Team Shenanigans

Here is my final project team's brand new website, where you can learn a little bit about the people I've been working with the past 5 months and check out our game Gingerdead, a survival/defense game with a Hansel and Gretel theme.

www.Teamshenanigans.net

Achievement Unlocked: Successfully Defend Thesis

Today was a very big day in my academic career down here at Full Sail; after months and months of writing and research, I was able to successfully present and defend my thesis, Application of SRK Framework to Game Mechanics.

My next step is to figure out how to get it published and out into the world. Shawn Stafford, one of my committee members, recommended Gamasutra, so I've been taking a look over there to see what kind of requirements they have for publishing. Appears to be mostly word limit and what not, so I think I'll confer with my committee members and send an email to Gamasutra's publisher, see if my thesis would be of any interest. For now, though, I'll just have it available upon request for any interested parties.

Setbacks

Currently recovering from a virus that required me to format all of my hard drive partitions, and ended up with me losing a great deal of files and information. It's going to be a while before I get things back up and running.

Let's restart a bit, shall we?

Okay. Hold on.

A lot has happened since I previously posted in this blog little under a year ago. Suffice to say, a lot has happened.

The quick things- Worked an absolutely horrible job at a call center dealing with customer service for a cell phone company based in Mississippi, after all, had to pay the bills somehow.

However! During this period of which I will block out, I applied to and was accepted to grad school at Full Sail University in their relatively new Game Design Master's of Science Program.

I've also been attending said program for the past two months as well. So! In light of trying to be professional and academic, I'm going to try and cease neglecting this website, post some information about life at Full Sail and my experiences going through this Master's Program. Also going to try to talk more about games and what not, since that is my career goal now. I'm most certainly learning a great deal, far more then I ever did in New Media (for which I'm quite happy.)

Other news to report - 'Stray Dog' remains in pre-production (probably forever stuck at this point), and given the little free time I have, I'll probably have to scrap any plans for a machinima project and focus on just completing the screenplay. Once it's done I might consider a creative commons for it, and see if maybe I can get some feedback from...somewhere.

An Update

Everything's still in pre-production, albeit on and off. Still working on the script, and I'm starting to think I'll try an episode format rather then trying to get a whole movie together in one go. Plus it'll give me an idea of whether or not this project has any merit when it's all said and done.

Other news, I'm applying for graduate school and going to attempt to write a novel in November. Go me!

Not Exactly Dead

So the re-write of the "Stray Dog" script is progressing slower then I had hoped, but I'm pushing myself to be done before mid-August. I've put the whole 'editorial' style project on indefinite hold until I have access to a much faster connection then I do now. I'm pretty sure that Steam along with every Valve game I own is incredibly out of date, so I have a strong feeling that's going to put any kind of real machinima production on hold for the most part.

In other news, I recently joined a mod team for Sins of a Solar Empire. There's a lot of helpful mod stuff out, so I figured I'd look into it and found a mod called "Gothic Sins" that's translating Battlefleet Gothic (a Warhammer 40K variant game) into SoaSE.

The Curse of Dial-Up

Since graduating and moving back home, I've been limited to the quite crappy internet connection my parents currently have, so it's put quite the crimp in a lot of my post-capstone project ideas.

I was hoping to get my concept of addressing the machinima community with an editorial series or some kind of reviewing series (something with a bit of a joke title like "Your Machinima is Bad and You Should Feel Bad") but since it takes me four or so hours to even download the most recent episodes of the new Red vs Blue series with my paltry 26.4 kps connection, I'm pretty much unable to watch a lot of the machinima videos out there, let alone do some research on the matter. Once I get a faster connection I'll be able to look into it more, but for now, looks like it'll be on hold. Again. Which pretty much sucks.

On the other hand, I'm planning to be done with the re-written script of "Stray Dog" by the end of the month at the latest. Once it's done, I'm going to see if I can get some input on it by anyone in the machinima community (probably from LitFuseFilms or TheLeetWorld.) and from there try and proceed with pre-production. I have a friend who's willing to put together some concept art and from there I'll see if I can get some advice on how to put some of those creations together. I'll probably be putting together a list of what I need to do once the script is done.