I was invited to be a guest speaker at IGDA Orlando with short notice. With the closure and recent resurrection of n-Space and the pending annual layoffs of doom at EA, I figured that something about how to deal with unemployment might be helpful, given my current Level Up in that particular skill branch. I did a lot of ad-libbing, but the talk went well and I crafted the below post from my hastily typed notes on my iPhone. Lots of folks came up to me and asked me questions as if I knew something afterwards, so it must have been moderately compelling and I must have given the impression of proficiency.

Without ado:

Item 1: Don’t Panic

So you just got laid off, huh? You are probably thinking: “Holy Hell. How am I going to pay for things? What am I going to do with my life? What did I do wrong? How could this happen?” Calm down. It happens to many of us. It doesn’t mean you are a bad artist/producer/coder/designer. Yes, it probably isn’t fair. Yes, there are probably some assholes who know nothing still with their jobs. Yes, you will have to tighten your belt, but it is okay. Unemployment insurance compensation doesn’t pay much, but with careful planning, you won’t starve.

Or maybe you are a recently graduated or soon-to-be-graduated student. You ask yourself: “How will I get a job when all these people with experience are flooding the market?” Again, don’t panic. While it certainly sucks to time your life to be graduating during an ever-deepening recession, there’s little you can do about that. Blame your parents for poor planning. You, however, can only make the best of it.

The key to Item 1 is to not take the first job that will have you simply because you are panicked that nothing else will come along. This is a common mistake simply because so many of us out there are desperate for a job and so many companies want to hire replaceable parts. You need to find a studio that will support you and make you feel that your work is worthwhile. After all, why are you in this industry?

Daniel Pink’s newest book Drive is a great read on motivation and fulfillment, if a little pop-science-y. In it, he lists three components of work that make work inherently fulfilling: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Find a place that will provide that for you. There’s so little time for us on this Earth. Don’t waste it by slaving for jerks because you are in a panic and don’t see any better options.

Item 2: Do Your Homework

Almost as bad as accepting a job you know you will hate is tricking yourself into believing that you won’t hate it. Now more than ever you need to be in everyone’s business. Do you have friends in the industry? How are they liking where they are? What does Gamasutra say today? More layoffs at such-and-such? A new EA Louse coming out about another studio? Those are good indicators (but not sufficient) of places that are not pleasant to work. If you are applying for a position, is that position open because it is new (good) or because the last guy couldn’t deal with all the BS (bad)? Does this place seem to make games that are made with care and artistry? Or do they make shovelware? Does that even matter to you? It’s okay if it doesn’t! In doing your homework, you will find out. This isn’t a one-day event. This is something you need to be doing regularly.

Moving costs a lot of money. You are only hurting yourself (and hey, maybe your family, remember them?) by picking up and moving to some place at which you won’t be happy. Don’t let it happen to you.

Ok, I promise the doom-and-gloom is mostly over.

Item 3: Play Games

Yes, sir! You have forty hours a week more than all your sucker friends with jobs and you still have a stack of games from two Christmases ago that haven’t been opened. Time to get cracking. Play great games. Play shitty games. Just play a lot of games. Not only will interviewers expect you to know what is popular, but they will want to know what you would change about titles. Stay current and play as much as you can. If you plan on applying to a social game company, you better have played more than Farmville. If you plan on applying to a company that makes shooters, then you better know why Halo succeeds and Killzone has mostly failed.

THIS ISN’T JUST A TASK FOR PEOPLE WHO WANT TO BE DESIGNERS. The dirty little industry secret that we designers keep is that everyone is a designer. Code slingers may spend their lives knee deep in Perforce, but they too need to know instinctually how games work just as a designer does.

Remember that you are playing these games with a critical eye. You are playing to learn and to have fun. If this task is work to you though, then maybe you should pick another industry, I know I don’t need to give you all more reasons to play games, so I will move on.

Item 4: Start a Blog

Hey, look, I follow my own advice sometimes. You aren’t starting a blog to get nerd-cred points, although those might come eventually. You are starting a blog to make yourself a better communicator. Take those games you played in Item 3. What did you enjoy and why? What did you not enjoy and why? What do those games make you think about? These are good starts for blog posts.

