• My Life

    2013 Year End

    This is the time of year that I review my goals and milestones for the previous year and bore all of you with the gory details :) I am well pleased with how well the Lazy Designer series performed. I’ve exceeded sales from prior years, I think in large part helped by the release of the third volume (Gameplay and Exploration) and a print version of the first book. The final two volumes are going through edits right now and will be available next year. In terms of writing goals, I met most that I wanted. I exceeded my goal of writing 250 000 words this year — reaching around…

  • Brent's Toys,  Technology,  The Lazy Designer

    Game Dev Update

    Decent work has progressed on the kid’s educational/robot building game (and to the supplemental document I’m writing to explain my design process on it). If you are bored/curious, it’s the top link on my unity page. Lower your expectations accordingly. It is not feature complete, but it’s feature sufficient and probably won’t be tweaked too much more. The most recent addition I’ve made to it is a player tracking mechanism, so I can keep tabs on how well the kids are doing while playing the various educational levels. There’s no front-end view for the data yet, but I’m tracking what I need to be tracking. This tracking led to an…

  • The Lazy Designer

    Lazy Designer Update

    This is what happens when kids play with the minifridge. Pop freezes. And explodes. We had several of these delicious but deadly grenades the other day. Be careful out there! As for updates… loads of progress on the Lazy Designer series, which is my focus for now. I won’t quite finish the rewriting pass on Book 4 before the holidays but that should be finished by mid-January, at which point I have a series of spelling and grammar passes that I will undertake, as well as building any example images required and the like. And I do have a few stories available, some online, and some elsewhere: Foolish Wishes, Fairy…

  • My Life

    No update!

    This is why: Lots more shoveling to do. (I had intended to finish up some features for the kid’s robot game and talk about it, but I’m a bit behind schedule and so that will have to wait until next week… or maybe next year… depending on the weather.)

  • My Life

    Smarty Games

    Work continues on the second kid’s game I’m building. I doubt it’ll be of any interest to readers, aside from the design lessons I’ve learned (and maybe the Unity experience I’ve gained), but the work-in-progress is lingering on the site if you want to hunt for it :) I’m about 50% complete, in regards to all the features it could have. I won’t add them all, of course. I’d like to wrap up work on it by the end of the year and then take what I’ve learned onto a new project. I’ve created several helper classes and whatnot that will carry over to other Unity projects. I have also…

  • The Lazy Designer

    Lazy Designer – Book 5 – The Design Manager

    I’ve finished writing the rough draft for the last book in the Lazy Designer series. This book focuses on what it is like to be a design manager in the game’s industry and I hope it is of interest to readers. It sits at about 55 000 words (pre-editing), making it neither the shortest nor longest of the books so far. So what does this mean next? I have a lot of editing to do. I’ve started editing Book 4 and hope to have that released in January of 2014. When that’s complete I might take a short break and write a short story or two (yes, I know I’ve…