that I’m not yet prepared to talk about because I am afraid doing so would cause them to evaporate like so much fairy dust. Sufficient to say that it’s the sort of job I think I’d enjoy and, if I’m lucky enough to get it, will almost certainly make me a happy man. In the meantime, though, I’m left with a one or two month period during which I’m not employed but also not actively seeking new employment opportunities. I’m also flat broke, so that eliminates the most irresponsible sorts of entertainment.

With that in mind I finally got around to starting up a project that’s been sitting on my docket for a month or two: Wordsmith. I got the idea for this game during a conversation with George in which he described an idea he’d been kicking around for a story. Essentially, in this strange world words are not free, as we think of them, but are actually owned or trademarked by people and business entities. Thus, if you want to use them you’ve got to pay for them just like any other product or service! This struck me as not only hilarious but a potentially interesting premise for a casual edutainment-style game.

I don’t have all the design details nailed down yet. My central core revolves around a multiplayer “auction house” where words are available to the highest bidder. Players bid against each other, vying critical common words or perhaps trying to snag a rare or particularly valuable word to add bonuses to their sentence. I’m envisioning a system where the players are given a sentence framework – perhaps as mechanical as “include a subordinate clause” or as whimsical as “capture the essence of an old sea-captain” – and then use whatever words they can buy to create one that fits it. Scoring is a particularly tough area, but for now I’m working on something that combines peer reviewing with various concrete bonuses like adjective chains, polysyllabic words and other such things. Other miscellaneous potential mechanics include paying small fees to do things like change the “type” of a word (for example, taking the verb “console” and changing it to a noun), switching a verb’s tense or making in an infinitive, etc.

If this doesn’t sound exciting to you that probably means you’re part of the vast majority this game won’t appeal to. For me, however, it’s an interesting design exercise and a good excuse to learn C#.NET and Windows Forms. I’ll be making minor updates as the project progresses and it’ll be available for you to play around with just as soon as it’s in a condition to do so.