Feburary 18, 2013: A retrospect

Last year I committed myself to doing something that terrified me. Something that could have potentially ruined multiple friendships.
Yet something necessary.
A year ago today, I did it, and got the best case scenario.
The day afterwards, I wrote this.

The time has finally come

To bite the bullet and hope it doesn’t explode in my face

Long have I awaited this day

-Too long, long enough

Dreaded it, craved it.

A simple answer is all I seek,

To know which way to turn on the path forward.

Where to plant my feet on my next step.

She leans, waits.

-Perhaps she already knows.

I grow cold as the words spill out, and I know there is no turning back

It is time to face the consequences, whatever they may be.

I know it won’t turn out perfectly for me.

If it could, it would have already.

-But I need this, to erase one last regret.

Better to regret doing it than not

However painful the outcome may be.

She smiles sadly, and answers.

The best I could have hoped for.

Everything risked, but nothing lost.

A few quiet words exchanged afterwards, I say my thanks

Though I can’t remember If they left my head.

The feelings fade, knowing now nothing will come of them.

But she will always be more than just a friend. She will be the friend who gave me what I needed most,

Not because of something she did

but

Simply because of who she was.

Because

On that day, I stopped being a coward.

Stopped hating myself for what I failed to do.

Knew I could do it again.

Because I did, I bit the bullet.

And it didn’t go off.

An Open Letter to My Valentine

Dearest Valentine,
I have a few women in my life. They are all genuinely awesome people, and I care for all of them. I am glad to be able to call them my friends.
But they are not you. You are more than a friend. You are the the one person I will be in love with for life, that state of true, mutual attraction that reaches the top of a hard-to-define scale so many poets have tried to describe.
We enjoy each others company. We get each others jokes, share each others woes, and just being around you makes me feel at ease, like the world is truly a place where miracles can happen.
I long to be with you, to hold your hand in mine, to see the smile upon your beautiful face as you look upon mine.
You are the Kyoko to my Sayaka, except straight, 'cause I'm a guy.
You are not the Juliet to my Romeo, because that play was just depressing.
And yet... I do not know you. Or if I do, you have yet to reveal yourself.
If it's not too much trouble, could we meet sometime soon? I know we have our entire lives, but every moment spent without you seems an eternity.
(And I don't know about you, but it'll take me somewhere between a week and 12 months to realize you are who you are, so I'd like to get on that as soon as we can manage it. Let me know when you're free and I'll find some time in my schedule.)
I write this in the hopes that one day you will look back and read it. I know I'll have many other opportunities to say it, but I want to say it now as well because it cannot be said enough.
Happy Valentines Day. I love you.

A First Year's Rant

The following is an archive of a Facebook Post I made following certain unsavory comments.

It has come to my attention that some of us, I won't name names, have been saying that others are "Bad Game Devs" behind their backs.
Not only is this shit-talk, it is BULLshit-talk.
Come now, are any of us truly "good" game devs? Is anyone good at this when they first start? Did Newell and Lombardi know the first thing about developing a game when they founded Valve? Did Romero, Hall, and the two Carmacks know what they were doing when they started id? Bungie founder Alexander Seropian? Gavin and Rubin of Naughty Dog?
No. They got where they are, where their companies are, in this industry through trial, hard work, dedication, and a whole lot of error.
Nobody starts out good. They have to carve their way through.
Now, I consider myself a decent level designer when it comes to Additive-space BSP-based engines. And I should be, since I started doing level design in general at 10 or 3, depending on how you define the practice. Were my scribbled floor plans from when I was 8 any good?
There's a damn good reason I completely restarted my Half-Life mod three times before settling in to it, why those earlier revisions no longer exist in any form. There's a reason I ultimately scrapped it. Even now, settled in to Source as I am, the team I'm on have just gutted two of our areas to restart from scratch. Because we learned from working, from making mistakes in those spots and applying the lessons we learned to the others until the broken parts were too unseemly in comparison.
I have been working with those tools for 7 years and I'm still learning. I'm still improving.
I'm still not up to snuff.

