17.12.07

Depression is a frigid bitch.

So I've been away from keyboard for.... about a week, maybe two. I wish I could say it was because I was off skydiving, visiting Europe or working hard on my program. The truth though is that I've been going to work and playing Call of Duty 4 between fourteen hour sleep sessions.

It's been a while since I'd let my depression get to me quite that badly. I'm not entirely sure what set it off, maybe not making any progress on my game, maybe just straight up loneliness. I probably won't ever know for sure. But tonight I think I'm finally pulling out of the fog, at least for a while. Strangely enough, it all happened while I was sitting in Panda Express. I go there a lot when I really just need to think, the hot guy who works there not effecting my decision at all >.>, and recently they've been playing some sort of Christmas mix.

Much to my surprise the song favorite things from the sound of music came on. It was a male singer, not Judie Garland, but it started me thinking all the same. What if I tried to think of happy things? What if I focused myself on what made me happy? Of course then I had to figure out what made me happy. Girls in white dresses with blue sashes didn't make the top ten, silvery winter melting into a beautiful spring is hard since I've never even seen snow, no, I was motivated by something else entirely. But what?

At this point I remembered when I had been working on birth, and finally gotten a ship to accelerate up to full speed and change acceleration as it turned... that moment when I had made something come to life. The act of creation, of taking a blank page of code and creating motion. My favorite thing.

So now I sit again before screens of code and Maya windows, even have a muck client open to examine an old world idea. Perhaps I can keep it going for a while this time... perhaps.

25.8.07

So I made a blog...

Of all the many people on this planet, I'm the last one to make a personal blog. I haven't so much railed against blogs and MySpace, so much as simply ignored the constructs and hoped that while I wasn't looking they would go away. Unfortunately that hasn't been the case, in fact they seem to have gotten only more and more popular.

Not being one to pass up an opportunity, I've decided to finally join the game, if at even just tangentially. This blog will be mostly devoted to my two pet projects. My game, currently titled Birth, and GTFUG (Grow the Fuck Up Gaming).

Birth, which can be found at www.thetagamerz.com/BirthV0.10.2.4 , is most definitely some distance off. For now I have some basic functionality while sitting still, but actual ship movement is some distance off. Closer than you'd think, but further away than I'd like. Feel free to check out the current version, or, if you have some gift with web design and like to work for free, drop me a line about getting this bad boy something resembling a true web page.

GTFUG is a little more complicated. The basic idea is pretty simple, tell the game industry it's time to grow up. I'm not saying that games need to drop more f-bombs or make all their characters nude, I'm saying that we shouldn't be afraid of making those artistic decisions. It's actually somewhat annoying to be playing through a perfectly good story in a game and come upon the obvious moment for a sex scene and the characters peck each other on the cheek and the most the player gets out of the deal is a raunchy joke. It's breaks anything resembling dramatic tension and makes the player think, "oh yeah, just a game..."
Some people, myself included, tend to get rather attached to characters in books, movies and games, enjoying their triumphs as if they were our own. When the character is in a bad situation we expect them to say things like, "well this is fucked up", or "god damn it". In games we tend to get one side of the profanity spectrum, "fuck fuckity fuck fuck fucker", or the other, "I do say say this rather seems like a mildly annoying situation my good boy", each sounding more childish than the other. A simple, "well shit", might have expressed the same thoughts more tastefully and less condescendingly.
Don't even get me started on humor.

Anyways, I'll leave you a link to The Escapist: Zero Punctuation (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation) since viewing Yahtzee's reviews was a large part of what actually made me decide to start this blog. (Oh and if you have the time check out his games at Fully Ramblomatic (http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/) . 5 Days a Stranger and 7 Days a Skeptic are awesome games. Sadly I haven't had the chance to check out Trilby's Notes or 6 Days yet.

19.5.07

Temporary Portfolio






















1.3.07

30.1.07

Glider1




28.1.07

benner concept