As common knowledge would indicate, failure to update this blog regularly would result in the world stopping spinning, causing the Earth to heat disproportionately and bring about the end times.

Thus, out of the great responsibilities this brings to me, I am creating a blog entry about my easiest of topics: what I’ve been up to since the last blog entry.

The Strange Mental Snafus Of Advanced Senior Syndrome

The semester is wrapping up.  December 18th is the end of finals week, and school doesn’t start up again until January 11th.  I’m looking very much forward to having 3 weeks off.  So forward, it would seem, that I’ve completely checked out.

I’ve a few big projects to turn in looming dangerously close, but I haven’t moved them beyond the conceptual stage.  Honestly, I’ve put off the vast majority of projects this semester until the very last minute… sometimes well after the very last minute.  I know it’s not the right thing to do, but it’s a mental block, advanced senior syndrome at work.

This wouldn’t be the first semester that ended with me feeling a bit like a bird self-conscious that it is flying into a windshield, but I’ve pulled out of this death dive before, so perhaps there’s just enough of me left that gives a damn about school to see things through in time.

Gaming Life: More Of The Same

Last week, I could be mostly found playing Mass Effect with a little bit of X³ Terran Conflict mixed in for good measure.  In the former case, I’m hoping to have a save game ready for import when the sequel drops next month – I’m probably about 75% through the game at this point.  In the later case, I’m hoping to find some redeeming reason for having spent so much time building a virtual merchant empire – I’m quite close to affording an M7 frigate, probably a Cerberus.

This weekend, I’m proud of myself: I actually did quite a bit of game development yesterday.  The secret to my success?  Listen to music while working: it makes the time spent plugging in code that may well be discarded later seem almost like time I spent being entertained.

Given the great success I had Friday, I thought I might replicate the schedule by doing a little gaming in the morning, spending most of the day doing game development, and then do a little gaming before going to bed.  Unfortunately, I ended up going out a lot on Saturday so that plan didn’t quite pan out.

Direct2Drive Is Going to Bankrupt Me

Direct2Drive is running a fairly awesome “21 days of Christmas” special right now.  So far, they’ve offered the following games, cunningly offered on a 24 hour clock so as to coax much impulse buying:

• Mirror’s Edge for $5.  An artsy, highly technically advanced game for less than I’d pay for the average fast food meal?  Okay, that one was a no brainer – cha-ching!
• The Witcher.  Although the general consensus is that this is a remarkably good RPG (indeed, it does have a fairly riveting story) I found the pace to be overly slow and the gameplay mechanic to not be at all involving.  Another con is that the titular character is apparently a complete gigolo who would sleep with a walking corpse (and, in fact, is given the option) in a collectible card side activity that is less fantasy romance and more flagrantly marking his conquests.  Regardless, I already had this game and bored of it before barely getting into it, so pass.
• The Need For Speed: Shift.  This is a great auto racing game.  A pity I don’t like auto racing games.  I think I probably played some bad one in the past that completely turned me off the entire genre.  Pass.
• Command And Conquer Red Alert 3, including Uprising expansion, for $20.  About 50-66% off, depending on how cheap the Uprising expansion goes for.  I almost passed on this one, since I’m sort of sick of RTS games, but then I always did like the stylistic approach in the Red Alert series, it’s prettier than Supreme Commander, and I am a bit of a power-mongering mastermind at heart… so I went for it.
• Prototype, for $20.   Another one of those “artsy, highly advanced” game, this one is a bit like Crackdown with a freaky alien nihilistic bent and better physics.  I’ve been wanting to try out this game, and $20 was the sweet spot.  Not bad for a relatively cutting-edge 6 month old game!

There’s many days left in this Direct2Drive sale, and I’ve little doubt I’ll find some more things to shell out for.  Unfortunately, I haven’t really had the time to play any of these acquisitions between everything else I’m currently doing, but I suppose there’s nothing wrong with stocking up on primo gamage on the cheap so I’ll have something to do over the holidays.

Having the week of Thanksgiving off from classes has been nice, but I haven’t had a whole lot to feel thankful for.  My game design hit a bad turn, and I haven’t actually played many games so much as I have wasted a lot of time this week.

