I have a defunct laptop with a harddrive I can’t seem to get out of the case – the screws are stuck and stripping.
My sister’s response: “Can’t you use the bone from your roast beef to open the hatch?”

Thus, today is a new commemoration: the yearly joke that is in reference to Shadowgate 64. Not a technically impressive game, but it was a sort of childhood landmark for me and my sister. For me, because I had no familiarity with the idea of “First person without being a shooter” (My childlike translation, scary enemies should be jumping out from everywhere), and I was also completely stumped by the beginning. The game begins with you, a prisoner in a small cell, and very little direction. It took me forever to figure out that I needed to find a bone (a pixellated N64-quality bone on a similarly textured floor) and use it to pick the lock on the hatch – a hatch which I believe was underneath some hay, but I could be overcomplicating it – to escape…

…maybe I can’t get the laptop open until I find the right tool… I better go around a hardware store and mash the A button until I activate something secretly awesome…

I would have written this great commentary on Final Fantasy VIII. As it stands, this entirely summarizes why I fondly call FFVIII “My favorite Final Fantasy game unless you are only counting Final Fantasy games I have managed to play all the way through in which case it must be removed from the list.” Anyway, I highly recommend this article. And hopefully I will be updating with some more of my own here pretty soon. (Yes I say that a lot every time.)

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/70336-remembering-the-orphan-final-fantasy-viii/

I know I have been exceedingly lax in updating this blog. However, it’s not because there’s nothing going on, but rather because I became so worried about flooding this blog with unrelated posts and nonsense and things that I have been treating it like it’s made of glass and I’m all thumbs. (Translation: Carefully.)

Maybe this is silly of me; it’s not as though any game designer, writer, programmer – hell, anyone who’s worked on a game project for more than five minutes – would believe that we are so prim and proper and upper-crust that we pause every day for tea time. No, we’re usually weird, ridiculous, goofy, sometimes creepier than is socially acceptable, and nerdy. I would like to think I myself am all of these things (except the creepy part), so I might as well act like it.

Last night Steve and I started really hammering out some concepts for a game project we’ve been talking about for months now. And since I recently purchased a computer – thus raising the number of actual, working PCs I own to the count of ‘one’ – I’m now installing Visual Studio and with any luck will be cursing my memory lapses of .dll’s and #includes creating something great very soon!

Anyway, it’s too early to really talk about the game, but it’s going to be primarily educational, though I’m aiming for a fun, accessible, as addicting as Tetris sort of play style. Since it’s just the two of us going to be working on it (for now, anyway) I’m sure the progress will be infinitely slower than I would prefer, but side projects are always suffering while we deal with those things in life like “paying bills” and “working.”

Speaking of working, though I’m still not ‘in the industry’ so to speak, and I would still like to be, I do think I’ve been doing pretty well for myself. My fourth novel, Dawn Shatters, is coming along really well and has been receiving most of my creative TLC for the past few months. Meanwhile, I have nearly completed the revamped (haha almost a pun it’s about vampires) version of Night Falls, the first book in the series, because I have simply got to get these things published somehow! A lot of what I find online is not helpful in the slightest, but my ever-attentive mother got me two books that have been very informative on the process. What it comes down to is simply that my life has been such a crazy rollercoaster over the last year (since moving to New Jersey) that I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. And it makes me want to punch myself in the face – I mean, who has three-and-a-half novels just sitting around without even trying, right?

Silly Jamie, that’s who. Anyway, consider this message a forewarning that my game-designing life may be about to get a lot more volatile (designers being put into programming roles… it’s like a bad horror movie) and therefore I will have a lot more things to complain about discuss in this blog.

Meanwhile, you should all (whoever actually reads this) go to www.wildlife-research-team.org and help a valuable nonprofit organization restore the environment! Any contributions help, even if you just tell your friends. Go! Go!