Yo Dawgs; it's been a while. Since I put this off until the last minute, I'll keep it brief. Also because I have trouble remembering stuff.

Slither

So the Global Game Jam 2012 came and went. I got my butt in gear and participated this year and had a great time. The theme this time was an image of the Oroboros, which is a pretty decent improvement over past years' themes. Discussing different game concepts with a bunch of strangers was fun, but the location that graciously hosted the Jam site for Dallas didn't have a place to put a desktop computer and even if I made one, I couldn't connect to the internet, so I got lazy and worked on the project from home instead of going back in and interacting with new people. However I didn't do it alone; my friends Shovaen Patel and Lori Wilson came over and lent some much needed help.

With our combined efforts, we produced the game called Slither. If you've got a wired 360 controller handy, you should give it a shot!

It's kind of mezmerizing to just watch the thing move around

Pistol Sisters

I came up with a cool game concept a while back. I don't want to write it all up here at this time, but I did spend some time making some premature fanart of it. It's nice to have an excuse to do arts every once in a while to keep me from forgetting how to launch Photoshop and stuff.

They love to shoot things with their pistols. But they don't like to get shot by things, so they carry around medieval kite shields. ALL PROBLEMS SOLVED

iPad

My wonderful employers (Robot Entertainment) celebrated their 3 year anniversary earlier this month. To congratulate all of the employees on making it this far (and making some Kick Ass games along the way), they got everyone an iPad3. So I guess that makes me a hipster now or something. Sorry.

It's pretty cool because now I can play Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery EP. Oh yeah, and now I can play Hero Academy at home too; that's nice.

Wedding stuff

I'm learning that a lot of stuff is involved in planning a wedding. Amanda's been doing amazing work at getting things organized and we've made a ton of progress. I'll save the details for later, but here are some of the things we have figured out so far (ok, I admit it's basically all her):

• Venues
• Date
• Colors
• Dress
• The wedding party
• Photographer

We've made progress but not really finalized a handful of other things as well. This weekend we are going to be sampling a metric ton of cakes, so hopefully that will be added to the list soon.

Hello all, you may have already read this on that other website people go to all the time that for some reason took off faster than DM.com, but I wanted to reach out to all the loyal monkey followers and say that I am now engaged to Miss Amanda Druck!

We have spent the weekend in Charleston, SC to celebrate and it's been a lot of fun. We haven't had much time to think about when or where we want to have the wedding, but I'm sure all of that will get sorted out soon enough. Everything below is just details, you have read the big news.

The Proposal

I had this one planned out for some time, and it was very difficult to avoid slipping up. She gets up in the mornings around 6:30 to let the dog out back. I was going to have the ring hidden in a place that she would normally look in the morning, but of course she did not look there this particular morning. While she was not looking I moved it into a more obvious place, but she missed it again. I moved it out a little more and she finally saw it. When she opened it I dropped to one knee and asked her to marry me, and of course she said yes. It was definitely a surprise. I had pre-arranged for her to have the last two days of the week off of work, so we left for Charleston after packing way too many clothes.

As much as I like the power of technology, it was a real pain in the butt. Amanda and I like to use Google Latitude to keep up with each other in case we are traveling alone or are out later than expected. I had to disable Latitude and pretend it was broken to make sure that she did not see me going to Durham for numerous trips to the jeweler. I needed to make sure she didn't see me going to visit her Mom or her Dad. In fact, the evening I went to see her dad I told her I was going to shoot pool with some buddies, instead of renting a girlie movie she decided, of course, to go visit her Dad. I tried going early, but no one was home, so I had to go again the next week. At least I got to shoot pool after all!

Now that the cat is out of the bag, it was all funny and a lot of fun to plan out and fortunately it all played out very well. We are both very happy!

Hey folks, so I forgot to update last month, my bad. Let's see if I can remember some of the stuff that happened:

• Made gingerbread house for the first time (I can remember)
• Celebrated Christmas at the Knutsons
• Celebrated Christmas again at my parents
• Happy birthday Amanda!
• Went to my cousin Amanda's wedding in Virginia and had a blast on New Year's Eve
• Went skiing with the Knutsons in Breckenridge for a week

It was all great fun and, as usual, I didn't take any pictures. However, I was able to find at least one picture of holiday festivites to share thanks to the facebook:

I learned that perhaps the most important part of a gingerbread house is the path leading up to it

Exciting news at work: we've released our iPhone game Hero Academy! I think it turned out great. Although I don't have an iPhone, I do have an iPod touch at work that I can use for testing/playing so if you want to play me, send an invite to "MikeD".

Yo dawg, I herd you like tactics so I put tactics in your phone so you can stay awake while you sit in a meeting

Also, I've gotten the chance to play a lot of video games in and around the holiday season. Here are the ones I'm working on (I recommend them all!):

• Dark Souls
• The World Ends with You
• Super Mario 3D Land
• Mega Man Zero Collection
• Advance Wars: Dual Strike
• Cave Story+ (Steam)
• Jamestown (Steam)
• Bit Trip Runner (Steam)

I don't know if it's sad or awesome that the wikipedia page on any given game is so much more useful than the game's official page. Anyway, see you next month.