I’m still working on actually establishing a schedule of what to do, and when.  I seem to be a largely helpless soul who really can’t control his destiny all that well.

• I blame MMORPGs.  They’ve somewhat trained me to grind away the hours endlessly doing nothing particularly enjoyable or productive.  As far as games go, MMORPGs certainly know how to occupy a quantity of your time, but they generally don’t do so at a very good quality.  They’re escapism personified but, at the same time, a very poor substitute for reality.
• I blame my age.  When you’re 32-years-old, you’ve probably got enough sense in your head not to give a damn about picking up virtual trinkets. Consequently, I spent a lot of time in MMORPGs not playing a single character but rather bouncing from one character to another, which has actually strengthened my tendency towards cognitive dissonance.
• I blame derivative design.  If MMORPGs were something more than grinds, perhaps they could have been something great.  It’s this desire for them to be something more that causes me to keep trying them, long after I knew better.

The bottom line is this: this is no longer an MMORPG-centric blog.  It hasn’t been for awhile.  The reasons are outlined above.  I’ve lost faith.  MMORPGs are no longer special, there’s hundreds of them, and they’re seemingly unable to do anything particularly interesting.

Other types of games, on the other hand – those have some potential.  They’re less focused on being a staging ground for mass hysteria and more focused on being genuinely entertaining.  The details are many and varied, but suffice to say a developer’s motivation changes when they’re not occupied with stringing people along for $15 a month.

Of course, part of the trouble is that I’m going through some things right now…

Wednesday, I hit a dead end in my game design.  I took most of Wednesday, Thursday, and today (Friday) off reinstalling and playing Mass Effect.  I hope to return to development soon but, with only a few days left before it’s turn to return to classes, why bother?   It’s not like I’d have anything definitively finished before I return to classes.  I should probably spend this weekend boning up on remembering what class-related materials I no doubt forgot over the past 7 days.

Honestly, I’m beginning to second guess even returning to classes right now.  I was making great progress before I went back to school with game development.  With my financial situation being what it is, I don’t really feel secure enough to be a full-time student.

What I really need is a job that leaves me enough time afterwards to dabble with game development.  To provide some level of discipline and reassure me that if my parents passed way I won’t be out on the streets.  However, it seems that nobody of quality is hiring in my neck of the woods, or has been hiring in a manner accessible to an outsider, for years.

Thus, I’m really not at classes as a student so much as a prisoner hoping his serving time there and procuring a degree will deliver an easy way out of purgatory.  I’m not real confident that a line on my resume is going to make any difference at this point.  No wonder I can’t enjoy games lately – I’m a caged bird.

I’m not sure what public significance this has, other than perhaps putting myself under a bit of peer pressure to get this done.

Currently, I have four games on the forefront of my mind:

• Dragon Age – This game is still completely rocking my world with a highly involving storyline, extremely well refined game mechanics, ect.  Before I started reading the reviews, I figured this game would be a crappy Baldur’s Gate throwback Bioware cranked out to get a cheap buck. They surpassed my expectations in that they haven’t just produced what they know with this game.  Instead, they’ve defined the state of the art, something that requires actually setting the bar higher.
• Borderlands – I know how the game ends, I’ve read it, but I haven’t experienced how the game ends.  It deserves at least one full playthrough – it’s not a bad game at all.  It’s sort of what Hellgate: London should have been – a game that marries the perpetual loot grinding retread enjoyment of Diablo with visceral action gameplay.  Borderlands proves what Hellgate was ultimately lacking was a clearer vision leading to time to perform a lot more refinement.  (To an extent, I would say Champions Online is similarly pigeonholed.)
• X³: Reunion – Surprisingly, this fossil (not to be confused with the 2008 release) is producing a genuine desire to play right now.  I’m not sure why, exactly.  I just got done maligning it for several good reasons.  However, as of this writing, my character started as a storyline-disabled space trader has five transports being remotely ordered about the universe, and I’m sort of curious how life would be if I earned enough credits to have six… or eight… or twenty.  I don’t like grinds, and what this game is putting me through right now is definitely that, but there’s something to be said for an adequate payout.  Going from lone space trader in a flimsy fighter craft to commanding a whole space empire from the seat of a gigantic fighter carrier carries with it a certain clout.
• Champions Online – Sure, I’m burned out from it, but maybe if I play it a whole lot less I can enjoy it again.  It’s been about a week since I dared so much as bounce off their login server, and perhaps absence is making the heart grow fonder.  However, though I may miss its pretty face, we’re not exactly on speaking terms right now.

