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Review Twilight
Okay so finally got around to reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer after my wife borrowed a copy (which I should note she read in less than a day, ignoring everyone and everything until it was finished). I did not enjoy it quite as much as she did. There are minor spoilers ahead. I never identified with the main character, Bella (which is probably ok since I’ve never been, nor intend to be, a teenage girl). To be blunt, at times I was actively hoping something really awful would happen to her. She kind of got on my nerves (sorry world!) I can understand how many did identify with the character…
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Empire Avenue – Two Ways to Advertise?
Empire Avenue has a built in advertising system. To this point I’ve had some success with it — and I know there are improvements to the system coming in the future and I’m excited to check them out. One nice thing about it is that ingame cash (eaves) is spent on this advertising so unlike other online advertising the only investment for ad space is time. But there is a second form of advertising on Empire Avenue (that is also free) and I think is often more effective. (Insert long dramatic pause). It is the ‘buy and hi!’. Huh? Basically whenever anyone buys shares in me I check their portfolio…
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Bring on the Robot Minions!
Anyone reading this for my writing or game design insights you can safely ignore this post. It is all about Empire Avenue. So I’ve had a Robots community on Empire Avenue for a while now that I have never really recruited anyone into. I just like robots. I think they are Neat’O. Given that discussion in the group has been me talking to myself for a while I’ve decided to change the focus. And why do we care? (See that, that’s me talking to myself. Creepy, eh?) Now the group is known as Robot Minions. Because I’m uber-eave-rich I now need Robot Minions to help inflate my airships (and my…
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BioWare-Brent Year 9 (Fall 2007 – Summer 2008)
This is the ninth of ten posts, one for each year that I worked for BioWare. Crunch Though Dragon Age’s release was still a long ways off we entered a bit of a mini-crunch period with things getting hectic and tempers flaring. While you bond with teammates when you are working with them late at night everyone also starts becoming a little bit grumpy. We had no major problems but I found crunch on Dragon Age to be a bit more wearisome than crunch on past projects like Neverwinter Nights. Still don’t really understand the difference but we survived it. Overall I think the team was starting to come together.…
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Videogame Design Documentation
Overview Documenting a game’s design is a challenging process. During my time with BioWare many approaches were attempted but a standardized process was never found that worked for all projects, all the time (though this may have had more to do with various projects being unable to fit new documentation schemes into their stage of development than any flaw in the documentation attempts). This section will summarize what worked a bit and why and why no documentation attempt ever really succeeded completely. A Wiki The documentation system I most prefer is using a wiki. With a wiki all team members can easily access up to date and relevant information. Advantages:…
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Task Management 101
Overview A few weeks into my job with BioWare, way back in ’99 I found myself overwhelmed. The tasks just kept piling on and while it was fun and exciting I was starting to get a little stressed. I think up until that point I had only received a few dozen e-mails in my entire life and now that was how many I was receiving every day. And most of them were asking me to do more work. Eeeek. I developed some task management systems for myself that worked more or less for my entire career with BioWare, needing a bit of tweaking along the way. Here’s a short discussion…
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Weekend Fun
Had a pretty great long weekend. Here are a couple shots of the kids enjoying a water park. Tomorrow I promise a more serious, non-kid or food related post.
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Name the Cookies Formerly Known as Spider Cookies
I do not think I have ever posted about cookies before, but here goes (and yes today was a slow news day around the House of Brent). The other day I mentioned making spider cookies and received a few ‘gross’ comments, people thinking that I was maybe eating sugar-coated spiders, I guess. Which would be kind of yucky. But in fact I had made a type of cookie I used to eat as a kid. We always called them spider cookies (I don’t know why). What follows is the recipe I used. Let me know in comments what you think would make a better name (chocolate macaroon cookies might be…
