Games and Things
In 2010 I mostly played games with a long horizon of learning, and something resembling a competitive scene.
This was a big deal for me. I found this quite emotionally hard. One attraction with Euros is that it isn't that hard to become quite good at them. Playing a game that is harder to learn, and which punish weakness at the game harshly was hard on my ego, and on whatever image I had of myself as a "player of games".
The three main games I played were Bridge, Starcraft 2 and League of Legends. The last two, I doubt I will ever get that good at, but I enjoy, and the matchmaking and player populations are sufficient that it is easy to play close enjoyable games. I have greater hopes for Bridge, and Babs is also playing (she started the year before me), and the game has impressed me much more than I thought it would. It is deep, interesting, has a very organised large competitive play scene in New Zealand.
I felt 2010 was a much worse year for game design for me. I was good for ideas, and some initial stages of games, but very poor at getting much further than that. Basically the bit that requires effort. This year I want to focus more. The design projects for focus on are Endeavor expansion stuff. A factional dice based board/wargame, and a web game (that web dev stuff, it turns out that is quite hard). I still enjoy designing games wit Jarrat much more than doing stuff alone, but orgnaising both of us to be available for projects at the same time seems more difficult than it used to be.
Other stuff of note, in no particular order:
- I went eeling with my dad and my boys last weekend, which was awesome.
- We are currently home schooling the boys, which seems to work quite well for them ,and works well for Babs being stay at home parent/teacher.
- I am on a game design holiday from work at the moemnt, which is great (even if it is also a go to games at Ian's, see Amanda Palmer live, catch up on chores holiday as well.
- The rest of my family is currently down south, well I am back in Wellington, as is common, the first couple of days I go, ahh, peace, solitude, I have missed you so. After that, it is, damn I miss my family.
- My job is interesting and engaging, but hard work, and has been lacking in slack for over a year now. I still work at Each Technology, but have been onsite at Contact Energy for over a year now. I have been to power plants (really interesting), worked with hedge trading systems (not as interesting as I was expecting it to be), and a few other cool things.
- In 2010 I met several new friends (normally I consider one new good friend a year an excellent success), went to Kiwifoo (really cool, but I can't work out why it is), Teched (Odd, hard to get past the fact that you alwasy feel you are being sold to, despite itneresting elements, the Sidhe internal conference, which got to talk at, and think I acquited myself quite well.
- I have bold intentions to blog more than once a year, but you shouldn't count on that.