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Lazy Designer Book 3 Exploration and Gameplay Is…
Not finished yet. I am working on it. It is just that it has so much more content than the previous two volume combined, that it’s more akin to finishing one of my novels. Which means, it takes time. That said, I have finally finished my giant grammar pass through all the sections and have trimmed several thousand words. What remains is a reread of the entire thing and I have to create some of the images needed to accompany the text (and the cover). Then I’ll start preparing it for publication. There’s no legitimate reason for me not to have it online before end of May. Part of the…
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Lazy Designer Stuff
It looks like I’ll write the third lazy designer book after all. The first two volumes have done ‘ok’, albeit not spectacular (else I wouldn’t be hanging around here on this blog, I suppose). Though I was reluctant to write the third book without meeting my sales expectations for the first two volumes I figured it made sense to start tackling this while I still *remember* my time working in the games industry. I’m worried that if I put this off too long I won’t be able to write anything relevant! I won’t start it right away though. I want to finish the rough draft of my current novel first…
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Lazy Designer Book 2
The second book in the Lazy Designer series is now available. This title explores how to build designer-powered game engines and pipelines as well as prototyping and testing. It can be purchased from Amazon. Later in the year I will make it available on other sites as well (Kobo, Nook, iOS, et cetera). A section of this book (a game scripting tutorial) is currently available free. As always any reviews/likes/feedback are very much appreciated!
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Lazy Designer
Work is progressing well on the second volume of the Lazy Designer, my series of books on working in the videogame industry. If you have not read the first book and are curious about a career in game design check it out on Amazon. And if you want to be notified when the second book is complete I’ve added a form here.
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The Lazy Designer Book 2 – Update
When I released book 1 of the Lazy Designer I had said that if it met certain financial goals I’d take some time away from my fiction writing to write a second game design book. Now that I’ve met the goals (thank you to everybody who has bought a copy!) I’m revisiting the outline I constructed earlier. The second book looks to be comprised of the following sections: Designing Experience – general design principles to construct an enjoyable game while balancing this against building a game an actual development team can complete in a timely manner. Will go into prototyping, iterative development. Data Management – team structure, a high level…
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Things You Might Not Know
For those of you who are interested in such things I thought it might be worthwhile to list a variety of facts about me. Some true, some not so much. TRUE FACTS I write short stories and novels I won first place in the third quarter of the Writers of the Future Contest (2009) for my short story ‘Digital Rights‘ I have story reprints available on Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and the Nook I am a game design consultant with Empire Avenue, the Social Stock Market The most recent game I played was Emissary of War My first writing sale was an article on role-playing with different languages in Dragon Magazine.…
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Busy!
Still not around online much but figured I’d toss out a quick update. Hope everyone is doing well. What am I up to? – I’ve passed the halfway mark on edits to Novel#3 – I’ve finished some design projects (documentation) for Empire Avenue – My game design handbook (Lazy Designer) is almost halfway to the sales milestone I set. If it reaches the milestone I’ll get a second book written, which will go into more detail on design specializations in the videogame industry with more examples from my time with BioWare And that’s about it. What about you?
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Freebies
For those of you who have purchased a copy of my Lazy Designer game design handbook I’d like to encourage you to check out some of my fiction as well. I have numerous short story reprints available. I’m offering a free copy of any of my stories for those of you that have purchased a copy of the Lazy Designer! Just send an e-mail to me with the story of your choice and the e-mail address associated with your Amazon account (I need that so that I can gift the story to you). Want to know which stories are available? Just check out my Amazon profile. p.s. the same offer…
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Lazy Designer Update
The Lazy Designer “How to Start a Career in Videogame Design” is almost ready to go. I should be posting it tomorrow (though I won’t be announcing anything about it until I’ve had it online for a bit… as I mentioned earlier the target audience isn’t for those reading this blog already). Anyways, I really wanted to hit the end-of-August deadline and despite some scheduling issues I’m pleased I’ve managed to do so. It was not without some costs however and I’ll have to reevaluate after the book has been available for a couple months whether I want to pull it and make some modifications. To meet the deadline I…
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Game Development Jobs – Design
I realize that I often toss out game development terminology that is probably not familiar to everybody reading the blog. If you ever stumble across something you don’t understand toss me an e-mail or leave a comment. This post will (hopefully) shed some light on various game development job categories. There is little standardization across companies, in regards to positions so take these descriptions with a grain of salt. If there’s anybody reading this with experience at other development studios using different terminology please throw a comment on the blog with the labels you use for the various positions. I’ll start with design, which, of course, I am most familiar…
