I hate ‘Friends’

I’ve always hated ‘Friends’

I’ve hated it since it debuted in ’94 and them roommates and I were dirt poor, living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and it took TWO subway rides to get anywhere. The roomies and I would lambast the show for its sheer ‘un-New York-ness’. No one we knew had giant apartments like that. There were no strikingly attractive people living across the hall from us. Our ‘wacky adventures’ were rollerblading the city streets looking for the cheapest food and ale we could find.

But I can’t get that damn theme song out of my head.

2nd gear. Stuck. Summer break with 2 kids who are bored. Family vacations stuck in the car driving for hours. Summer camps (special needs for lil’ Art Director and chess camp for Jr. lil’ Art Director).
Playdates with other kids. And I truly believe Sartre is being misquoted when he said ‘Hell is other people’ – I think he mean to say ‘Hell is other people’s kids’ – either I have some sort of ‘vibe’ kids pick up on, or there is a serious parenting crisis in the country; but it seems that if I show even the slightest interest / interaction with anyone my kids are playing with, they instantly glom on to me and demand my attention. Its almost as if they’re neglected by every single adult in their lives and they are starved for grown up attention.

Rant over. Seeing that I haven’t written since April- I can totally relate to the whole ‘stuck in 2nd gear’ motif. Even though things HAVE been moving forward.

I’ve been slowly plugging away at the mobile game – and despite the struggles of adding the Curved World effect that it seems is necessary for all infinite runners these days, its getting closer to release. The biggest issue, of course, is the impostor syndrome nagging of ‘is it any good?’ Which I’m sure will plague me 10 years down the road after the internet has shredded it, mocked me into a cave-living hermit.

I’ve been playing around with AI stuff as well – I tried plugging my game into Midjourney, and this is what was spat out – and I kinda like it as a starting point, so it might become the logo for the mobile game. After some edits. Painting it from scratch. Adding my kid’s handwritten font. Redoing it again cause I don’t like it. BUT – I do see the potential for faster iterating of ideas, maybe not the actual art creation, but just quickly throwing out stuff to see what get the creative juices flowing.

Lastly – I got an intern! A fellow Oculus Launch Pad dev (who also happens to be a new media professor at a nearby college) approached me with a student who wants to learn VR dev and I have to say; as SOON as I get a dime of funding, I’m hiring this guy. Its been so long since I’ve done any collaborative work with someone else, that I had forgotten that people can bring a whole different kind of creativity to the table. The animation above really drove that point home. I would have given this character a skootchy, wiggly type of dragging on the ground movement, but instead my intern gave it this vertical, bounciness that I totally adore. Having a different viewpoint can be completely eye-opening.

Keep your eyes peeled – crowdfunding is coming soon!

#WritingWednesday and I just realized I hadn’t posted a blog in like, forever and seeking to rectify that.

So let’s show off, shall we?

Working backwards – I just got into the finals of the Game Dev World Championship and I’m absolutely floored. Can NOT wait until March 15th to find out I didn’t win. but, hey – that’s just my pessimistic side speaking.

Over the Xmas break – I saw a FaceBook post from a local reporter, Taylor Bruck, who was asking for any ‘feel good’ stories and I rolled the dice and pitched my game, and to my delight, she accepted! She came out to the house, interviewed the kids and myself, shot some video and took a few pix and a few days later, it aired on Spectrum 1 News.

I also showed my game at the Cleveland Gaming Classic back in November and that was a fun one – partially because it didn’t require me to drive 2.5 hours to get there (plus the relief that if I forgot something, I didn’t have to pray that a nearby WalMart had what I needed and was open)

it was also nice that I got to show the kids what I do, and what these type of conventions are like. Plus they got to play videogames (always a win) and see cool stuff like this:

But it was also nice to branch out to a new expo, meet local people that are also in my dev community and see fellow parents and kids friends, it felt more informal and relaxed.

And hey – winning an award for Most Creative didn’t hurt either.

The other thing, besides the holidays, and kid’s off from school and epic deluges of snow and testing positive for Covid-19 and winter blahs is me deciding I needed to get off my butt and get a product ready to ship. If I’m seriously going to pursue funding, the people who write the checks are going to want to see a track record. And that means shipping titles. So I said to myself: ‘Self? What’s the quickest wat to publish a game? … @#$%^& – I gotta make a MOBILE GAME.’

So, since I have a crapton of assets ready to go – lets make this a franchise and ‘educational’ to boot. I had started with calling it ‘Booper Prelude’ but a gave dev friend and mentor suggested that I use ‘Go Booper Go!’ and it has a nice ring to it.

I also figure that when it comes expo time again, I can have a tablet running it and a QR code to the Play Store page so people can drop me a few bucks to help support the VR project as well. Gotta start thinking business stuff.

or: How I spent my weekend

So – now that I’m back, rested, exhausted from all the catch up work, stressed from the up coming holiday season and prepping for the next one; I can properly relate the adventures of GDEX/Origins.

