MERCH!
Giant Bomb - a website about video games and the people that make them

Let's try blogging with 90% less dramawhoring

by dochaus

Prologue Last night after exhausting myself, I was tempted, oh lord was I tempted to write a drunkblog (or whatever the equivalent is when you feel wiped out after martial arts practice instead of drunk and/or crunk). Luckily, my brain decided a better use of its time would be to go to sleep for two hours, then wake up with a stream of Artosis playing yet another zerg opponent in SC2 (he ended...

Prologue


Last night after exhausting myself, I was tempted, oh lord was I tempted to write a drunkblog (or whatever the equivalent is when you feel wiped out after martial arts practice instead of drunk and/or crunk). Luckily, my brain decided a better use of its time would be to go to sleep for two hours, then wake up with a stream of Artosis playing yet another zerg opponent in SC2 (he ended up losing that match, zerg spread too far for his lone warp prism drops to effectively cut them at any one point). Then fell asleep again. Then woke up in the morning to find that some Steam friend I don't know wished me a good morning. Fuck if I know why.

Wait, wait, I was going somewhere with this. I guess I wanted to say that after writing and then erasing a depressing blog over and over, I figure I would try writing a good one instead and get some things off my chest without sounding too self-loathing.

Game design!


There, something constructive. At some point in the past few months I made a decision that if I was going to remain jobless at present I might as well go study something in a field I enjoy (gaming/computers/writing) instead of a good-though-depressing one (Political Science, Informatics, insert your punchline here) while I apply for jobs and pray that one of them will respond to me with something other than another form rejection email.

Gamer_152 once wrote a mini-series of blogs about building yourself up for and breaking in to the gaming industry. And while they were informative and interesting, I didn't read them until after the fact, so when I threw myself into a course in local college I realized a few things:
  • Half of our class was made up of weeaboos, hyperactive kids and people who didn't know the difference between making a game and playing one.
  • We were forced to work with Game Maker to make a "health-related" video game, despite the probability that I won't be using GM ever again if I continue on this path.
  • I was the only member of the "project team" with programming experience, and even that was pretty rusty.
  • Not one of the 5-6 "gaming schools" in the country that people know of, which makes this a neutral move in terms of networking/resume padding.
Having said that, there were some advantages to taking this class instead of merely working with tools online.
  • Meeting people face to face helps build up social skills instead of chatting with anonymous folk and dealing with pointless drama on the internet.
  • Despite my complaints about class composition, met a very talented artist willing to work with me and a professor who gives a damn. Never would have found them if I didn't go here.
  • Being thrust into a project with people more passive than me has forced me to learn management skills on the fly, including pep talks, delegating tasks and "firing" one guy who nearly dragged down the rest of the team with his laziness.
  • The area does have some smaller gaming studios within driving distance, potential opportunities to network.
  • The big one: the motivation that hard deadlines and grades provide to finish a project as opposed to an open-ended "when I feel like it" statement. I'm looking at you, majority of game mods and webcomics!
At the moment I am trying to finish building a turn-based battle system mostly from scratch using Game Maker Language, by the end of this week, when the cutoff date will hit. Hopefully it will work without crashing the game when it's done. Unlike political science I find you can't bullshit your way through half the class even if you wanted to, because if you screw up writing code people will know immediately. If you screw up writing an article or an essay well...as long as you make it sound the way that the teacher's assistant likes, you'll be fine. Besides outside of you and that person, no one else will read or care about it. Much like this blog.


(Well, I didn't say "100% less dramawhoring," did I?)

Guides!


Speaking of unfinished projects, I have a few unfinished game guides I wrote on Giant Bomb: one for Resonance of Fate, one for BlazBlue: Continuum Shift, and one for Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 2: Retribution. 

I've always wondered...does anyone ever look at these guides? Or any of the Giant Bomb guides in general? I've only gotten a few PMs from people who wanted to contribute or people who wanted me to continue writing them. Not even so much as a "Your guide is shit and you are a jerk! Also, why did you stop?" message. It is something that I have wondered, considering how quiet things have gotten within that section.


Stop trying to relive the early 90s!

In an attempt to be nice to the music industry, I paid money for physical CD albums (on sale, but still...), the latest ones from Against Me! (White Crosses) and the Beastie Boys (Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 2). The former is horrible, and I would have defended "New Wave" but now I don't think I can anymore if this is their slide. As for the latter, 10 year old me would have found it edgy and awesome. Current me wonders what the hell a prequel to "Ill Communication" is doing in the year 2011. To the odd music exec who stumbled onto this blog by complete accident: you wonder why people are still downloading music? So they can avoid the same mistakes I just made! 
Even the best bands are not exempt from the Law of Diminishing Returns (look it up).


Podcasting!


I know, no one cares about another podcast, but I figure I might as well mention that I've been doing a podcast with some other duders. We call it AlphaVictor, because it was arguably the first podcast to attempt to fill the void in the redheaded stepchild of the Whiskey lands (AV) since the official SquadCast was abandoned by the side of the road when Gia and John left. Now some other folks there (Tom Pinchuk, undeadpool, etc.) have posted videos and video reviews in an attempt to make it less of a jerky/creepy place, but our AlphaVictor cast is still going on. 

Please, give it a listen, just be aware that about half of it deals with anime-ish topics and/or "taking the piss" out of them (I think damswedon said that once), so if the mere mention of it scares you then I recommend you find another podcast. Like Marc Maron's WTFpod. Seriously, go look that up right now if you have even a passing interest in comedy or the comedians who work in that biz.

tl;dr


I've thrown myself into game design and learned more social skills, podcasting with some animu, some game guides have fallen by the wayside due to lack of interest by the writer and/or reader, music bands that have been in the business for 20+ years should probably settle down, and don't write blogs when depressed/wipedout/drunk.  Or if you do, at least make them funny. Now I gotta finish a project, get/make some dinner, and hope that one of at least one of my contacts returns a message tomorrow about paid employment.
Peace out with a chill background tune.