So, what’s the problem?  After all, the gaming god delivereth.  Any one of these games could eat up a weekend as easily as I can blink.  I’m not burned out from three out of four of them.  Further, I’ve another half-dozen games on the mental back burner.

Well, the thing is I have a game of my own that I’m developing, the skills I learn from developing it are probably a whole lot more important to my survival than just playing games for fun, and not to mention it is in many ways quite innovative and a worthwhile contribution to the world.

Further, there’s no real rush to burning out from these games – I could probably enjoy them just as much if I paced myself a bit.  Perhaps it’s a sign of adulthood that I can have a giant pile of awesome sitting directly in front of me and be willing to pry myself off it knowing that said pile of awesome will still be there later.

I thought today (Friday) would be a good day for that, but a fellow does need at least one day of rest a week, if he can get it.  I spent said day in X³ and accomplished virtually nothing.  I topped it off by purchasing an ore mine, placing it on a high-yield ore asteroid, and noticing that even with a nice 1 ore to 6 energy cell ratio, the cost to produce my own ore was more expensive than to simply buy it from the nearby ore mines.  Yeah… I’m thinking the grind may not be worth it after all.

I have an interview up on Grinding To Vahalla.  If you’re curious to read more about the method behind my madness, give it a skim.  Thanks very much to Randolph Carter for an excellently conducted interview.

I spent the last few weeks in a time machine.  That is to say, the time machine we all have built into us, where we’re moseying along minding our own business and suddenly realize, “It’s the nearly the end of May? And I accomplished nothing?  My God, I think I’ve traveled through time!”

You can make a fairly good guess about what I’ve been doing with my free time lately over the past few entries:

• At the end of April, I was writing up a Chronicles of Spellborn guide and played the Immortal Defense demo.
• May 1st – 4th, I bought and played through Dead Space.  It rekindled my hope for gaming by being a mainstream game that was actually fairly pushing the envelope, at least along the lines of Sci-Fi presentation.
• May 4th – 5th, I gave Hard Nova another spin.  It reminded me of how even a simple 1980s game can still be fun, even with today’s innovations in mind.
• May 6th – 7th, I played Plants versus Zombies.  That this casual-friendly title managed to have some grip over me (though its dearth couldn’t hold a gamer hobbiest for long) taught an important game design lesson about how an occupied mind may indeed be the only core asset of fun.
• May 8th, I changed the theme of this Blog from white on black to what you see here.  Post removed for being pointlessly spammy.
• May 9th-10th, I spent enough time on forum to realize I had outgrown most of the people who hang out on forums.  Post removed for being a travesty of whining.
• May 11th, I considered how to go about making a space game that still seems interesting.  Hard Nova versus EVE Online examined.
• May 12th – May 14th, I hung around Champions Online’s forums severely boning up on my current most anticipated MMORPG.  Take that, Bioware.
• May 15th, I was in the beta.  That’s all I’m going to say about it because I like being in the beta, and violating NDA is not a good way for it to stay that way.  (Suffice to say, a considerate existing tester gave me his Friends and Family Buddy Key, and ironically I was one of the Sakura 150+ the week after.  Before you ask, no, I didn’t get a Sakura key, probably because I was already in the beta.)
• May 16th-18th, I decided to give Fallout 3 another spin, shelled out $30 for expansions.
• May 19th, I needed a break from Fallout 3 so I gave another old game, Star Command, a spin.
• May 23rd, here we are.  Last week was largely spent gravitating around Champions Online, catching up with my newly-acquired preview forum access.