The reason I started this blog was simply that I was not a morning person. I’d get into work, fire up the computer and look at a blank Word document that needed to be a design draft by 3pm. I found that browsing the news sites of the day and then writing a short post about something I found interesting or disagreed with really primed my mental gears and got me going. Then I kept up with it, met some awesome people and it became a Thing I Did with capital letters. It doesn’t have to go that far with you, but you should realize the exercise’s potential in cultivating your written talents.

That said: Try your best not to slag people. Be constructive. There are enough negative nellys on the Internet. It is easy to be a curmudgeon. I spend most of my day as one. It is harder and more rewarding to be critical. There is a vast difference. But blogging should be an autotelic experience just like playing games. If you don’t love doing it, you won’t keep it up and you won’t get any better. If you don’t enjoy it after a while, try some other technique to keep your written communication skills sharp. This one works for me, thus I recommend it to others.

Item 5: Network

An unfortunate truth is that the vast majority of interviews I’ve done in my unemployed periods have not come from diligently applying to posted jobs but instead come from people-knowing-people-knowing-people-at-suchandsuch who happen to be looking for a designer. I can recall only two interviews I’ve done where I’ve gotten calls for an interview from traditional listings. The fact is that a lot of companies post listings just in the hopes that a Prince Charming will come along and sweep them off their feet, offering to work for a dollar salary with fifteen years of perfect experience. They don’t want you. Also, some companies have such a bad reputation that they hire tons from traditional listings because no one internally would ever recommend their friends into that hell.

It’s better for both ends to actually know someone by other means. It is better for the employer because they have someone they (hopefully) trust pre-screening schmoe applicants and it is better for the employee because they are doing the Item 2 due diligence by actually talking to a real employee beforehand to find out what the company is really like sans HR bullcockie.

But you can’t get that foot in the door unless you are networking. Sam Houston has a great list of game devs on Twitter. Find the ones making games you are interested in and ask them questions. Most are nice enough and not so busy that they can’t answer a 140 char question. Twitter is a good start.

People have been lukewarm about the IGDA, but I’ve met a lot of great folks there. I guess it varies city to city. It’s pretty cheap to attend their events generally and can’t hurt.

How about conferences? Yeah, GDC is expensive, but you get what you pay for. Are there any cheaper conferences locally? Have you thought of more non-traditional cons where you can schmooze like GenCon? Keep an open mind. Sturgeon’s law applies–90% of your contacts you meet you will only talk to a few times. But the 10% that you regularly correspond with or become friends with is really worth all that extra effort.

Of course, the autotelic warning from above applies here too. You aren’t networking for the purpose of these people helping you. You should be doing it because there are interesting people out there in the world and they are tough to meet if you are playing Farmville by yourself all day and not making an effort. Most achievers can smell out people who want to be friends only for their personal gain. We know who you are. There is no hiding it. If you are that kind of person, then I have no advice for you, sorry.

Item 6: Practice

When you were employed (or when you were studying), you were constantly engaging in behavior (hopefully) that made you better at what you do. You were writing designs, or making characters or writing code or whatever it is you did for a significant portion of your week. Now, you aren’t being paid to do that. How will you make yourself better?

I make board games. I’ve talked about this briefly before. I choose to do this over coding and self-producing my own games because there is less overhead. I can go from stupid idea to realizing my idea is stupid via paper prototype in maybe an hour or two versus a few days via my sloppy coding ability. Honestly, I don’t think I work hard enough at this. I resolve to do better.

How will you make yourself better? I ask again. Will you write a novel? Make a comic book? Record an album? Make a Team Fortress 2 map?

After you are fired, you get about one month of guilt-free time where you can sleep until noon every day and watch Ninja Warrior on G-4. After that first month, if you keep doing that, you are a slacker. You are blessed with all this free time! Don’t squander it! My next item ties directly into this.

Item 7: Finish Something

I am guilty of this and so I turn my shame into lessons for whoever is reading. The points of practicing are twofold: to get better and to provide proof of your efforts. There are many, many writers out there with unfinished novels on their hard drives. These people are not novelists, they are chapterists*.

It is easy to make a board game and not really worry about playtesting it. It is easy to write half a novel. It is easy to write janky code that sorta-kinda-works but not really in all situations. It’s harder to make a tested, elegant game system. It is harder to finish a novel. It is harder to write robust code. Finishing things is hard work and it proves you are still capable. It proves it to yourself when you get depressed that you are out of work and no one wants you. You can say: “I’m still a writer. Look at that novel I finished!” Or: “I’m still a designer. Look at that board game that my playtesters liked!” And better than proving to yourself that you still have it by finishing, you can parlay that experience to interviews: “Well, I’ve spent the last few months making a mod for Civilization 5 and it has five thousand downloads” sounds a hell of a lot better than “I’ve watched the entirety of Quantum Leap” in an interview.

