Given that I’ve been working my fat ass off to get this game out the door, I’ve had little opportunity to get a haircut. As such, my hair essentially looks like the do that Mr. Corey Feldman sports in the above picture. Actually, I wished it looked as good as that.
If you click here, you’ll find another picture Corey in more recent times. If you know how Corey was able to get that to happen, you let me know.
I’m sure a lot of you have heard of local author Douglas Coupland and his book J-Pod. It is loosely based on a large video game development company located in the Lower Mainland. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that company is Electronic Arts.
Did you know that CBC is turning it into a TV series? Apparently, they have written the first ten episodes already. Thanks to something that happened in the studio last week, I now know what part of the eleventh episode will be about.
Last week, there was an “incident” on our floor. The whole thing was actually funny from the get-go. It involved an opening of some cherished item that had been on the desk of a software engineer for apparently seven years. There were many e-mails sent out about it and someone even wrote a poem.
One of the managers was at a dinner later where she told some people about what happened. It turns out one of the diners was a CBC producer. She thought it was a really funny thing and so they’ll try to write it into one of the episodes!
Look for it in early 2008!
It sure was a mistake at 11pm to download a Xbox 360 demo of a game called Vampire Rain. Now I have no time to write a detailed post.
http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=20583
Not to be outdone, the folks at Neversoft have released a trailer for Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground. EA’s corporate line on TH is that they’re really not the competition because our games are fundamentally different. This is actually sorta true. That said, the public loves to compare the two games in every gaming forum out there.
I get to sleep in tomorrow. I’ve been working a lot lately and it’s been over two weeks since I’ve had a day off. I told my manager today I wasn’t coming in until 1pm tomorrow. He was totally cool with it. I can finally watch Regis and Kelly Lee right to the end for once!
http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=20369
Daddy’s too tired to post anything substantial tonight. Instead, let’s watch one of the latest trailers from skate. I’m so busy, I haven’t even been able to skate that massive ramp.
While leaving the Starbucks at the Pan Pacific at around 6pm today, I saw B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell. He was leaving the hotel and quickly got into a van. My companion, a fellow co-worker who shall go unnamed, called him “Brian”.
There are probably over a dozen of my co-workers still at the studio tonight. I can say that we’re trying to meet a very important deadline. The surprising thing is that I got to go home at the early time of 10pm.
So while I arrived at home slightly before 10:30pm, people were continuing to make shiny things appear on screen. I could have just relaxed, folded my laundry, and fed my pet condor but I couldn’t resist logging into to my work e-mail. I checked it before 11pm and I just checked it again. There a fair number of messages to be read for that time of night.
I just need to know how things are going. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I also checked the Perforce server for the submitted changelists. All work on our game is submitted via a server that can track changes for us. You can view these changes in a timeline so you can see who checked in what at what time. People usually don’t read these things but I do since I can’t help but be nosy about what to expect when I get back to the studio in the morning.
Ok, I’m going to check my work e-mail again.
Last week I was at work in the evening, one of many evenings that I’ve been at work. Having not had some time off recently, I almost fell back into some old habits. When I’m doing lots of OT, I tend buy things on a whim, usually off the Internet. Money tends to accumulate in bank accounts when you’re working lots. This behaviour started when I was a games tester. Back then, I didn’t make a lot of money, so the spree buys were limited to small things.
I make a tiny bit more money now as a software engineer, which probably explains why I was about a mouse click away from buying a 37″ Sharp Aquos LCD HDTV sight unseen. I thought that buying that TV certainly would make the evening much more enjoyable. Then reality decided to show up. Even if I did buy that TV, I wouldn’t really have time to use it. I had no idea how the display looked. I hadn’t read any reviews on this model. I didn’t even know what inputs it had.
Cooler and more budget-conscious heads prevailed, so I backed off on the purchase. Instead, my George Foreman Grill is being airmailed to me as you read this.
The marketing and product management people at EA quietly released the cover art for our game to various web sites a few weeks back. They decided on this cover many months ago and I was quite happy with it when I first saw it.
The prevailing opinion is that it doesn’t look like a typical cover for an EA game. People should take that as a compliment because EA is definitely trying something new with skate. Look for this cover art on store shelves… soon?