With that, all of May is accounted for. That was just my free time, of course.  What about professionally?  I’m fully aware I can’t live under my mother’s good graces forever, and it’s been a pressing goal to seek my financial independence in the name of not being her fiscal burden.

I would like to say I’ve been busy applying for work, but the truth of the matter is my work-finding regimen over much the last few weeks has been: “Call the temp agencies and say I’m available.  Tell myself I’m going to drop some applications this week.  Then get distracted and do something else.”

The reason why is a natural biological override.  Over the past year, I got three job callbacks and one hiring from temp agencies.  Conversely, dropping three applications a day for months, with follow-up calls, for a year, generated no replies at all.  The human brain can only tolerate so much futile effort before it instinctively locks up and says, “You stupid simian, you’re getting nowhere, I’m going to stop you from spending calories that way now.”

It seems the subconscious mind is as vulnerable to reinforcement as the conscious.  Much of my whining about motivation over the past few weeks has been trying to overcome this incredible natural magic of the workings of my creation-given design.  That I’ve had such a great failure to motivate myself has in itself resulted in an extinction of the very attempt to do so.

I might as well have been trying to turn back the tides with a toothpick.

Granted, a really well-conceived toothpick might pull that off.  Say, a fusion toothpick which harnesses the power of deuterium in the waves.  Hey, I can still motivate myself, I just need to invent the mental equivalent of nuclear fusion.  How liberating.

Perhaps, instead of defying the tides, I can devise a means to go with the flow.

That’s sort of where this, “I think I’m a game designer” thing comes in.  I’ve savored playing games for 26 years.   I’m volunteering my time to beta test a game right now, and it’s far from my first.  I’ve volunteered to write about games in the past.  If I can make great games, and that would be awesome because it would provide a marketable conduit for my life’s passion.

I’m returning to school in late June, and that’s good.  It provides a chronological frame of reference to this hallow void of a life I’ve been living.  I can now say, “five more weeks of this, and then I’m back to school.”  Previously, I would say, “I’m looking for work, but I have no idea when I’ll find some and barely any leads as to where to look.”

Is it any wonder I lost track of time?  It held no meaning.  Now that I’m returning to school in five weeks, I’ve a deadline to make my first little BYOND project.

I’ve been in a rut. I’ve accomplished only a few things over the past couple days:

1. Played the Immortal Defense demo. It’s quite compelling, insofar as pretty geometry meets tower defense, sprinkled with a story about being forced into eternal disembodied servitude, can be.

2. Wrote up the Spellborn Character Selection Guide, perhaps the best summary of the classes you’ll find on the net for a game only a certain niche plays.

3. Did my laundry.  This was probably the most productive thing of the three.

Hardly compelling steps on the path of ultimate game design. Wednesday was perhaps a complete waste, bouncing about those eternal black holes of angst, Internet forums.

However, here on the cusp on my Thursday, I think I’ve at least partially figured out the cause of my lost flow.

I had a game design approach of going back to the drawing board, and drawing something up until I have what plays from back to front in my head as a compellingly interesting game. I spent the entirety of Monday doing this.

Unfortunately, the trouble with this approach is I was basically giving my inner critic the reigns. Such is my level of creativity that I’ll hit an ultimate conclusion in fairly short order.

The inner critic’s ultimate conclusion is that absolutely nothing satisfies in the long run.  That’s depressing.

A Re-Examination Of A Theory Of Fun

Cats are interesting creatures in that they seem to have some semblance of predatory intelligence, but (like most animals) are not very-self aware.

So it’s interesting to see that I’m able to entertain a cat for quite some time by putting a toy that it wants up on a mantelpiece which it can’t quite reach.   It’ll pace back and forth for quite some time trying to figure out how to get to that toy.

During the time it spends trying to accomplish an aim, I suspect it’s not too bored, because its mind is very much turning over how to accomplish something.  Trivial aspects such as what it will do with that toy (quickly lose interest in it) are put aside because the cat’s new goal is simply get that toy.  The cat’s having fun.

This is pretty much an MMORPG’s appeal.  We put the next level up on the shelf for the players to accomplish, and they’ll busily occupy themselves with getting that level.  So long as what they have to do is obviously not something they find distasteful, or better yet they’re not sure what they have to do but are making progress towards discovering it, the mind feels as though it’s making progress.  The mind is content, it’s having fun.