But, you doth protest: I try writing stuff or coding stuff or designing stuff and it is shit and I don’t want to finish! My reply: OF COURSE IT IS SHIT! You learn by making shitty works. If you were able to summon up the great American novel by force of will then you wouldn’t need to practice writing, would you? My best advice for aspiring game designers is to not be afraid to make shitty games. You learn from making shitty games/novels/programs. Fear of failure is fear of progress. Students often wail over the catch-22 that you need experience to get a job as if the only way to get experience was via a job. Yes, it is the most salient way to show experience, but it is far from the only way.

I’m devoting another paragraph to this because I feel it is that important. Here you are, unemployed, with no penalty but deflated ego if you fail and it is NOW that you are afraid to make things? And you want a job where there are million dollar budgets on the line based partially on said ability to make things? THEN you will be comfortable with your abilities?

*By the way, I totally stole the “chapterist” term from some writer’s workshop I went to once and I don’t remember who it was so I can’t give attribution. Sorry, because I really like the term and the meaning behind it.

Item 8: Read All Kinds of Stuff

You’ve got a lot of spare time! It is silly to believe that all of that time will be constructive relating to Items 6 and 7. But even when you are feeling writer’s/designer’s/coder’s/artist’s block and you aren’t working on your blog (Item 4) or your backlog (Item 3), you can still be doing things to help your position.

Read a ton. Fiction. Nonfiction. Whatever gets your interest. I personally keep record of what I read and post it here on my blog at the end of the year, just so I can go back in the future and remember some of the things I had read and temporarily forgotten. But most important is to not get sucked into the same kinds of books you normally read for leisure. I mentioned Daniel Pink’s book Drive above that I read this year. That isn’t my normal topic for leisure reading. And while it wasn’t about Game Design per se, it is highly illustrative of a number of issues that are tangential to game design.

You will end up finding the oddest connections. And most of all, you will keep learning. But don’t strain yourself to read topics that you generally find dull. I know people who read technical manuals and can down them like they were pulp mysteries. I know if I started one, I’d never finish. Read things for enjoyment and let the enrichment happen as a side effect.

I suppose Drive ended up as being a cornerstone of these ten points without me really attempting it to be. Interesting.

Item 9: Keep a Routine

I personally again have not been following this advice, but I have special dispensation because of certain life events. As I said earlier: you are allowed to wallow in sorrow and watch junk TV all day for the first month of unemployment. After that, you need to kick yourself in the ass and give yourself a routine. Set yourself a time to wake up if you generally oversleep. Many people I know find unemployed time to be the perfect excuse to start working out again. You don’t need an expensive gym membership. I wish I could count myself among them, but I’ve been too lazy thus far. Set yourself some “work time” everyday where you write/code/whatever. I had this for a while and then aforementioned certain life events uprooted it. I firmly believe I will go back to it.

Nearly every site I’ve seen with “unemployment tips” recommends this for the simple reason of depression avoidance. I’m no psychologist so I cannot tell you why it works, but as someone who fights depression, I can attest to the fact that setting a routine certainly helps me feel more in control of my life. Maybe it will work for you, maybe it won’t. But I cannot see it hurting. At the very least it will force you to be organized and realize how much time in a day you spend poorly. You don’t have to be productive 24/7 to be happy; quite the opposite. But if accomplishing things makes you happier, and setting a routine helps you accomplish things, then it follows that setting a routine should make you happier.

Item 10: Enjoy It

I believe fully that my unemployment situation is temporary. Since it has an end, I only have a set number of days in which I have full control over 168 hours of my week (save some mandatory things I have no control over.) Someday, I will trade that free time for meaningful work and a paycheck, but in the meantime, I will treat every day as an opportunity to become better at what I do and enjoy my life. Think about what you don’t have to deal with as an unemployed person:

- Traffic Jams or Crowded Subways
- All-Hands Staff Meetings with 90 PowerPoint Slides with 12 Pt Font and Animations
- Having to Pay Full-Price Rather Than Matinee Price for Movies
- Not Being Able to Play One More Round of TF2 Because You Have to Get Up in The Morning

Hey, being unemployed isn’t so bad! Go out and make the most of it! Or stay in. Whatever.

