I love those days that end at 4am and start at 8.  Hmm actually are there any other kind?  I love them because the feeeling of accomplishment is imbued in my every step, my every keystroke.  I had a conversation with my better half the other night about that and how the most important thing in your life is looking in the mirror and knowing , as in down to your core, that you have done absolutely everything humanly possible, that every fiber of your being is being put towards your dreams.  Once you can look at yourself with that knowledge greatness is always around the corner.

So with that I go to put on a pot of coffee and what else this morning? Going to spend 30 minutes or so promoting the blog, an hour of recording for Industrybroadcast.com and then meditation with Jesse Pettersen is in order!  looking forward to that sesh for sure.

So grateful today!

I am grateful for Kathy, I am grateful for Jesse, I am grateful for Rael, I am grateful for clean drinking water, I am grateful for this cloud day, I am grateful for Nels, I am grateful for Badu, I am grateful for my will, I am grateful for my energy, I am grateful for my motivation, I am grateful for Sirlon, I am grateful for my awareness, I am grateful for my artists, I am grateful for my creativity, I am grateful for my organisation, I am grateful for Brad, I am grateful for Eric, I am grateful for putting that deal together, I am grateful for Jody, I am grateful for Art, I am grateful for Armagan, I am grateful for Kirk.  I am grateful for my resources, I am grateful for my experience, I am grateful for the outsourcing leads, Iam grateful for my honesty, I am grateful for my design leads, I am grateful for Dhruv, I am grateful for India

We now have 5 amazing and Experienced minds of our Industry on board for offering articles to IndustryBroadcast.com: Jamie Fristrom of gamedevblog.com, Bruno Urbain of bruno-urbain.com, Daniel Cook of LostGarden.com Joris Dormans of jorisdormans.nl , Jonas Heide Smith of http://jonassmith.dk .

I was getting worried today as Bruno Urbain only has 2 articles currently online(although he has some wicked ones in the works) but an email from Jonas Smith tipped the scales for me.. He has his Ph.D in Video Games and his articles are absolutely humoungous. I am going to probably be looking at an hour read per article which means I’ll probably break it up into 2 pieces per article maybe even 3 with some of these.. And boy are they indepth.  A little more dry and technical than the others but I think there is some incredible learning from this man, as well as from the other amazing minds contributing to industrybroadcast.com .. I definitely feel like I have something of great value here to offer the games industry!

Ars has a great review of a great game.. I feel that it may be slightly skewed due to it being played on the console(meh) and therefor the gameplay of course suffers horrible as the FPS was never meant to be played with those god awful analogue sticks, but with a mouse that becomes and extension of your arm and your mind!

Recording a great articles by Bruno-Urbain on playtesting over at www.industrybroadcast.com and the day is looking better.. Sometimes it just takes hours to get the productivity ball rolling but a little meditation sesh and a podcast and I am off to the races.

Gratitude is one thing I cannot overlook either.. I am grateful for this cup of coffee and the energy it gives me, I am grateful for Erik and Brad coming together on this deal, I am grateful for my motivation and inspiration, I am grateful for our new web designer, I am grateful for his awesome designs, I am grateful for Mikes Patience, I am grateful for my new CPU, I am grateful for Aaron, I am grateful for Kirk, I am grateful for Badu and I grateful for Rael

Thank god I finally uninstalled that piece of garbage game today.. Chromium is a game that came closest I feel to being something great but because of a designer who obviously(I am pretty sure he works for NASA) is a genius yet lacks any sort of common practical intelligence whatsoever.  The only reason I say this is because I am absolutely certain that specific game mechanics were implemented just to appease his ego and to piss the player off.

Examples are that every time you start a new game in the same session it ramps up the frame rate of the game making everything come at you faster and faster.. To give you reference the game normally plays at 50-60fps, after starting 10 new games you are at 120fps making the game insanely difficult and frustrating for someone that doesn’t know what is going on as youjust feel like you are getting worse and worse

Secondly the collission detection is made by a 6 year old.  You have a shield around your ship that makes other enemy ships bounce off, yet to pick up a powerup you literally must get it overtop of the center pixel of your ship.. You can’t touch it with a wing or the nose, so you end up missing all of the powerups while the enemies sneak by

Third and most obvious being that when you die the game just ends and prints ‘looser’ on the screen a clear indication that the designer is mainly there to make the player feel like garbage

