Been a YEAAAAR!!
Yup, it's been just over a year since I've updated this beast. So, lets briefly sum up what's happened to me in the last year.
Got back from Kingston with very little money after squeezing into my second year of college. Worked pretty hard on Serpent, which was a game engine that Dan and I were developing over the summer. Ran out of money, and had no choice but to take a job as a telemarketer at Ipsos-Reid for a little under 2 months. Finally got a better job and worked at Best Buy in the home theater department for November, December and a bit of January. During the fall, Serpent hit a brick wall as the code base was starting to bloat and Dan didn't want to refactor it. I had started on the scripting module for it, and decided to fork that off into it's own project, which became CaLua. I worked on CaLua for about 3 or 4 months until about February.
By February I had completely fucked myself out of school. Work on CaLua and my part time job left very little time or energy for school; this, added to the fact that I didn't really care much for school to begin with, led to me getting spectacularly failing grades, and going back part time for the second semester. Having finished work, saved up enough cash to not need to work for the second semester, and only doing a fraction of the courses, I told myself that if I fucked this semester up, I would simply not return to college. Looking back, I could almost hear myself say "do you promise?!?".
Anyways, about two months in and Dan finally gets off his ass and decides to start working on something again. He says, he's going to build an isometric tile editor for use on a 2.5D RPG game for cell phones. Me him and Chris all start talking about it and getting more and more ideas and doing more and more research into the field and getting really excited by it. Chris had no job, Dan had no job, I had lots of money and little school. Needless to say, we were excited to start working on this.
One day, after simply talking about it for too long, we just decided to setup the office in the basement. We moved all the computers downstairs, setup tables, built a new computer from scratch, got chairs, put a dorky poster on the wall, and called ourselves Orbis Studios. We just started working day and night, both of which had also lost their meaning. Sleep schedules went way out of wack, I found myself sleeping on the office couch more than my own bed, and we would only know what time of the day it was from looking out the window or when Chan and I would go for smokes.
We worked through the cold winter and into the spring, during which my grades went to total shit. Chan and I had signed up to go tree planting up north that spring, and it was up to Dan to keep working on the game and e-mailing us his progress while we were away.
Well, Chan and I went tree planting, which was an adventure of it's own (perhaps one day I'll write out my planting journal, which I wrote in every day, on here), came back to find that Dan had basically played Ninja Gaiden the entire time we were gone, and hadn't done a god damn thing the entire time, save for maybe a week after we left.
So we get back, bum around for a bit, try to get Dan to hop back on the game, but basically not much is being done.
One day Dan gets an e-mail from a lady at EA Canada and wants to do a phone interview with him. They do the interview and she sends him a technical test. Dan simply doesn't do the technical test, which results in a big fight between him and I, but is quickly patched up when EA moves Dan along in the interview process without having done the test. Dan had several more interviews, and one day after a long night of gaming at a LAN party, he called an HR person and got the dream job of his life. He would be flying out to Vancouver in 2 weeks to work on games for the biggest game company in the world.
We made our time with Dan, worked on one last goofy project together as Orbis Studios, and that was it. Chan and I saw him to the airport and he was gone for good. Me Chan and Dan had been best friends for as long as I can remember, and it was weird driving home knowing that I couldn't just pop over to his house to hang out, and that from here on in it was JUST me and Chan.
So knowing that I didn't want to go back to school, I decided to put my resume in to EA and try my luck as well. We were going out to visit Dan in a few weeks, and I was determined to have at least one interview setup for when I was out there.
EA called, I had the phone interview, setup an in person interview for when I was out there (which was a series of interviews which took about 6 hours of the day and was quite exhausting but exciting), and had a great awesome time in Vancouver. Headed back to Ottawa and was extremely excited by how it went. I basically bummed around, spent my money, chilled in Kingston for a week during their frosh week, and started to get really nervous. They hadn't called me back at all, and when I called them up, they didn't sound like they had any openings. By this point, I was running a bit low on money to go back to school, and it was getting to the point where I couldn't just be waiting for EA to call me back anymore.. I didn't know what to do....
I fretted for a while. The bank was calling my house, asking about my student line of credit when I wasn't enrolled in school, and I didn't want to find a shitty job and work it, and I basically couldn't go back to school without MUCH begging and humiliation (someone had told everyone in my class that I had already gotten the job, but this was very much not the case)...
Anyways, they finally called back and I got the job, and now I head off to Vancouver in a week and a half. I'm fucking nervous as shit, and I hate leaving all my friends and my whole world behind. I'm basically starting a new life, and I've never been so scared and excited before in my life... I was feeling this way on a much smaller scale before tree planting, but, even with that I knew I'd be back in 2 months... This is me leaving Ottawa basically forever...