- Whirlwind tour here, folks.Two years ago when I moved into a house in Florida I said “God damn it, I’m never moving again.” Then I moved to New York City and said “Moving is for suckers, good thing I’m in this Great City.” Well, I’m moving again, this time to a cheaper city to contemplate my options. And it is just a stressful as it always is.

Unemployment this time around has left me a bit crestfallen and unmotivated. I know that this situation is entirely not my fault, but I’m still left feeling inadequate. I’m trying to distract myself by writing. My writing has significant problems but I suppose all writers feel that way about drafts. I’ve got some board games in embryonic form and one that I am submitting to publishers.

In a self-promoting turn, I’m quoted in the debut issue of Handshake Magazine about violence in gaming. The magazine is free and full of great articles with eye-pleasing layout, so check it out.

- I have had time to play a few games. I’m utterly torn by Deadly Premonition. It is wholly awful, but it exudes this sort of creative artistry that shows someone cared for it. I read the postmortem in GameDeveloper and wanted to chuck it across the room when I read how long they spent making real event cycles for the townsfolk and other behind-the-scenes stuff. Maybe they could have spent some time on making the controls not stiff and unresponsive? Or maybe they could have hired someone who has at least written a short story to do the dialogue. In the way of a lot of Japanese-derived voice acting they take thirty second pauses between lines, so when there is literally a four minute scene where the characters introduce themselves to each other and no action or development happens at all, I want to get the source code and just comment out the whole scene.

Other than that, it has some interesting themes going on. You can pick it up for like fifteen bucks now. But be prepared for some gristle.

If you were a fan of Dead Rising then the demo-slash-prequel Dead Rising Two: Case Zero is probably for you. (Dead Rising hit a two run walk-off in the bottom of the ninth to beat Case Zero, if you are looking for the box score.) Here’s another instance where I am torn by the writing. In the opening scene, there is a very tense revelation of backstory as you find out that the child was infected by her own mother and that the father has sacrificed for her. Yay for characters with motivation!

Then you get into the game proper and it just lacks any sense of subtlety. There’s the pair of, ahem, ladies, on a bachelorette party complaining about how “omigod, not hot” it is that they are stuck in a bowling alley with some zombies. Uh, what? The auteur side of me wants to say that this is (as was Dawn of the Dead that the series is based off of) a commentary on the shallowness of popular American culture. There’s evidence to support this. Zombies still stand at the slot machines in the casino compelled even post-mortem (ha! Used that in two different ways this post. Achievement unlocked). There are a pair of “extreme” athlete fans that stay put fighting packs of zombies because it’s “awesome”. If I was working on this, I’d have put a zombie on a computer in the police station with a little image of Farmville on the monitor. But then I look at the lack of subtlety thrown in across the board (sure, there are motorbike forks sitting in this locked shed, why not) and just want to assume they are being silly because it’s their damn canvas and they can use whatever paints they wish.

But here’s an honest question: how does a town with ten buildings have a thousand zombies wondering on the street? Where did those people live? Where did they come from? Who are they? Why do they congregate on the streets? The Willamette shopping mall thing made sense – these folks come from the various burbs. Here it just looks like they were using the copy-paste tool to make it scary.

Here’s another question: why does a hunting supply store have a display of broadswords?

Here’s another question: how was Zombrex named, packaged, manufactured and distributed in a few days/weeks?

Here’s another question: How does Chuck attach nails to a propane tank without rupturing the tank?

Here’s another question: Ah, screw it. I’m thinking too much.

I guess you want to know if it is fun. It is! I played it through twice and cannot wait for the full game. I’d give my pinky finger to design on a Dead Rising game. I love ‘em.

- I should write more on here, but when I think about games I start getting pensive and sad, so I’ve been avoiding it. I will rectify the situation.

So… long story short is that I’m not going back to Gameloft. Looks like I can hire out my services to any progressive company that will have me.

If you are looking for a designer/producer/TF2 spy, here’s my card:

No, really, that’s my card. If you see me in person, I’ll dig one out of my wallet for you.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a lot of time to work on my prototypes and writing! Door closing, window opening, cliches inflating.

