Notice how all of my posts recently have been in this “General life” category?  Losing my job has kind of thrown me into a spin, even though I have good prospects for paying work for at least the next six months or so.  I haven’t managed to actually write any home project code since I found out what was going on.  Writing that massive post yesterday really helped me to sort out my brain about what was going on.  It took me well over two hours to write, and even after posting it I continued to go back and revise it almost continuously for the following two days, fixing a sentence here, adding trivia there, putting a proper conclusion on, etc.  Twice, I woke up in the middle of the night with a piece of trivia that I absolutely needed to edit into the post before I could get back to sleep.  I think I’m finally done with the post now.  If you read that post within the first few hours it was up and found it interesting, you might like to go back and glance over it again;  there are probably a lot of new details in there now.

Last night, I came very, very close to starting a new “Game in a Week”, to force myself to get back to coding (and I promised myself that no matter what, at the end of the week I would stop working on it no matter what state it was in;  no more extending deadlines like happened with “Lord”!)  I had randomly selected the theme quote, and was all set to post an announcement about it.  And I thought, “why would I do that?  I should just get back to working on MMORPG Tycoon 2.”  So that’s what I’m going to do.

Let’s see, other stuff..

In the past few days, I’ve been playing a bunch of Costume Quest[1], a bunch of Super Meat Boy[2], and some Champions-Online[3].  I have also been playing some co-op Halo Reach[4]. All of this is interesting to me, because (except for Starcraft 2, which I didn’t so much “play” as “surround myself with the trappings of”) I haven’t actually played any games since Arkham Asylum[5], and for the life of me I can’t think of the last game I actually finished.

I’ve also been going through old notebooks full of design notes for MT2, and re-evaluating the direction the game is going.  There are some really neat ideas in there, which I haven’t thought about in a long time.

Anyhow, I’d better cut off here, or I’ll never get back to actually writing code.  Wish me luck, and hopefully I’ll have an actual development update for you tomorrow.  :)

Footnotes:

1. Usually when linking to games, I link to their Wikipedia page, so as not to appear to be sucking-up to the developer.  But in this case, Tim Schafer is one of the last game designers on the big “game designers that I want to meet” list which I wrote for myself when I was fifteen, and by linking straight to his game’s web page, I’m inexplicably hoping to drive enough traffic to his company that he’ll somehow notice me and say, “Gosh, Trevor, you sure are a swell guy.  How about you come and work for me, and become insanely famous and wealthy?”  And I would coolly turn him down, because going to work for a company is how I met Wil Wright (who was also on that list), and it’d be, like, so last decade to use that same tactic again, and so instead we’d go out for drinks and swap old war stories and the next thing I knew I’d wake up in in a bathtub in Mexico, missing a kidney but with a delightful Monkey Island t-shirt by which I could always remember that perfect, romantic, dreamy evening.  (This whole scenario is, of course, ignoring the awkward fact that I never actually spoke to Wil Wright while I worked at Maxis, despite working less than three meters from him for six months.  I was very shy back then.  And working three meters away from a guy for six months can be very much like talking to him.  Right?  Right??)
2. Usually when linking to games, I link to their Wikipedia page, so as not to appear like I’m sucking up to the developer.  But in this case, Edmund is in fact awesome and his game is awesome and I’m not at all embarrassed to appear to be sucking up to either of them, because they both deserve all the links I can give them. In fact, have a few more.
3. Sorry, Cryptic, not nearly awesome enough for a direct link.  Wikipedia link for you!  But I’ll mention here (spoiler warning!) that MT2 is going to contain an in-joke about needing to destroy all the beacons.  Because it’s very important that all the beacons be destroyed.  All of them.  Destroyed.
4. Halo Reach, I’m not convinced that you’re really awesome, sorry.  Speaking as somebody who’s been trained in psychology, I think it’s just the “halo effect” (coincidentally, that really is the technical term for this) of being in such close proximity to the awesome friends with whom I’m playing, that you appear to be awesome as well.  I don’t think that I’d be enjoying you at all, if I was playing solo.  Or with people who were less awesome.
5. I can’t quite figure out why I didn’t like Arkham Asylum.  The game did so much right.  Its pacing was superb.  It just didn’t grab me at all.  I feel like this is a personal failing of some sort.