Here's a list of extracurricular projects that coincided with my professional experience in the videogame industry.
This is a little Q&A with RazorForce on their blog, TheGameNarrative.
I wrote at least one haiku every day since August, 2022 to December 2023. I published the collection of 2,049 poems through Kindle Direct Publishing. Get a copy of the Kindle, Paperback, and Hardcover versions of the book at this LINK: HAIKU 2049!
Just a collection of tips and observations for Farm Merge Valley. Play the game on Facebook!
I pitched in Game Design ideas and documents for the Zynga Blockchain group early in 2022, and consumed a bunch of information on Cryptocurrencies and NFTs. An innovative "Play to Mint" design offering in the Duskbreakers project. I Played their 3rd-person sci-fi shooter game and won an opportunity to Mint Duskbreaker #3584 for some Etherium. I poked around the Duskbreakers Discord server and a bunch of owners were writing up backstories for their 'Breakers.
I wrote up this little backstory for the the Sisters based on the Greek myth of the Kindly Ones / Furies.
Thanks to PK_Supra and the Team Rush Discord server for inviting me to answer questions about RUSH!
Thanks to Ryan Neal of Ketchup & Mustard for this interview on Primal Rage fighting mechanics! As of 4/20/2022 the video has over 300k views, and I try to read and Like each comment!
We acquired a playground structure from our kid's school and it made a cosy, sturdy chicken coop for our ~30 birds. We 'chopped' it so that it sat lower to the ground, and attached it to boards and steel pipe around the base and 8' x 16' run. Most of the wood came from the cull carts at our local home improvement stores at 70% off.
To complete the fence around the perimeter of our 'homestead', this project used 2 3/8" reclaimed steel drill stem pipe and sucker rods from oil rigs, 4" hogwire panels (orange segments), a rolling gate across the driveway (red segment), and a swing gate on the lower lot (magenta segment), and horizontal wood picketing (cyan segments) Each of the ~72 steel posts (yellow dots) were pounded 2'-3' into the ground. Cross beams were welded at 6' high and the hogwire panels attached. The whole project took over a year to complete with two subcontractors helping me with the pounding and welding.
Jacob Melvin asked me a bunch of questions about lesser-known and unreleased games that were developed during my time with Atari from 1993-2002.
Check out his podcast on SoundCloud!
Here's my transcript of the interview questions:
What does "Home" mean to you?
Home is a safe place where we learn about the importance of family and traditions. In practicing these traditions, and passing them down to future generations, we preserve the meaning of Home.
Download the game for Windows, Mac, or Linux from the Global Game Jam site!
Our team was recognized by the HOFT Institute for Best Audio!
Exclusive first-person hamster electroshock experiment simulator! Download it for Windows/Mac from the Global Game Jam site!
I contributed to Level Design with MS Excel, and setting up the game scenes in Unity
Our team won the "Pizza Time" award from the hosting HOFT Institute!
Through Fire Red, Emerald, Diamond, and finally, Pokémon Black, I managed to capture, hatch, evolve, transfer, and trade a bunch of Pokémon.
I really went deep into competitive breeding, IVs and EV training, building up a team of my faves - Darmanitan, Galvantula, Gengar, Gyarados, Torterra, and Tyranitar - each with 5/6 perfect IVs.
In Pokémon Diamond, with the addition of the Poké Radar, I became obsessed with Shiny hunting and acquired over 50 Shinies! The extremely tedious, esoteric, and delicate "shiny chain" hunting method increased the probability of encountering a Shiny from 1/8192 to 1/200. Once you had a chain of 40 going, it was an exquisite grind through time, patience, and resources, to be rewarded with that glowing patch of grass!
As part of the Educational Reimbursement program through Electronic Arts, I took classes part-time at California Lutheran University - nights and weekends - to finish out this degree program. I maintained a 4.0 average over the 13 classes, mostly in computer science and business management.
There were a couple opportunities for work/school crossover like the Boom Blox Employee Survey, and my Capstone Project, the Boom Blox: Bash Party - Level Database Interface.
WHERE DREAMS BECOME LATE NIGHT TV SHOWS
This blog is a kind of dream journal, edited for television.
Pokémon Pinball for Gameboy Advance is the finest console pinball game I've played (the title for best mobile pinball game goes to Zen Pinball)
November 28, 2008, lost a ball and working backwards to get the score: current score is 149,766,848,779. 808 Pokemon caught. Score before the bonus was 135,456,398,779. Bonus subtotal was 144,550,000. Multiplier was 99. Bonus total is 14,310,450,000. I have a video of the bonus but I pressed the 'A' button before seeing the breakdown of the bonus so I was only able to see 99 Pokemon caught on the ball.
Read more about the journey in this blog post: Gotta catch 'em all - one flight at a time
This blog was created as a receptacle for all of my fondest video game memories.
Some are memories of video games I've played, like Raiders Of The Lost Ark for the Atari 2600 or Impossible Mission for the Commodore 64.
Other memories are from professional experiences, but those that would never make it into a review page, like walking Steven Spielberg through Operation Neptune on Medal Of Honor: Airborne, or the birth of the ficticious business, "Seventies Television" in Rush 2049.
Puzzle Quest for the Nintendo DS is a Match-3 RPG, and one of the first successful examples of the genre mashup.
The Warrior's Deathbringer spell was a welcome surprise at level 30 but I realized quickly that this spell was immensely overpowered.
This was a Medal Of Honor-inspired mission beat document, created after some of our Level Designers were moved to a lower floor in the building.
Getting into Maya modeling and going nuts using boolean operations resulted in this city block compound level.
I signed up for a 3DSMAX modeling and animation workshop from Learning Tree University in order to level-up my skills in the software package.
The Seventies Television and STV logo idea combined what I thought were three cool elements:
The CBS Special ident intro music from the 1980's that you'd see before The Charlie Brown Christmas Special and Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory every Christmas and Thanksgiving.
Three spinning colored lights - one red, one green, one blue, that animated and combined into a white light.
Flying text 'punch-out' animation and fade out that I drew out of the McDonald's "I'm lovin' it" campaign at the time.
As a commercial project for Chiquita Bananas, I modeled all of the objects and scene in the Still Life Reflect video from real objects I had in the kitchen.
I used the cool 'spiraling violin' intro from Patsy Cline's "Sweet Dreams" to match the spinning lazy susan and spiraling camera.
Finally, I mapped the amplitude of Ms. Cline's singing onto a translate animation controller in MAX to give the text a lyrical wiggle.
Before StepMania there was Dance With Intensity, a free Dance Dance Revolution simulator for Windows.
I submitted a song and stepchart for Machinae Supremacy's The Great Giana Sisters (after getting permission from the band, of course) to an online tournament, winning the popular vote and 3rd place from the official judges.
Robotron: 2084 is my favorite game of all time!
On a co-worker's machine at Atari Games, I set up an 8mm video camera to capture footage of gameplay, then submitted a performance with a score of 624,000.
This score is currently recognized and ranked #7 on Twin Galaxies official leaderboard.
Of course, I wrote a blog post about the game: Eugene smiles upon you, and gave a presentation of the game and my progress in my public speaking class at Gavilan College (using OVERHEAD PROJECTOR transparencies!)
I fell in love with Gitaroo Man after playing it at E3.
Not only is COIL's original soundtrack awesome, but the rhythm game mechanics are innovative in that they incorporate not only the timing-based button presses, but the analog thumbstick directionality and natural vibrato and bending of guitar notes.
Being a guitar-playing fan, I naturally had to learn the Legendary Theme, and wrote out a tablature with chords in this blog post: Mojo Mojo Mojo King Bee!