Again, we bring about humankind’s main difference over the lesser beasts: a greater amount of self-awareness.  When we begin to question why we’re doing something, we completely derail this activity of apparent contentment, and are able to move on to better things.

The holy grail in this case becomes defining a greater outer purpose behind the act.   When you’re gaining levels just to gain levels, and your self-awareness makes you aware of this, the lack of a greater outer purpose propels you do something else.  When you’re defeating other players in PvP, and all they do is respawn and defeat you right back, the lack of a greater outer purpose makes the PvP seem pointless.

So, what is the ultimate greater outer purpose we can give players?  That’s a toughy.  The really tricky matter behind all this is that, when you get right down to it, our very creator seemed loathe to apply to us a greater outer purpose — humankind, such as it is, has been inventing our own for quite some time.  Even if I were give people cash for winning the game, wouldn’t there eventually emerge a point where they have everything they want and little need for cash?

Perhaps at the upper end of society, where money no longer contains a meaning of something you need more of, we’re trying to establish the same things we are at the upper end of MMORPG development:

• We seek direction, so we welcome quests from NPCs, handing down instructions from leaders (possibly imaginary).
• We seek to build something greater than ourselves, so we embark upon what would be dynamic content in a MMORPG, the building of dynasties.
• We seek conflict and, in what would be player versus player activities in a MMORPG , we spark wars (another builder of a dynasty if you happen to be an arms dealer).

The inevitable question, in life or in game, is “what’s the point?”  The inevitable answer of the creator can only be, “points are for you to decide.”  It’s an unsatisfactory answer, but the only one of lasting perpetuity.

The bottom line is that it is forever the core of fun of a game design to create a desire and provide mind-occupying means to pursue it.  It’s not the desire, but the occupied mind that entertains, but the player is still there under false pretenses.   So long as a player’s self-awareness fails to pick up on this, and the mind remains occupied, the game successfully entertains.

Therein lay my rut at its root level.  The would-be game designer (me) must learn to carry the burden of knowing the outer purpose behind a virtual desire may well be absent.  I must willingly weave an illusion.  Unless, perhaps, I were to succeed in inventing an outer purpose – perhaps if the game were to deliver a useful skill or life lesson.

Since my muse was rekindled on Tuesday, I continued to invest a lot of effort into putting something together in BYOND.  I’m going to take a break this weekend and get back to work on Monday.

To an extent, I’m enjoying this enough that I don’t want to take a break, but I understand that taking a bit of guilt-free fun is actually an essential focus to stave off procrastination (at least according to The Now Habit).  This new “work M-F, play on weekends” gig will be my new schedule until somebody hires me.  Being able to self-motivate myself like this is perhaps the first real step of self-employment.

Project Cyberverse (tentative, not-at-all-precious-enough title to worry about registering a domain or anything) is not a humongous project.  I’m trying to keep it simple enough to finish it.

The design – my main hurdle – is largely worked out in terms of overall scope of how the parts are working together. In terms of overall scope, I’m about a quarter complete. I can’t see the future, but my prognosis is good.

So, let the tipping of my hand begin. Just bear in mind that none of this is set in stone. Most of what I’ll be saying is abstract, describing the philosophy behind what I’m making, so I don’t paint myself into any corners. What can I say? I like my creative freedom.

Turning the MMORPG genre on its head

Maybe that sounds a tad presumptuous, but technically, that’s what I’m doing.

Where the average MMORPG puts you in the role of being a single player in an expansive world, I’ve turned that on its head: All the players are expansive world manipulators governing several single player units.  They build the world, set up the encounters, they’re essentially what a GM is (but without unlimited power).

Why? Two reasons.

First, because the game masters have a whole lot more fun on a massively multi-player scale. A player can only see what’s right in front of them, but a GM can rapidly flit about the game universe as they see fit and see a lot more of it at once. Your initial impression might be that the disembodied GM perspective is less immersive, but actually what happens is the aperture opens, you take in a lot more MMORPG goodness than you can as just a single player.