It’s pretty damning for a blogger to not post for more than two-weeks. I’ve lost the link that showed a study between post density and traffic, but rest assured that quantity is indeed a component. So I apologize for being quiet recently. Work is busy and my free time is spent gearing up for GenCon.

I’m bringing the Airport game I blogged about recently to show to publishers and also quickly adapted a design I had shelved in 2009 after randomly coming upon a novel theme and scoring mechanism for the whole thing. It’s tenatively called New York Minute. I rudely threw that together with Gloriana’s help and so I’m bringing two well-tested (I got a lot of reps with NYM in its previous incarnation. It’s a pretty good game that lacked a theme and felt a little arbitrary. It was surprisingly easy to fix.) games to the show and hope to get some useful feedback from the publishing folk.

When I come back, I’ll post a full recap of the goodies of GenCon and then I’ll be back to my regular posting schedule. I’ll leave you with a link to a very hyped new blog that posts the tired and I thought defeated argument that you can divide price by hours and get some sort of enjoyment metric, as if enjoyment was measured in hours and not something more flighty like utils. These articles are inevitably written by college kids or people who generally have the time to fully appreciate 100+ hour titles where people with demanding jobs or kids or a life really appreciate getting a full experience in a digestible amount of time, even if that makes the price/hour metric all outta wack.

I’m not going to continue my posts about Airport Rush for the time being. I had a fantastic playtest session with some very talented designers at Eric Zimmerman‘s playtest group yesterday and I think I am going to make some major changes. While this is dangerous to do a month before I take the game to GenCon, I think it is absolutely necessary.

It highlights what I’ve known to be a problem with my process for some time now and that is the unfortunate necessity of having the same people playtest your games. Since you can’t take them out back and format their brains to see everything as a blank slate, they are forced to compare a new version with an old version. If the new version fixes problems with the old version, then the fixes must be good, right? Well, no, not exactly, because those fixes might make no sense to someone coming into the game raw.

There are problems in Airport Rush with the alignment of theme and mechanics. While I am no slave to theme – Why are there n identical San Juans in Puerto Rico? Why can only one type of good fit on a ship? Why in Ticket to Ride do you need special colors of track? What do the tickets represent? And so on – there is much to be said about congruency insofar as it helps people understand the rules and mechanics. If people are distracted by incongruent rules, then I should work to fix it. Some incongruencies will remain (to the chagrin of nitpicky designers), but I was looking for feedback, not orders.

It’s actually been a long time since I’ve received feedback that was in the form of: “Why did you do things this way?” “Because such and such.” “Oh, I see. I think that’s too slow. Wouldn’t such and other such be better?” It’s refreshing.

I’ll be typing up part three of my board games post sometime later this week when I have time. I had friends come up over the holiday and we went to Central Park, MoMa, the waffle truck, played Dominion, Puerto Rico and Le Havre,  played at Dave & Busters, went shopping for Chinese junk on Canal Street, saw Avenue Q, saw the 4th of July Fireworks on the Hudson, went to Liberty Island (I took a great photo of the Statue with my phone that I am using as my wallpaper now. I’ll upload it later) and had delicious food in a number of places. It was a busy weekend!

This short post is to tell you about a gem of a game I played through on Thursday. It is Telltale’s pilot of Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent. If you like the Professor Layton games, then Puzzle Agent is familiar. It is a point-and-click adventure game sans inventory management, where the challenges come from brain teasers, logic puzzles and riddles that are interspersed with the story.

The pilot was great, but leaves on a bit of a To Be Continued note, so I’d be very sad if folks didn’t scoop it up in enough quantity to merit a whole season. I felt that the puzzles were more fair than in the latest Layton game (in that, some puzzles could be interpreted in multiple ways leading to incorrect correct answers). But the real draw here is the ridiculous writing and voice acting. I’ve found the voice acting in the Sam and Max games (of what I have played, at least) to be a bit monotonous. Plus there is a wonderful surprise that breaks the veil of puzzle and story that I will leave for you to discover.

One of the few things that I like about New York City is the density of unique events. On Friday, I read about the Come Out and Play festival in Brooklyn and figured that would be some good times for Glo and I. It was!

