{"id":1652,"date":"2010-10-25T22:02:18","date_gmt":"2010-10-25T11:02:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/?p=1652"},"modified":"2010-10-26T23:03:11","modified_gmt":"2010-10-26T12:03:11","slug":"whats-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2010\/10\/25\/whats-next\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s next"},"content":{"rendered":"

Notice how all of my posts recently have been in this “General life” category? \u00a0Losing 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. \u00a0I haven’t managed to actually write any home project code since I found out what was going on. \u00a0Writing that massive post yesterday really helped me to sort out my brain about what was going on. \u00a0It 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. \u00a0Twice, 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. \u00a0I think I’m finally done with the post now. \u00a0If 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; \u00a0there are probably a lot of new details in there now.<\/p>\n

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; \u00a0no more extending deadlines like happened with “Lord”!) \u00a0I had randomly selected the theme quote, and was all set to post an announcement about it. \u00a0And I thought, “why would I do that? \u00a0I should just get back to working on MMORPG Tycoon 2.” \u00a0So that’s what I’m going to do.<\/p>\n

Let’s see, other stuff..<\/p>\n

In the past few days, I’ve been playing a bunch of\u00a0Costume Quest<\/a>[1], a bunch of\u00a0Super Meat Boy<\/a>[2], and some Champions-Online<\/a>[3]. \u00a0I have also been playing some co-op Halo Reach<\/a>[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<\/a>[5], and for the life of me I can’t think of the last game I actually finished.<\/p>\n

I’ve also been going through old notebooks full of design notes for MT2, and re-evaluating the direction the game is going. \u00a0There are some really neat ideas in there, which I haven’t thought about in a long time.<\/p>\n

Anyhow, I’d better cut off here, or I’ll never get back to actually writing code. \u00a0Wish me luck, and hopefully I’ll have an actual development update for you tomorrow. \u00a0:)<\/p>\n

Footnotes:<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Usually when linking to games, I link to their Wikipedia page, so as not to appear to be sucking-up to the developer. \u00a0But 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. \u00a0How about you come and work for me, and become insanely famous and wealthy?” \u00a0And 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, <\/em>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. \u00a0(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. \u00a0I was very shy back then. \u00a0And working three meters away from a guy for six months can be very much like talking to him. \u00a0Right? \u00a0Right??)<\/em><\/li>\n
  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. \u00a0But 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. <\/em>In<\/em><\/a> <\/em>fact<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>have<\/em><\/a> <\/em>a<\/em><\/a> <\/em>few<\/em><\/a> <\/em>more<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/li>\n
  3. Sorry, Cryptic, not nearly awesome enough for a direct link. \u00a0Wikipedia link for you! \u00a0But I’ll mention here (spoiler warning!) that MT2 is going to contain an in-joke about needing to destroy all the beacons. \u00a0Because it’s very important that all the beacons be destroyed. \u00a0All of them. \u00a0Destroyed.<\/em><\/li>\n
  4. Halo Reach, I’m not convinced that you’re really awesome, sorry. \u00a0Speaking 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<\/a><\/em>) of being in such close proximity to the awesome friends with whom I’m playing, that you appear to be awesome as well. \u00a0I don’t think that I’d be enjoying you at all, if I was playing solo. \u00a0Or with people who were less awesome.<\/em><\/li>\n
  5. I can’t quite figure out why I didn’t like Arkham Asylum. \u00a0The game did so much right. \u00a0Its pacing was superb. \u00a0It just didn’t grab me at all. \u00a0I feel like this is a personal failing of some sort.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Notice how all of my posts recently have been in this “General life” category? \u00a0Losing 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. \u00a0I haven’t managed to actually write any home project code since I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-qE","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}