Hey person who stumbled onto my website. No way you’re a recurring visitor checking to see if I’ve posted anything recently, as I haven’t in a couple years. But if you are, today’s your lucky day. I’m going to catch you up on what I’ve been up to. I’m sure you’ve been dying to know if you’ve been frantically checking this ghost town of a site. To catch you up, I will post a post on this website. Yes this website that I pay hundreds of dollars for, yet I barely utilize. This website where the visitors coming in have dwindled to such a small trickle, no doubt degenerated from the god awful SEO I have right now. And I have no plans to improve it. I don’t plan on investing lots of time into this site like I used to. I ain’t got time for that crap. Things have changed of course.

I wanted to come on here to write a list of some of my favorite games of 2021, but I can’t really do that without a proper catch up can I? Let’s check, two and a half years ago was the last time I posted here. I was still working for Farsight Studios, which obviously wasn’t ideal. I tried for some time to get a job out of there, so I could make more than the abysmal pay I was getting there. Ya know, so I could support my soon to be daughter financially. My then girlfriend and I were doing just fine at the time, but we weren’t making any savings. We got to go on dates and enjoy ourselves and all that fun stuff, so it’s not like we were poor. But I honestly did not save much during my two and a half years at Farsight. So adding a child to support on that wage would’ve been so tough.

Luckily, out of nowhere I get a hail mary in the shape of an acorn. I caught that nut. And I devoured it. Yes, I know how that sounds. Yes, I’ll publish these sentences. Anyways, that nut I caught was from Blind Squirrel Games (BSG for people that ain’t got time to type out that name). I had an incredible opportunity to work on Drifters: Loot the Galaxy, a third person multiplayer hero shooter. I thought at the time that I had enough UE4 experience and networking knowledge to be able to handle something like that. And I absolutely was able to handle it, and I’m proud of what I accomplished. But I look back and see the huge lack of knowledge I had at the time. After over a year of working on that, I decided I wanted to polish up the ol’ resume. Give that a proper spit shine. *Hocks loogie* I polished the shit out of that resume. A lot of gameplay experience. Check. Networking experience? Check. A weird system that UE4 developed for use in its multiplayer games like Fortnite and Paragon that doesn’t have great documentation from Epic Games, but it’s super powerful? Double check.

I packaged that beautiful resume with a custom made cover letter—multiple copies as well, one for brail, one in cursive, etc.—into an artisanal envelope, with frailly, delicate lines bouncing around the edges. I melted some wax, and I dipped my sealer into the red wax and dabbed it onto the envelope. The initals TD emblazoned itself onto the wax, where it then dried. I licked the stamps—two forever stamps for a tall and wide envelope of this stature—and stuck them onto the envelope. I then wrote the address of Epic Games on it. And then I did the exact same thing with another, yet I wrote the address of Zynga on it. I got my horses out the stable, had to step over the corpses of one that had just passed the month before, and attached them to my buggy. I was off to the mailboy. I got there, and I said, “Only but your best workers today. This is the utmost importance to me”. He fetched his two biggest and best ravens out of their homes, attached my envelopes to them, and sent them off into the night. I tossed him a nickel for his services. From then, I waited. Waited with bated breath.

I received back from the first raven within days. It came back with a programmer test from Epic Games. I slammed through that, and sent it back. No dice, they weren’t interested. I wasn’t gonna be able to suckle on the teat of Mama Epic Games, and enjoy the blue embers that gushed out. Days went by, and there was no word from the second raven. Mailboy seemed distraught. This was actually his fastest raven, so he knew something was up. Someone, or something, must’ve interfered with it. He pulled out his cross hidden from underneath his white wifebeater and mythril chainmail and said a prayer in remembrance of it. He knew it wasn’t coming back. He asked me to get another envelope and resume, and he’d send it out again just in case the raven hadn’t made it there. I told him it was God’s will that it didn’t arrive, and I wouldn’t worry about it anymore.

Instead, I got to start on a very exciting, new project that BSG had started on. I got onboarded onto it, and things were looking pretty dang good. I was slowly getting used to working on the new project. After over a month of this new routine, I was in bed one morning, and I heard loud knocking coming from the door to my house. I scampered out of bedroom and rushed to the door in my underwear as the strength and pace of the knocking urged me to get to that door as fast as possible.

I swung open the door, and I seen an envelope attached to a ravens foot. But not any raven. A baby raven. I asked, “Is that who I think it is?” He said, “Yep, it’s the baby of the raven that never returned”. In his eyes, I seen a glimmer of sadness, but on his face he mustered a smile. He was saddened that the mom hadn’t made it, but he was just happy that he had something to remember her by. I turned my eyes back to the envelope in astonishment. Her dying wish was that this request was completed, and she made it so her newborn had finished it for her. I plied the envelope off of the raven, I opened it. It was a response from Zynga. They were interested in interviewing me for the position. .

I received a couple calls from Zynga from the recruiter and from the lead recruiter. It all went really well. I went onto a Zoom call with the technical director of the team. That went well. And then after that I went on to the final part of the interview: taking turns interviewing with several people of the team. Pre-COVID I probably would’ve flown out, grabbed some lunch, and checked out the building. But during COVID, that wasn’t going to happen unfortunately. Regardless, it was a super easy interview. It ranged from just a super friendly, easy going chat to some more technical questions digging into a bunch of UE4 stuff.  My time at BSG had well prepared me for something like this.

Anyways, I got the offer. No biggie. Another huge step up, but I wasn’t sure I should leave BSG. I really liked it there, and I wasn’t really ready to leave the company, especially with just starting a new project. But the opportunity was just too damn good. I would’ve been a fool to have passed it up.

And so here I am, four months later after being hiredm, working on the gameplay team of Star Wars: Hunters. Learning a crap ton. Moving from CA to WI. Yadda yadda yadda. I won’t bore you too much with some of those personal details I already spent most of the recommended 1500 word count cap going into some of the more important things (e.g. honoring the heroic raven that died doing what it loved).

I think this was a pretty good first post back, and now I can get to some of the fun stuff after. Who knows, writing is kind of fun, and I haven’t done it for a long time. Maybe I will go into some of the details from Farsight and BSG. But I’ll save that for another time.