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Lazy Designer
I’m still on target for a late August/early September release of book 1 of the Lazy Designer. This first book will delve into getting a game development career and will include practical advice and a few anecdotes from my days at BioWare to help emphasize points. Anyways most of the content is already present on the blog (and organized on the Lazy Designer page) so I thought I should remind regular blog readers that they probably won’t get much value out of buying the first book in the series. The later books in the series will feature more original content but most of the topics I wanted to cover in…
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A Box of BioWare
In this box… all the ‘written stuff’ I accumulated during my years with BioWare. While most of the paper is related to the two sales that occurred while I was with BioWare (selling a company generates a lot of paperwork!) there is some interesting stuff in here too. The black notebooks are full of ‘to do’ lists, daily roll-call for the designers, and design plans. I also have books full of initial Dragon Age ideas, including one of James Ohlen’s early design books for Dragon Age. Anyways, I have no idea what to do with all this stuff. I’ll hang onto the business paper and contracts and whatnot for a…
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“Cool” – The Most Dangerous Word in Game Development
There used to be a joke around the office that whenever anybody started a sentence with “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” we would immediately reject the idea*. That might seem somewhat callous but the truth was (especially in later stages of development) there were far more cool ideas than practical ideas. People could see the game’s potential (a good thing) and wanted to improve it (a good thing too). But as a manager it was important to know when to draw the line. And often if the best the team member could start with was “wouldn’t it be cool…” then I became concerned about how much thought had gone into…
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Cover Thoughts?
If and when I ever decide to take the plunge into self publishing novels (still undecided!) I’m going to use a professional cover artist. But for my story collections and non-fiction I’m still messing about with pixels on my own. Any major concerns with this cover? To encourage myself to actually finish the Lazy Designer I’m going to release the book in six parts (i.e., instead of waiting until forever happens before finishing the entire thing). Each book cover will have a slightly different subtitle in the center but will otherwise look the same (I’m debating changing the ‘banner’ color as well with each).
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The Monastery – Free
My short story ‘The Monastery’ is now available to read free for various readers (iTunes, Nook, and others) Unfortunately it is not available for free on Amazon yet… but I’m hoping they will ‘price match’ soon. (Note: This story first appeared in print in 2010 in the magazine Not One of Us – Hidden)
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Bad Designer! – Road Construction
I often find it useful to look at how the things I encounter in life (buildings, objects, events, procedures, et cetera) are designed. This helps me understand user flow as well as how engineers and planners prevent misuse. It also gives me the chance to vent about road construction under the guise of constructive criticism :) I’m going to assume most readers are familiar with road construction and how frustrating it can be to hit a long stretch of it. Slower speeds. Workers along the sides of the roads. Heavy machinery. Rocks spraying up and cracking windshields. Why Drivers Do Not Take Road Construction Seriously Between the two trips, I…
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I’m Back
I have been out of town for a few days this week but I think I’m done with traveling for the rest of this summer. Where have you been? That mystery will have to wait until I catch up on some things.