I'm sure I'll make a post about how life is now in the next few days. Just bringing my journal up to date.
Got back from Kingston with very little money after squeezing into my second year of college. Worked pretty hard on Serpent, which was a game engine that Dan and I were developing over the summer. Ran out of money, and had no choice but to take a job as a telemarketer at Ipsos-Reid for a little under 2 months. Finally got a better job and worked at Best Buy in the home theater department for November, December and a bit of January. During the fall, Serpent hit a brick wall as the code base was starting to bloat and Dan didn't want to refactor it. I had started on the scripting module for it, and decided to fork that off into it's own project, which became CaLua. I worked on CaLua for about 3 or 4 months until about February.
By February I had completely fucked myself out of school. Work on CaLua and my part time job left very little time or energy for school; this, added to the fact that I didn't really care much for school to begin with, led to me getting spectacularly failing grades, and going back part time for the second semester. Having finished work, saved up enough cash to not need to work for the second semester, and only doing a fraction of the courses, I told myself that if I fucked this semester up, I would simply not return to college. Looking back, I could almost hear myself say "do you promise?!?".
Anyways, about two months in and Dan finally gets off his ass and decides to start working on something again. He says, he's going to build an isometric tile editor for use on a 2.5D RPG game for cell phones. Me him and Chris all start talking about it and getting more and more ideas and doing more and more research into the field and getting really excited by it. Chris had no job, Dan had no job, I had lots of money and little school. Needless to say, we were excited to start working on this.
One day, after simply talking about it for too long, we just decided to setup the office in the basement. We moved all the computers downstairs, setup tables, built a new computer from scratch, got chairs, put a dorky poster on the wall, and called ourselves Orbis Studios. We just started working day and night, both of which had also lost their meaning. Sleep schedules went way out of wack, I found myself sleeping on the office couch more than my own bed, and we would only know what time of the day it was from looking out the window or when Chan and I would go for smokes.
We worked through the cold winter and into the spring, during which my grades went to total shit. Chan and I had signed up to go tree planting up north that spring, and it was up to Dan to keep working on the game and e-mailing us his progress while we were away.
Well, Chan and I went tree planting, which was an adventure of it's own (perhaps one day I'll write out my planting journal, which I wrote in every day, on here), came back to find that Dan had basically played Ninja Gaiden the entire time we were gone, and hadn't done a god damn thing the entire time, save for maybe a week after we left.
So we get back, bum around for a bit, try to get Dan to hop back on the game, but basically not much is being done.
One day Dan gets an e-mail from a lady at EA Canada and wants to do a phone interview with him. They do the interview and she sends him a technical test. Dan simply doesn't do the technical test, which results in a big fight between him and I, but is quickly patched up when EA moves Dan along in the interview process without having done the test. Dan had several more interviews, and one day after a long night of gaming at a LAN party, he called an HR person and got the dream job of his life. He would be flying out to Vancouver in 2 weeks to work on games for the biggest game company in the world.
We made our time with Dan, worked on one last goofy project together as Orbis Studios, and that was it. Chan and I saw him to the airport and he was gone for good. Me Chan and Dan had been best friends for as long as I can remember, and it was weird driving home knowing that I couldn't just pop over to his house to hang out, and that from here on in it was JUST me and Chan.
So knowing that I didn't want to go back to school, I decided to put my resume in to EA and try my luck as well. We were going out to visit Dan in a few weeks, and I was determined to have at least one interview setup for when I was out there.
EA called, I had the phone interview, setup an in person interview for when I was out there (which was a series of interviews which took about 6 hours of the day and was quite exhausting but exciting), and had a great awesome time in Vancouver. Headed back to Ottawa and was extremely excited by how it went. I basically bummed around, spent my money, chilled in Kingston for a week during their frosh week, and started to get really nervous. They hadn't called me back at all, and when I called them up, they didn't sound like they had any openings. By this point, I was running a bit low on money to go back to school, and it was getting to the point where I couldn't just be waiting for EA to call me back anymore.. I didn't know what to do....
I fretted for a while. The bank was calling my house, asking about my student line of credit when I wasn't enrolled in school, and I didn't want to find a shitty job and work it, and I basically couldn't go back to school without MUCH begging and humiliation (someone had told everyone in my class that I had already gotten the job, but this was very much not the case)...
Anyways, they finally called back and I got the job, and now I head off to Vancouver in a week and a half. I'm fucking nervous as shit, and I hate leaving all my friends and my whole world behind. I'm basically starting a new life, and I've never been so scared and excited before in my life... I was feeling this way on a much smaller scale before tree planting, but, even with that I knew I'd be back in 2 months... This is me leaving Ottawa basically forever...
I'm sure I'll make a post about how life is now in the next few days. Just bringing my journal up to date.