riffelian ramblings

Conquering the ToDo List Monster

Well, the past month has been pretty busy, but also pretty nice. I’ve gotten lots done, and after I do my taxes tonight (ugh), I will only have like one or two items left on my ages-old todo list. This will feel very nice.

Got some good work and fun done in the past month, both personal and “work” related. Every day the team gets closer to completing our current game project, which is good because every day we get more and more ideas for new projects, which is great. Everything else is pretty good, other than the repetitiveness of the day job. With so many ideas and so little time to implement them, I always yearn for the day where I can just code and do creative things full time …perhaps one day (fingers crossed).

Anyways, look for our game coming out in the next couple months. It’s called Monkey Escape, and it’s under production by myself, Joseph Cooper, and Mike Gentilini, under the MassiveWar Studios banner. We’re all pretty excited about this project, and plan to release it on PC/Web, iPhone and Android devices.

Weekend of Fun and Productivity

I went to Joseph’s house and we did some code, gaming, hanging out, and even had ourselves a Brewskey Brainstorming™ session. Got a lot of work done actually, and came up with some pretty sweet ideas for some small scope phone games. Anyone who knows us, knows that our biggest weakness in brainstorming is the small scope, more casual games. We’re pretty good at creative thinking and making ideas, but it’s always at a much grander scope than what’s typically found (or even appealing to) the casual gamer’s market. Long story short, the Brewskey Brainstorming was a resounding success. Ideas were flowing, new concepts were birthed, and expectations were exceeded.

We also made some decent progress on our current game, which we hope to complete within the next 1-2 months here. We even did some initial tests which gave use some VERY good feedback on how to tweak some of the physics to make it easier and more fun to play. All in all, everything is heading in a very good direction with that (and the polish of the game is starting to look pretty nice as well). Look for that to come out relatively soon!

One of the greatest parts of the weekend is that is wasn’t at a grueling pace. We got some hanging out and gaming time in there. This is an awesome thing, as I’m quite a proponent of maintaining a healthy work/life balance (even though I fail in this regard perhaps more than most). We did some Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on the PC, and I even briefly jumped into my single player game of Medieval: Total War. Both very excellent games.

So now I am back at work. We’re shorthanded, and viruses everywhere. Oh well, such is the grind in corporate IT. Though it’d be nice if people just stopped clicking on things so much.

…wow, that post was kinda boring, even to me. Oh well, I guess I lead a pretty dull life, haha.

Here is some funny to mix it up: http://fatpita.net/?i=6267

Love it!

Information Overload in the Information Age

The web has come a long way since it’s static paged, glitter graphic, animated gif rollover origins. The utility of the web has blossomed into something truly monumental. Indeed, so much of our daily lives touches the internet that when someone’s connection goes down, it profoundly impacts their day-to-day routine. Banking, email, social, informative, entertainment and everything in-between is often now based in online services. This is both a cause and effect of perhaps the bigger fact that so many people are online nowadays.

The online population has gotten to the point that you can find nearly anything online. Virtually anything you’d need to know is just a few searches away. The amount of content on the web is mind boggling. With this wealth of content comes a wealth of information. How does one tap into this information without experiencing massive information overload? (and this is assuming one can sift through the countless heaps of useless drivel which dilutes said information. See: 90% of Twitter posts)

I’ve recently decided to start using a few sites to help me with my information overload. Bookmarks are simply inadequite these days. I will now be using a cocktail of online services to keep my random thoughts, online finds, real-life experiences (pics, video, etc.) and everything else as organized as possible.

My current plan of action is to use this blog, Twitter, Posterous, and whatever other useful tool I can find on the way, in order to keep my thoughts and experiences as organized as possible. Random thoughts of any length would go here. Tiny (almost inconsequential) random thoughts and experiences would go on Twitter. And the less coherent, but still notable thoughts and notes shall go on Posterous (gonna treat it like bookmarks on steroids for online finds and random thoughts). In this way, I hope to avoid information overload as much as possible, while still enjoying the wealth of information to be had. Those who know me know that I often keep browser tabs open in the hundreds, that’s just how I roll. Now maybe I can offload some of these finds into something more organized and suitable than just bookmarks, and reduce my chronically high tab count.

Hello World.

So here is blog post #1. Dead simple. Non interesting.

Just testing things out, to see how it all looks. Maybe interesting things will one day be posted here. I will do my best to spare anyone from endless pictures of my cat (even though he IS super cute).