The problem with Chromium however is that the actual game idea and elements are great!  The concept, the power ups, the strategy that you develop when playing is fantastic and hte game itself could have been a massive hit in the casual gaming world I feel had the designer actually made this game with the thought that it coudl be something great. Instead It is apparent he went into it thinking that it would never amount to anything publically so why not put in features that piss off his friends and random players so that he could sit back and be smug in his geekdom that he just called 500 people a looser today.  If he didn’t work at NASA I would be sitting smug knowing that his ego probably blew a chance at a dream job designing games for a living, but working at NASA I can imagine he already has his dream job.  Pity, as I would have liked to at least have a bit of smugness in me today.  Instead I just get to uninstall the source of my morning frustrations and never have to look at it again

You can grab the game here: http://www.reptilelabour.com/software/chromium/

Review here: http://tuxtoday.wordpress.com/2007/08/12/chromium-an-addictive-vertical-scrolling-shooting-game/

One of the key challenges with managing such a diverse and geographically spread out team is communications.. We have 46 members now from Pakistan to LA and getting them all included in talks and discussions is critical.  The problem is that no one seems to have a standards IM they use..  So you need the ability to not only be able to speak with them on their terms in a way that is convenient for you but also offer them additional and easy to use methods to participate in group discussions.  This is what I do:

For myself my Linux IM clients of choice are:

GAIM/Pidgin: http://www.pidgin.im/ :

Gaim Allows me to connect to multiple clients(AIM, ICQ, Gtalk, etc etc)and have everything in one easy to use program.  The big downside for me on this is that it doesn’t support offline MSN messages, which can be important at times

aMsn: http://www.amsn-project.net/:

Because of my need for offline messaging I use this.. It is nice and simple and offers a lot of options that make my life easier.  For some reason though my webcam only broadcasts in Dark Purple

IRC: http://konversation.kde.org/:

IRC is a bit trickier.. I don’t have enough registered Undernet users to register a channel but what I do have is an Eggdrop Bot that connects from my webserver and holds the channel for me, and gives me op status when I log in.  Although not as used as IM’s IRC does get a lot of use during our weekly meetings as it allows everyone, no matter what, get together for a real time txt chat while we are carrying on in Teamspeak

Forums: http://www.yabbforum.com/:

I’ve been using YaBB for years now and am happy with it.. Unfortunately the community isn’t as active as it once was so the amount of plugins working with the latest versions have been dropping off severly but it still does what I need it to do and changing over the 7000 posts to another BB system would be hell.  We have all WIP concepts and models posted up here for group discussions and really hammer home the importance of everyone getting together for discussions.. Recently this has really taken off with speedpainting threads being very active and more importantly theories behind game story and mechanics(fashion for example).

Task Manager: www.dotproject.net:

The ONLY way this team runs at all is because of Dot.Project.  All tasks and jobs go through this site and it allows me to quickly check on peoples progress(as long as they are updating it) and carry on more 1on1 communications with people regarding their individual tasks.  All final models, textures and whatnot are uploaded here and kept in a nice centralized location for easy access and reference later on.. Dot project has something changed the way we run the team and it is the primary reason for our success.  It should be noted that some PHP hacking was needed to make it do what we needed and it does take a lot of diligence setting all of your tasks up and staying on top of having jobs lined up for months ahead of time.

Jesus chris is it tough to do.. I can’t believe how many mistakes I make and how f’ing long it takes to do a recording.. I feel like I am in the 2nd grade learning how to read again and my brain half of the time decides to just insert random words into the written material so that by the time I am done the sentence it makes no sense and I just have to start over..

That coupled with the fact that audacity crashes every 20 minutes makes it oh so much fun.   It normally isn’t this infuritating but todays’ article ‘The Chemistry of Game Design’ over at www.industrybroadcast.com is 28 minutes long so it just drags out when yo uhave to re-record it over and over and over again.

To get over this hump of negativity from the recording I am going to start my first gratitude journal entry here:

I am grateful for my voice, I am grateful for Badu, I am grateful for Rael, I am grateful for my artists, I am grateful for the amazing presentation package we have, I am grateful for Kirk, I am grateful for Aaron, I am grateful for India kicking ass, I am grateful for Mike, I am grateful for Brad, I am grateful for two more real estate deals!

Carmack changing the world… Again:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10076702-76.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20 -   What I love here is the demonstration of what happens when a young creative genius gets his hands on lots of money.  He knows that anything is possible and to hell if the moon is any different.  Great videos at the bottom of the event, the stabiity of Carmacks ‘Pixel’ is impressive