Brent Knowles

Hope the New Year is treating everyone well. I’ve been very busy at work with Beamdog… but can’t really dive into what I’m doing so I’ll keep it quiet on that front and just discuss my second wood working project instead. After building the large entryway organizer I decided I would tackle something simpler. The previous owner of my home had a tall and narrow bookcase near the living room window and I wanted to duplicate that (at this point most of my books were still in storage!) I found some stock plans and modified them — my bookcase was going to need to be narrower and taller. The construction…

Hello… just a quick update before I abandon the interwebs for the holiday season. Hope everyone has something fun lined up for the holidays. I’m going to take my couple weeks off and just relax mostly… I’m digging through old writing and programming projects today for example. And I might build a table, we’ll see. Neverwinter Nights As I’m sure you already know, Beamdog is working on a Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition. Neverwinter certainly has a fond place in my heart… it was the second game I worked on and the first in which I had lead design responsibilities. It is really exciting that work is resuming on it. If…

So… I have a blog. Not that I’ve forgotten about it. Obviously. I haven’t even forgotten to post to it. I just haven’t posted… anything… in quite some time. Because I haven’t felt like it. While I was never prolifically active online, I was reasonably so at one point in my life. When I was trying to build a career as a writer. That came to a crashing halt a couple years ago when my then-wife left me. Between transmogrifying into a single dad (after 15+ years of marriage), reentering the workforce (after ‘retiring’ to pursue my dream of becoming a full-time writer), and spending time figuring myself out… I…

Last December I did not do a year-in-review about my writing, as I generally do. Mostly I avoided this because the holidays were a rough time for me — first Christmas without my kids, etc. But also, because I did not accomplish a lot in 2015. The past year and a half I have been in survival mode. When my ex and I initially separated, I moved out and established a new (much smaller household) and found work remotely (and a few weeks, on location in Florida). This alone was a huge adjustment, after several years of being the stay-at-home spouse. I also started volunteering a lot more, with my…

I’ve been working at Beamdog for several months now and have been enjoying my time with the studio. Last week the team hit a huge milestone — the release of Siege of Dragonspear, an expansion set between Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2. They’ve devoted significant time and energy to the expansion and I’ve had the privilege of playing through their new content a few times. A huge congratulations to the team, for all their effort. Many of the team members are very long-term fans, some working in our office, others around the world. It has been very cool to watch this distributed team work — the same enthusiasm as…

First, many apologies for the delay between posts. I am not yet ready to promise more regular postings but interesting things are afoot. If you are even vaguely interested in game development you have probably already learned that I’ve joined Edmonton-based game developer Beamdog. I’ve been working for them for the past few months. I can not really speak towards what I’m currently doing but in general I’m hoping to provide direction and the benefit of my experiences to the talented crew at Beamdog — lessons learned from my years BioWare as well as my time freelancing. Read the Beamdog announcement here: http://blog.beamdog.com/2016/02/beamdog-achievements.html And for those interested in the writing…