I had started prep week with the usual busy work; getting my expo gear out of the closet, gently washing my ‘Booper’ t-shirts, hastily ordering new stickers since my stock was low – and being dismayed to find my new banner had gotten wrinkled from being in a closet for a year and a half. Helpful suggestions included letting it warm up gently in the sun, ironing it or using a hairdryer to warm it up.

I opted for the sun, cause there was no way in hell I’d trust myself with ANY heat source near vinyl.

I got my various bits of expo gear gathered in the dining room, commandeering the expansive table to spread it all out and make sure I wasn’t missing any connectors, cables or other important techy bits to demo my game and settled down to a little TV with the missus and check my email.

Finally! The organizer had been apologizing for the lack of load-in info and the few messages in the ‘ol inbox looked like he finally got it. it looked kinda the same as always, where the loading platforms were, check in times and when to show up Thursday.

Wait… Thursday??

Tomorrow? I was expecting a Friday check in as we’d done the past years. $#!+. Panic started creeping in – I was not relieved of parental duties until Friday noon, because the wife had scheduled a little time from work to go pick up the kids after school. Thursday was my eldest 11th birthday. Thursday was a day earlier than my stickers were supposed to arrive,

So I spent an absolutely panicked Thursday morning grabbing my PC, Laptop, all the aforementioned gear, cramming it in the wife’s car, grabbing the kids from school, having a rushed 11th birthday for my eldest (I always seem to have a expo on his birthday- the guilt over THAT could fill a novel) and drive like a maniac to Columbus and get my booth set up.

Only to discover that I’d left my power cable for my monitor sitting on the desk back home. $#!+.

Quick text to my bro-in-law (whose couch and ale I’d be helping myself to none too soon) and he offered his nice curved 35″ monitor. A lovely piece of equipment that I could see any number of bad things happening to and I would have to reimburse him for – so I asked if he had anything else. Which turned out to be a 19″ ancient flat panel from 2004. So, I spent the rest of the evening driving around some small town Ohio looking for a big box store that might actually carry a VGA to HDMI converter, praying that it’d be open and doubly praying that it would actually *WORK*. Wal-Mart had one, probably over priced – I could only hope that it worked in the morning.

Friday and I’m running a bit behind because every fast food joint seems to have a line around the block – I get to the expo with 10 minutes before the doors open and wend my way through the throng of eager expo attendees. Quick setup the monitor loaned by the excellent bro-in-law and fire it up- it worked! The gates opened and I raced to set up the rest of my booth; feeling like I was losing precious demo time.

Annnnd it didn’t matter. I got set up, ran a quick playthrough to make certain no glitches were waiting for me, downed a gulp of coffee and stood by my booth ready to show my game proudly. And waited.

No one seemed to be the slightest bit interested in my game.

After a quick consult with y neighboring devs, we all quickly came to the same conclusion: there wasn’t a lot of crossover between tabletop gamers and video gamers. We did get the odd player here and there, but this was nothing like the regular video game expos where I’d have 3 and 4 kids lined up, waiting for a turn to explore my little hand crafted VR adventure. I spent the day mostly people watching, talking with the other VR booths and wandering around, observing the tabletop expo – it was HUGE, like a dozen times bigger than the GDEX or MakerX shows I’ve shown at.

Saturday went a lot better, felt more like the usual crowd, and certainly more families- but still didn’t have the rush and hum of GDEX. I did get some vistors, my bro-in-law and his son used my passes to wander the floor and play some games (and bought some too) and generally geeked out over the offerings of dice, swords, steampunk goggles and many, many boardgames for sale.

I also got a visit fromt he awesome Brian Skeel, a composer who I’ve worked with and who made the epic win / fail fanfares I use in my games, both light and whimsical compositions based on some singing my lil’ art director did; very reminiscent of the old Looney Toons short phrases.

The highlight of the day came at the end, when the floor closed and we game devs piled into a small conference room, and announced winners of various game dev categories. I was floored when they called my little game for the Best in Music & Sound. I never got awards, ever – growing up I wasn’t good at academics OR athletics and to actually win something was a triumph I’ll not soon forget.

Sunday was bittersweet. Its a shorter day, so the exhaustion from the previous 3 days was tolerable, knowing I’d be able to sit my butt down for a long drive home. I got to spend a bit more time wandering the floor and wondered what I could do to make my display pop more (and without breaking the bank with huge monitors or banners) I heard of a expo closer to home – the Cleveland Gaming Classic, and I promised myself that I’d look into it – showing my game is thrilling and the more eyes I can get on it the better.

Slowly the day came to an end and I packed up my gear, a bit sad that it was over, but also happy that the pandemic hadn’t completely ended events like this. I drove home to find the kids outside playing, the wife sitting on the glider on the front porch and I showed the family my new trophy. And as my weekend came to an end, I smiled – knowing that I picked up a few new fans.