Second, because being just a player character in your average MMORPG is monotonous and a waste of the players’ talents. Your average MMORPG interaction is to give the player a quest to kill ten rats, and so the player goes off to do it. The gameplay is simple, successfully killing ten rats may only require selecting the rats, turning on your autoattack, and waiting. It’s so simple, an NPC can do it… so that’s precisely where I put the burden. The players’ role is to direct, not just one NPC, but as many NPCs as they can, and then to reap the benefits of direction.

By putting the players into the GM’s perspective, I was able to satisfy one of my two major design goals: interaction. There’s plenty of meaningful, game-impacting things for a GM to do, it keeps the player well-occupied with meaningful interactions. In this regard, it’s a quantum leap ahead of what most MMORPGs offer.

Of course, the players are not literally as omnipotent as GMs – they are taking the role of players with GM-like powers balanced within the scope of a game. At this point, I was surprised to realize, the game automatically evolved into a somewhat real time strategy like focus.

I want to maintain that pervasive feeling of a living, breathing world that MMORPGs offer. So, unlike your average RTS, the maps are never cleared. Players are tasked with building or destroying dynasties – if they can.

This achieves my second major goal for this design: dynamic content. It’s also another major way in which I’m turning MMORPGs on their head – usually, you’re the only meaningfully changing thing in a static world – now the world meaningfully changes.

I’ve some really good ideas along the lines of just how that works, but I haven’t ironed them out well enough. So it looks like I’ve revealed all I’m comfortable revealing so far.

K.I.S.S. Vrs Overthinking

The “Keep It Simple, Stupid” principle is all well and good, but lets face facts: I’m a thinker.  Look at my blogs and it should be clear: I over think everything.  It’s just my nature.

Perhaps chalk it up to a lifetime of playing games, but my mind always wants to be occupied with something awesome.  Thus, if I simply created a puzzle game or something like a simple hack-and-slasher (less than 1 hour’s work in BYOND) I don’t think I’d be satisfied with the result.

On the upshot, a game in which a lot of thought has been put into – like any product wrought by human hands – is a much better product than one in which barely any effort went into at all.  The way things are shaping up, this game will be awesome.  That, even more than boredom, is what motivates my muse.

Once in a great while, I have a quiet day of introspection.  Perhaps were I a more enlightened fellow, every day would be a such a day.  However, for the time being, I’m not so very enlightened and consequently I’m having a very boring time of it.  Turns out that there needs to be more to life than wasting it online.

Cape Mastery

My goal of accomplishing level 27 across three archetypes in City of Heroes – a triad of varying moods – has hit a relatively solid brick wall in that I’m discovering that the game is once again boring the snot out of me.  It seems the only real archetype I’m interested in is Controllers, maybe a few Blasters, and I’ve already identified my favorite power combinations and played them until I’m pretty bored of them.

To large extent, this isn’t City of heroes’ fault.  I’ve been playing only it for weeks, ever since I decided work wouldn’t leave me time for anything else.  Now I’m not working again, and I’ve had all day to play it, and am fully impacted by the implicit truth that no game can stay entertaining when all you’re doing is playing it for weeks.

I need to do something else for awhile.

Champions Online will not be coming to my rescue – they’ve decided they’d rather invite established guilds into beta.  This is shortsighted because established guilds are, by and by large, accustomed to playing EverQuest clones which Champions Online, by and by large, is not.  It’s not that hard to figure out that the main publicity they’re getting out of this bout of ill-conceived WoW-imitation will be negative as a ton of people are fished in to try and spread opinions about something they’ve demonstrated they’ve no interest in.

The rest of the games in existence, as my current mood and $20 or less game budget mandates, are also too boring for me.  This will vary from person to person, of course, but I’m a really picky gamer bereft of a purpose.  It seems there’s really only a couple options left: 1. Do something non-gaming related.  2. Make my own game.

I would love to do something non-gaming related.  Even if it were monotonous, part time, and paid barely over minimum wage.  At least then I’d have a purpose.  However, the job market in my neck of the woods continues to be over-extended.  Two temp agencies, who could make a decent buck at finding work for me, have failed to materialize anything.  It doesn’t help that my resumes and job history evaporated last week.

