• The Lazy Designer

    Lazy Designer – Changing Designer Data

    Overview This post is a bit of an addendum for an earlier post (Data and Resource Generation) which talked about ways to organize the data needs for a game. Role-playing games are data intensive. In my career I’ve worked at two different extremes, in regards to how game data is organized and edited by designers. Both have their benefits and their disadvantages. Everything is Unique In this scenario if the designer needs to place a creature, for example, they would create the creature from scratch or reuse one from a library. Benefits Full Control. This scenario allows for maximum customization, the full particulars of each creature can be tweaked until…

  • My Life

    Popular Posts from 2010

    Figured I’d list some of my more popular posts from 2010: Writers of the Future BioWare Year 10 How to have fun on Empire Avenue Empire Avenue Etiquette Spider Cookies And just so you all don’t think I’ve forgotten or anything I will post a Lazy Designer article tomorrow.

  • My Life,  Writing Resources

    2010 Wrap-up

    This is my year end summary of my writing endeavors for 2010. Overview Not surprisingly (given my ability to write full-time) this was my most productive writing year. I wrote in excess of 400 000 words, including my novel Latelander and a second novel. My word count goal for the year had been 240 000 words so I greatly exceeded that. I also wrote eight stories or so, exceeding my goal of six. The only goal I didn’t achieve was making my second pro sale (my first pro sale was to the Writers of the Future contest). New Stories Published in 2010 “Digital Rights” — Writers of the Future XXVI,…

  • My Life,  Writing Resources

    Turkey 1, Brent 0

    Surfacing after a pleasant weekend of eating and relaxing. Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend too! Now I’m back to writing: I’ll clean up the story I wrote last week and send it out in the next couple days. As well I’m continuing my read of the first draft of novel#2 and making notes on what needs to change (for the tech curious I’m using the iPad + Noterize instead of a paper draft this time around). Next month? Probably a couple new stories and polishing some rough draft stories I have in inventory.

  • Website

    Guess the Connection

    Because I’m still recovering from the plague my kids passed onto me I don’t have the energy to write anything new, witty, or exciting. So instead I’m going to list a few writer blogs I follow and leave it to you to guess what they all have in common. Jordan Lapp Tony Pi Stephen Kotowych

  • My Life

    Everybody loves Cookies

    So I was looking over my website statistics and realized that a not insignificant portion of search traffic leads here because of my Spider Cookies recipe page. Seriously. Here I thought the traffic was because of my game design articles or my stories. Perhaps next year I should write a cookbook or something. Any suggestions for titles?

  • Brent's Toys,  My Life

    iPad + Kobo + Instapaper = Awesome

    Longtime readers might remember me ranting about not enjoying the reading experience at online magazines such as Strange Horizons or Clarkesworld. I very much dislike scrolling and prefer a paging experience. This is probably one of the reasons I really like reading eBooks on the iPad as all the book apps use a paging interface. Anyways yesterday I stumbled upon a good solution… using Instapaper I can flag stories I want to read later and then read them through the Kobo app on the iPad. This gives me the ability to page-read (no scrolling!) So I’m happy. And now I’m going to go sit downstairs by the fire and finish…

  • My Life

    Request – iPad & iPod Touch Recipe Manager

    There is nothing writing or game design related in this post. Just saying. As the cook/mealplanner/shopper for the house I’m trying to make my time spent doing these things a bit more efficient. To that end I’d like to use my iPad and iPod touch to help manage the dozens of recipes I have scattered across various cookbooks. (Yeah I’m a techno geek and I’m looking for an excuse to mess around with the devices more. But I think there’s the potential for this to save me time in the long term. Maybe.) Anyways what I want is the following: Ability to add my own recipes. I like Epicurious but…

  • My Life

    Would somebody I know go work for the Sifteo folks. Please. Thank you.

    Just noticed a couple new job openings for Sifteo. Because I think the whole Sifteo device is so delightful it would be awesome if someone I knew went to work for them. That way I might get free samples and stuff. In case you don’t know the Sifteo blocks are cool little computer gadget-thingys. And I like cool little computer gadget-thingys. There’s a few videos on the Sifteo site if you want to check them out.

  • Game Reviews,  The Lazy Designer

    A Sense of Wonder

    I do not like massively multi-player games. But one of my favorite games of all times was Ultima Online. If you are scratching your head and wondering at this contradiction, bear with me and prepare yourself for a ramble. New Experiences I grew up in the 80-90s and witnessed the birth and development of the videogame industry. I went from playing simple, yet fun, games on my Adam (and learning to code my own games) to playing less simple but still fun games on a couple different Tandy computers. And what did I play? Everything I could get my hands on. Every game was a experience, offering a new style…