Music!

Since my contract ended with Demiurge, I've decided to dedicate myself to something I've wanted to do for a long while: finish an album of songs! So, while I continue to look for the rare gem that is a game design job in the Boston area, I'll be spending much of my time working on music!

I now have a Soundcloud, on which I'll eventually be posting the finished tracks. Until then, on the rare occasion that I feel capable of sharing works in progress without my face melting off from shame, I'll be doing that as well!

Demiurge!!

I'm excited to say that I've landed a position at Demiurge Studios! For the next six months or so, I'll be doing design on Marvel Puzzle Quest! Check out my Portfolio if you'd like to see my personal work.

Back to Boston!

After finishing up at the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy, I'm excited to announce that I'll be moving back to Massachusetts, as I have managed to land myself a Design Internship at Turbine! I'll be working on The Lord of the Rings Online. It's always been my dream to work on MMOs, so I can barely contain myself.

See you in Middle-Earth!

The Calm Before

Finally! After nine long months, my colleagues and I at the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy have finished and released our game, The Calm Before. A lot of love, tears, and caffeine went into this game, and I'm extremely proud of what we managed to accomplished. I'm even more proud of what we learned along the way.

If you'd like to see and download the game (it's free!), please check out our website: thecalmbeforegame.com!

Denius-Sams Gaming Academy!

I'm happy to announce that I was selected to be one of the 20 inaugural participants in the Denius-Sams Gaming Academy under Warren Spector! I still can't really believe that I was selected, and I can't wait to do amazing things with these people.

Since I'll likely be spending most of my team working with the DSGA team, it's likely that I won't be able to post much of what I'm working on (NDAs and such). I apologize in advance for the lack of updates!

LIFELIKE Lore: The History, Stanzas 1-10

I'm in the process of writing the history of the Ethereal Eclectics corporate office building, and I decided that an epic fantasy-movie-opening-voiceover style would be the most appropriate. Here's a bit of a taste:

1.

At the dawn of the first age, in the fiscal year of our Lord sixteen, the world was stricken with a grey blight known as the Recession. Our domain, known by a since forgotten name at that time, was not spared from this blight.

(more after the break)

LIFELIKE: Polish, Polish, Tutorial

(I've decided to copy over some of my posts from the Lifelike dev blog, 'cause who's got time to read two blogs? No one, that's who.)

We're fully into polish mode for our demo for Game Demo Day at this point. We keep telling ourselves we're content locked, but new things keep sneaking their way in.

It has come to our attention that most people won't immediately know how to play our game upon seeing it (weird, right?), so I've been thinking about what we can do to create a condensed tutorial for our condensed demo.

So, I wrote up a design for a tutorial, but ended up getting way too into it and accidentally made it out of scope (woops). There's little chance that this will be ready for game demo day, but designing it with the demo in mind actually led me to figuring out ways to streamline the tutorial for the eventual full game.

The tutorial essentially only introduces players to the basic controls and game flow, leaving the rest to the players to learn for themselves. It also does a good job of introducing the player to the tone and narrative in the way without getting bogged down in exposition.

Anyway, check out the design doc for the tutorial after the break.