The essence of the festival is a mix of ARGs and impromptu sports. The above picture is me playing the awfully named “OMMRPG” which should really be called “Laser Football”. The idea is that each team has one laser pointer and a number of players with mirrors and must direct the laser to a “goal” while avoiding the other team’s defenders. It is wildly chaotic and actually works without a lot of rules. I stealthily hid behind an “official” and scored three times before the opposing team caught on and I was marked for the rest of the game. Once you are marked, there is little you can do to score, which is a weakness of the game (in basketball or soccer you can out-finesse someone to shake off a defender, in this, due to the precision required of angling a mirror, it is less possible). After I was sufficiently frustrated by a defender, I passed off my mirror to another player. I think more organization would lead to these kinds of strategies – passing mirrors to confuse defenders. I was surprised at how well the game worked.

There were a number of games that took place over the entire weekend. One was hosted by Scvngr. Since they have no vowels, you know they are Web 2.0. You download the Scvngr app for Android or iPhone and you are led on a photo scavenger hunt around town. It is the perfect melding of an old game with new technology and if AT&T’s network wasn’t such balls, it would have been very clever and smooth. Scvngr allows you to set up your own scavenger hunts for others. They are partnering with museums and such to offer these sort of ludically-guided tours (I just made that phrase up, sorry).

You can see on the above picture a bandanna tied to my leg that says “Human”. It was part of another of the whole-weekend games called simply Humans vs. Zombies. It is essentially Massively Multiplayer Thematic Tag. One player starts out as Subject Zero and by tagging humans (those with bandannas on their arms or legs) can turn hapless humans into flesh-eating zombies (indicated by bandannas worn on the head). Humans can stun zombies by hitting them with socks or nerf guns at which point they must wear their bandanna around their neck and cannot tag for ten minutes.

Gloriana and I were on our way to an event on Saturday morning when we saw a Zombie across the street in the direction we were headed. I paused and we made eye contact, yet he smiled and continued walking away from us. Were we safe? Was it a trap? I peeked around the corner. No Zombie there. But by then it was too late. The Zombie was hiding behind a trash can. I was taken, but Gloriana survived by spiking me and the attacker with socks.

My attacker (left) and the decoy (right).

Now, this led to an uncomfortable situation. I was a shambling shell of humanity while Glo was still pure. Nonetheless, she felt like she had a hand on the situation. She set her phone to go off in ten-minute intervals. When it would ring, she would instantly spike me with a sock. Hmph. I felt like in the last scene of Shaun of the Dead where Ed is chained to the shed and can only play Timesplitters instead of eating flesh.

Glo was protected in safe zones like the park (the game was suspended if you were in the park playing another game, in a business or crossing a street). Also helpful was the overprepared Nerf-based militia that patrolled Park Slope looking for zeds to shoot. Not pictured above is the guy who had a bandoleer of socks and a belt of Nerf cartridges.

But as in the precautionary zombie movies, a split second of indecision can upend an entire life. I was on the phone talking to a friend who were we going to meet for the day. While Glo thought I was distracted, she crossed the threshold of the park and was no longer in a safe zone. I tagged her “undead” and she was upset! Geeze, you would have thought that I did something bad like forget her birthday – I only converted her to a mindless automaton of insatiable hunger!

We continued on with the games. “Field Crumpets” was a lively variation on field hockey that was just wacky enough to be novel. We participated in a horde event where we Zombies milled about trying to trap helpless humans (we won!). And we also took great efforts to complete the SCVNGR hunt. We used props for extra effect. The prompt was to hug a tree in Prospect Park. Instead, I prosposed to one:

It said no.

Our pictures were pretty good (Glo is a creative photographer) and in the end thanks in part to our funny pictures, we won the SCVNGR hunt! Our prize? A new 3G iPad! Whoa! Supposedly, they are ordering it today and it will be in the mail.

If it doesn’t show up, I know a horde of flesh-rending abominations that I can send to the SCVNGR headquarters.

You are ridiculous:

• 4676 diggs (#1 overall),
• 707,000 hits on Kotaku,
• +180,000 unique visitors to this blog (there wasn’t even a link on Kotaku) from 168 countries, (Hi Finland! You are the second most popular country for some reason. I’ll have to write more about Sonata Arctica)
• +120 Twitter Followers,
• +20 Facebook friend requests, 0 accepted, (sorry folks, I only FB with people I know, no offense)
• 5 coworkers insinuating I’d be fired (why?),
• 10 telling me how much they liked the post,
• Countless friendly messages from long lost classmates and colleagues,

It wasn’t that funny.

Looks like I’ll have to post some more relevant stuff to keep you folks around. Sorry. It’s mostly game design minutiae here.