Whoops! Almost forgot I had this in my Drafts. So, here we go; a few things to add and… etc
Hmm. Don’t eat loads of chocolate cookies about a week before a dental visit? That’s common sense, surely… alright, slightly more important stuff: Read More
The last day of Comic Expo started easily enough: out of bed, down to breakfast, back to the room, pick up everything I need to, realise I can’t possibly carry all of it while also wheeling my luggage out… okay, maybe not so easy.
With Mat’s help I got everything downstairs, checked out, jumped in the van, and nipped over to the Commonwealth Hall to park for the day. We were inside in good time, and cleaned up the stand of the usual detritus, ready to face Sunday shoppers.
As well as the dynamite team of Neil, Mike, Jason and Kat we also had Andrew Wildman joining us, so we knew it was going to be a productive day. All we needed now was people. Read More
Apparently I am an elephant, because an elephant never forgets.
As I dropped off to sleep on Friday I remembered that in the same hotel in 2007, I’d overslept thanks to an alarm call that never came. That lingering knowledge probably kept me half-awake through the night, and I woke a little groggy on Saturday - but on time.
Still. Show to get done. No rest for the wicked… Read More
More Comic Expo recap stuff is coming; will probably be three posts now as I’m such a long-winded bugger. Just wanted to drop a few things here.
News-wise…
‘Podcast 2.5′ as we’re calling it, is about done and should be online very soon I hope. It’s mostly more recapping of the MiniCon, including chats with some TF Omega teams and a long talk between Alex ‘GhostRaptor’ Weekes and me. Who has a blog, if you haven’t seen.
Speaking of MiniCon, the first official video for it went live yesterday… go see it on Blip.tv. (Yes, there will be a downloadable version soon.) There’s a lot more footage and a lot longer video coming.
Speaking of the podcast, Episode 3 is also half-way done already because we did an interview with a couple of the guys from the Tabula Rasa team. I wasn’t in on it but Chris tells me it’s real good.
In the (probably extreme) off-chance that you aren’t frequenting the EU COH Forums, just FYI, all of the sketches from Bristol are now live on Flickr, along with a fine selection of ‘official pictures‘ too.
Also: I’m playing with this. You might like to play with it too. Or offer me suggestions on what to do with it.
Some random linkage…
Adam Martin, who’s one of our top programmers in the fledgling internal NCE development team, spoke at ION 08 yesterday, on one of his favourite subjects - MMOs and Web 2.0. Massively did a write-up which makes it sound really interesting; I’d say it’s worth a read.
Adam will also be speaking at the MMOG-fest thing that I’m going to be at in early June at Staffordshire University, so if you wanted to come quiz him, that’s a great opportunity to do so.
If you’re in a reading mood, this post on MMOG Nation has some great ideas about guilds and how to keep guilds alive. It’s sort of aimed at developers but you might be interested regardless.
That’ll do. Work calls!
In one two post posts. Not four, unlike the last show. Can’t guarantee to be short, though… so that’ll be like last time.
So, we came (again), we saw (again), we conquered (well that might be debatable but we certainly seemed to do alright, thank you). Another Comic Expo has come and gone. Let’s talk about it, shall we? Okay. With pictures? Oh alright then.
Got that nervous, churning feeling in my gut. As a wizened old country yokel staring out at the horizon might say: “Show’s comin’.”
Not a big one, of course, but any show gets me this way. It’s just nerves. And excitement.
Some random stuff before the weekend, from today:
Did a presentation of something we’ve been working on for about… six months*. It went pretty damn well, even though it wasn’t the all-singing, all-dancing, “Hey - was that Sean Connery on the voiceover?” multimedia extravaganza we’d originally envisioned. We’re going to follow up with more concrete details and then hopefully… fingers crossed… it’ll happen.
Confirmed my attendance at the Staffordshire University event - which specifically, is called MMOG Fest ‘08. Then expanded it to our attendance. We’re now going to have a little stand there to sell games and give career advice from. So if you’re a student or just interested, check out the schedule. (I’ll admit it’s not too cheap, unless you’re a student!)
After a lot of confusion over whether or not it was going to happen, got officially asked to present an Eagle Award, essentially on behalf of Andrew Wildman. Which is nice. Be nicer if I knew what the award was for.
Spoke to Kat Nicholson and double-confirmed everything for tomorrow. Colouring sketches is going to be very cool… still haven’t decided if I’ll get any of mine done.
Sat with Chris and Mat, and figured out everything for the weekend. Couldn’t ask for a more solid team, got to be said; we’ve done this so many times now we’re pretty damn fluid**. And I won the coin toss to get a hotel room to myself, so result!
We had some network issues here - hardware problems, which had IT looking deathly serious all day - so I was confined to working on whatever I had in my email. Good thing, as I cleared out a bunch of stuff including edits on a big corporate document. So that made people happy.
Oh yeah; and got put in the frame for pulling together a product presentation video at short notice, so that’ll occupy next week, quite possibly.
Anyway; off to the gym and then hooking up with a friend later. If you’re coming to Comic Expo, I’ll see you there!
* By the way, it wasn’t like we worked on the presentation solidly for six months. That’d be silly. The idea, once we had it, was easy enough to verbalise… it was just harder to visualise for others, and that took quite a while to figure out. Also, we had other things to do in the same timeframe.
** Funny thing is how different things were a year ago. I expect I’ll be wittering about that in the inevitable video that’ll come out of this weekend.
Busy week especially outside of work, which is why you haven’t seen much here and probably won’t for a little while. May is festival month here in Brighton, with the Brighton Festival and Fringe both descending, and this year unlike previous we’ve decided to really go for it and see a bunch of stuff. So far we’ve seen a couple of plays, with more to come, and a tea dance which I’ve foolishly agreed to as well.
Most of this is purely for entertainment but I have a personal interest too, as I’ve written a couple of plays and want to see a lot more theatre just for reference on staging, direction and so on. It’s illuminating.
When I’m not out being cultured I’m trying to hit the gym and in-between, GTA IV tends to suck me in, so time at the keyboard to do this is sort of limited.
Work-wise, we’ve been preparing for this weekend’s Comic Expo (at which I might even try to ‘live blog’ a bit, when I’m not being bombarded by people!), as well as getting a few other things moving or off the ground.
Had a real start-stop day yesterday - our Christmas party idea was presented and welcomed… only for us to find that the venue we had in mind is now a year behind schedule in its refurbishment. So that sorta throws that idea out of the window. Back to the drawing board.
As well as that I’ve been invited to attend an academic / industry ‘conference’ up at Staffordshire University in early June, which should be fun. I think I’ll be doing a variation on my ‘how to break into games’ presentation for it.
The calendar’s filling up rapidly, which is good but unusual for me. So please feel free to direct suggestions my way so that when I do get time to blog I do so on topics you want to hear about.
