I’ve been told that sometimes I don’t do a good job with updates because I make a big post about once a month that interleaves a bunch of topics such as personal life, work, and hobby stuff. This makes things a little tricky to parse for readers that only care about one or two of those subjects. Therefore, I have decided that it would be better to make smaller posts a little more frequently. This will help things be a little more targeted, and prevent me from having trouble remember stuff months after it happened.

Triangle Game Jam 09 & Sunny Day

A group of professional game developers from the NC Triangle area got together over the weekend of July 10-12 to hold the 3rd Triangle Game Jam. This is the second year that I was the lead organizer of the event and it was really gratifying to see things work out as well as they did. There were 14 people, we made 4 games. You can find more info about the event and the theme that inspired the games on the Triangle Game Jam website.

The game I worked on was Sunny Day. I’ve added an entry in the games page for it, which includes a download link and a list of requirements. Keep in mind that in the weekend, we weren’t able to get some things implemented that would have made it feel like an actual game – specifically, there isn’t an ending or scoring. But hey, it was done in 2 days; what do you expect?

It’s supposed to be very happy

Comic Game

I mentioned last time that I recently completed phase 1 of my Comic Game experiment. Apparently that got lost on the noise because it was at the bottom of a wordy post about other topics. It probably also had something to do with lack of a screenshot. I’ve added a list of requirements to the game’s page, which also contains a download link in case you didn’t realize. Just to make sure that everyone realizes it’s there; here’s your friggin’ screenshot:

Now you know it exists

Other news

Despite what I said in the beginning of this post about being more targeted, I’m going to mix in a little personal life stuff here because it is recent, relevant to me, and I don’t want to make a separate post talking about it later.

My dad recently received a life-threatening injury and had to have emergency surgery. He was in intensive care in the hospital for a while and was unconscious for a few days. Don’t worry; he’s well on his way to recovery now so it seems like he’ll be fine.

However, going through an event like this gets you thinking about things. I’ve come away from this with a short list of realizations I thought I would share:

• If you’ve got something to say to your loved ones, don’t wait to say it.
• When life-changing things happen, remember that they don’t just affect you; they affect everyone that cares about you.
• Being in good health is very important. It’s worth the effort to eat right and stay in shape.

I’m sure everyone already knows all this stuff, I just want to give a reminder and put a little emphasis on it. This stuff is important guys, for real.

later