Confronted with the other option, making my own game, I’m sitting in an empty room and on the other side of it is BYOND.  I’m hesitant to pick it up because I know that, once fully invested in that process, it could be weeks until I reemerge and the actual fruits of that labor are sketchy: a game I won’t get paid to make hanging around a portal rife with copyright violations.

I’d be better off learning Flash, but then, Flash is expensive.  Besides, Flash is sort of problematic in that it’s not inherently an online environment so much as a simple graphical app assembler.  I could probably get some exciting single player things assembled, but it takes some more knowhow than Flash to jury rig together a flash-based MMORPG.

Bah – maybe I should read a book.  Actually, I do have a few free options.  If I made a BYOND game, at least the experience of doing so will pay off.  Also, I could also make something in Java.  I even have a good book on the subject.  BYOND is a lot easier, but Java is a bit more useful of a employable skill.

Either way, at least I’d have a purpose.  Running around Paragon City all day, while an effective time burner, just doesn’t do it.

I had puzzled my way to the bottom of the obfuscated wellspring that was City of Heroes’ oh-so-complex Character Generation system.

The key, I decided, was going to be a Gravity Control /Kinetics/Psionic Mastery Controller because only this magical combination had the ability to easily reposition foes (with some correctional facility) for optimal damage boosting and then lock them down for containment before I put their brains in a blender while being protected from disturbances.

No other power combination could do this – a Mind Controller came close, but he didn’t really have a way to establish lock down for AOE containment nuking.   Thus, I had finally found a character of optimal variety, power, and group contribution with a relatively good level of creativity as well.  If everything shook out as I expected it would, this was a guy who I’d take through earning all the badges, completing all the story arcs, fleshing out with all the best invention enhancements, and so on.  He would be a main character without regrets.

I woke up this morning eager to put my plan into effect… and then my hard drive broke.

Not entirely unexpected

My 1 Terabyte Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 was purchased back in August of last year.   It wasn’t recognized when I booted up my computer this morning, and a little investigation revealed it was making sick grinding noises of failing to spin up.   Its failure was not such a stroke of bad luck, apparently, as over 20% of reviews on NewEgg seem to indicate that the poor thing died on them too.    If anything, I was lucky it lasted for three quarters of a year.

Fortunately, Seagate appears to have a really cool return policy.  My new hard drive is on its way.  I even shelled out an extra $20 for quick replacement and a nice chariot to send my old hard drive back to Valhalla.  You never know when that Champions Online beta invite will show up.

Unfortunately, I lost all my data.  While I did have it backed up on an external hard drive when I performed my Vista upgrade, I had deleted that from that drive (I even used a utility to scramble the bits) because I knew I might be taking that drive to school and I’d hate to have it fall into the wrong hands.  Even knowing that my main hard drive was prone to failure, even though I’m currently nto in school, I foolishly left myself without a recourse to recover it.

A lifetime of computer use has made data loss not nearly as stressful as it would be for a neophyte.  So I lost my passwords?  Most parties have a password recovery agent.  So I lost my email?  I rarely ever reference it.  So I lost an easy reference sheet to my work history, my resume, my cover letters — frankly, most of that stuff sucks and needs to be redone anyway.

Update: Not A Development Break, After All

After some time on my  laptop, I was invited to head down to BestBuy.  The goal was to replace a kludgy CD-ROM to make my Vista reinstallation go smoother when my hard drive replacement got here, but I walked out of there with a new hard drive too.   I decided that if I saw the exact same model (with newer firmware, one hopes) I’d go ahead and shell out for one and then run them in RAID 1 when the replacement gets here.  They had the same model, so I made good on my wager.

My motherboard is quite RAID compliant, so I look forward to giving that a spin.  RAID 1 isn’t supposed to grant a performance boost, but somebody scrawled in the Wikipedia that it might if you have multiple processors, and I do.  It probably won’t be until I’m running Windows 7 before that works, but then I primarily chose a RAID 1 because I don’t think I can trust this model of hard drive anymore.

