Countdown

Weather: Clear and bright - nearly had moonshadows
Encounters: Scripted
Slugs: Too close to home
Consoles:  Too far!

Our game shipped today. The studio is a bit topsy-turvy, but pretty high on the whole situation. Unfortunately, that means the end of my contract - and I didn't get extended. ): I've got three weeks, which will be spent doing my damnedest to find a means to stay out here. Job applications, personal development, and networking like a fiend.

Easily half the time I see a slug on my ride home, it's at the top of the small hill behind my house, and it's freakin' 4" long. Same place every time, same huge slug. Eugh.

I'm going to be applying for at least one (and as many as four) positions at my current company, which is a strange thing to do. I'm still writing a cover letter - as a contractor, I don't get the perk of an internal application process - but it seems silly to "introduce myself" to the company that's been contracting my services for the past four months. On the other hand, my studio is huge and the Design team certainly doesn't know me, so I am introducing myself to them for the first time. The other bit of weirdness is whether or not to include things I know that are covered under my NDA. Obviously I want to talk about what's happening next, but as an "external" email, is that still keeping to my NDA? So weird.

I've seen a lot of slug trails on the front walk outside the house, but never caught a slug "in the act" -- UNTIL TONIGHT! Smarmy little 2" bugger nearly got my tire all gross. Slugs are jerks. Spiders are also jerks, by the way - they've taken over the exterior of the house and I can't walk anywhere without getting silk on me.

The job I'm most interested in at my studio is in systems design -- creating the various bits of gameplay that weave together into the full experience. It's weird to apply for a job at your own studio, but it's also weird to apply for a Design job when you already know a lot of the game's nuts and bolts. I feel like my entire pitch is pointing out flaws I see in the game and presuming to know how to fix them. Is that arrogance? Confidence? Expected? I have no idea. I need to get this application together quickly, but I have a feeling there's a lot of rewrites between here and the SEND button.

Meanwhile, I'm spending my free time up to my elbows in our proprietary scripting system. Unlike Unreal's visual scripting, we unfortunately use a purely text-based solution. It's a very loose scripting language (like Lua after a three-Martini lunch), which makes it easy to write but a little tricky to learn. You have to parse the whitespace in addition to the punctuation and written code, which is taking some getting used to. But I'm starting to make sense of it, which will definitely help my cause in the long run.

I ordered a PlayStation 4 to coincide with our game's release, and I was pretty excited to get home tonight, plug it in, and start to play the game for fun (or play a different game - who knows? I'm crazy!). Then I realized I'd told Amazon to ship it to Boston instead of Seattle.

It's probably for the best. I have a lot of work to do.