Perhaps It Should Be

I wrote on this original entry that I planned to use my downtime to develop in BYOND (one of the few things my laptop can do well with a video card I chose to keep me motivated on things other than gaming).  However, now that I think about it (and that I’m starting to get over my cold) I should really try to take some time out of every day to do some kind of computer-related skill building.

I’m a maverick at computers, but I never really bothered to learn the specifics of a lot of the stuff in use by the professional business world.  From my perspective, most software in use is silly proprietary stuff foisted on novices who don’t know any better.  However, if I can bring down some bling from knowing it inside and out, it’d be a lot better than feigning customer service.  I’m talking maintentence or operations, but if I could become some kind of incredible engineer of one-of-a-kind-products, that’d be even better.

Surprisingly, I’ve been let go from a temporary position that was only going to last another 3 weeks anyway, right before they were going to be hit with a rash rush of customers.  (Then again, perhaps it’s not too surprising, “Last to Hire, First to Fire” and all that.)

Idle Hands, Idle Speculation

I knew being a somewhat introverted homebody by nature may have made me a poor choice for the job, but I never received a single complaint when I was on the job.

The feedback given to the temp agency was I was being “too short,” with customers and employees.  I doubt that: I’m a very courteous individual, I listen to what I’m being told, and I have received many complements from customers for having the patience to resolve longstanding issues.

What might have happened was that I have a habit of speaking too quickly.  My mind goes very quickly, and I have to make a conscious effort to keep my mouth at a speed slower listeners can understand.   That could easily have been misinterpreted as being short.  However, if so, it would have been a real easy fix: just remind me to slow down every once in awhile.  I may have received such a reminder once, if that.

It’s boggling.  Why hire on a temp and let them learn the ropes for 4 weeks, only to drop them on the very week things were expected to get hectic without so much as a hint as to what they might be doing wrong?  It doesn’t make much sense – it seems to me they’re putting themselves at a great disadvantage over an easily corrected qualm.

However, like many aspects in life, I’m probably over-thinking it. They may have even been cutting corners, and the “too short” comment was just to give the employment agency an excuse.  Perhaps it’s the truth is simply that temps are expendable – telling me what I’m doing wrong is perhaps seen as too much investment in an asset they were about to lose anyway.  “Last to Hire, First to Fire” arrives as the most likely explanation.

Water Under The Bridge

Really, I shouldn’t feel bad about temp work falling through.  If nothing else, I should grateful for getting a bit of experience.  It certainly helps pad the blow that I was expecting to crawl into work fighting a nasty, sore throat-inducing, cold today (though no one knew of this).

Financially, I’m well enough off.  My last paycheck should be just enough to push me out of the red with the bank, and that was a worry gnawing at me before this job.  As I’m living at home, it’s not like I really have living expenses.

I didn’t quite make my goal of saving up enough money to reinstate my financial aid nor purchasing Adobe Flash, and I probably would have spent much less eating out if I knew the assignment was going to be this short.  However, aside from that, I invested my income in things I intend to use to awhile.

So, overall, no harm came of this.  It was, if anything, a forgettable four-week assignment in which I could probably escape with minimal blame despite an early closure of my contact there.  Perhaps I could consider it 3 weeks of lost income, but that window of opportunity may have been narrow enough it may as well have been shut unless I were some kind of magical Mary Poppins of customer service.

Back To Pursuing Greatness

Now that I’m once again amply endowed with free time, perhaps I should put some serious consideration towards my game development.  My mental gears are shifting between the concept of some kind of space RPG that encompasses both ground space elements versus the concept of some kind of unusually played Strategy/RPG hybrid that casts the players as futuristic hackers.  Either way, the focus remains the same: interaction in the inner layer, dynamic content on the outer.

Maybe, if I’m not hired soon, and if I finish a good BYOND project, I should take this time to familiarize myself with Java.  BYOND is an excellent prototyping agent, and a great way to learn online game production while having fun, but what I’d really like to do is make some money doing what I love.

Today, however, I think I’ll just cope.  I’ve got a cold bug to nail and a change in schedule to routine to adapt to.