We're all still first years. Are ANY of us ready for a job in the industry? Hell no!
Will those of us who tough it out and stay for the next 4 years be among the best batch of new blood flowing in when we're done? Hell yeah!

But none of us are good game devs yet. Do not presume to be any better than your peers. We are all equals here, so get your heads out of your asses. If the student is willing to learn, should the master turn them away?

And for those of you who have been accused of being below these bloated heads, I present to you a challenge:
Beat them. Prove the worth I know you have. Aim to make your group's GDW game the best of the year.
I know I will. Jeff out.

What is it about?

What is it about?
It's a tough question. A long answer.
What is it about? It's about Life. The Human condition.
It's about happiness and dispair, satisfaction and remorse, love and hate, violence...and peace.
It's about never giving up on the things you care about, protecting them with all your being.
It's about the lengths people will go to to do just that.
It's about how someone's actions and someone's spirit don't always match up.
It's about moving on when someone you feel you need doesn't return your feelings, because there's someone so much better waiting for you down the road, even if you don't realize it.

It's something that saved my life. It may seem odd, even foolish to you that I say that. You weren't there. You didn't feel what I felt. That...sense of resonance, from inside a dark place, that assurance that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
It's about knowing that no matter how bad things get, as long as you carry on, it's not the end. That you can prevail against all odds, against all naysayers, and make a difference.
It's about the powers we all have in a world that wants to tear us apart.

Yes. Most of all, it's about Hope.

Hope.

[Backlog] Writing: Wastelander - Part One

The following is from my catalog of un- or privately- published short stories. This is an experiment in first-person writing based on the Fallout series created by Interplay and now owned and developed by Bethesda.

I walk down the deserted streets, hunting rifle in hand, scanning the road ahead for scavenging opportunities and hostiles. My eyes settle on a shop with boarded up windows and a faded sign reading “Pawn”. Creeping closer, I notice that the door isn’t secured; I should be able to enter with no problem. Suddenly, my foot descends onto something squishy. I look down and see a man staring up at me, eyes glazed over. I bend down to feel for a pulse; as I expect, he’s dead. A quick search of his roughly sewn pockets produces a piece of bent piping and a single bottle cap. Pocketing the cap, I straighten, then freeze; I hear the sound of footsteps echoing from a nearby alley. Training my rifle at the opening, I steel myself and wait.

                A tattooed face emerges, with a Mohawk dyed bright purple. The man is covered in dirt and flecks of blood, his clothes torn, and he has a Stent model assault rifle in his hands. Definitely a raider. I squeeze the trigger and send a .32 round into his frontal lobe. Cries come from inside the alley, and I rebolt my rifle. He wasn’t alone. A trio of raiders, two male, one female, dash out guns blazing. I fire, hitting one of the men in the arm and throwing off his aim. Again, the other male crumples, an oozing wound in his chest. Again, and I bite nothing but brick. Again, and the woman is on the ground bleeding, still firing her Shanxi 17 pistol at me. I try to load another round into my chamber, but end up with nothing. The rifle’s empty, and I have no backup magazines. No ammo. The rifle hits the dust, and I pull my sidearm, a 10mm N99. I plink three rounds each into the two of them, and a bullet whizzes by me from behind.  I turn firing, only to see another 15 or so raiders. Too many to take on alone. I backpedal, firing blindly at the swarm. I see one toss a grenade just in time to hit the deck, or maybe too late, as I summersault from my chest to my back from the force of the blast. Getting up, I make a break for it, firing behind me with no idea what I’m hitting. Click. Eject magazine, reload. I register a turn in the road too late to make it, maybe too late to stop. I can either try to stop and face the raiders or run out of space to put my feet. I make a split-second decision to give jumping a shot; What’s the worst that could happen? I die anyway? Hitting the ground hard and stumbling, I whip around just in time to put a lucky shot into the head of one of my pursuers. Another makes the jump, and my perception of time slows down. Pause. Calculate the odds. Time enough for three shots. Chest, Chest, Leg. I fire, my entire world moving in slow motion. Bang. Miss. Bang. Hit. Bang. Miss. Doesn’t matter. He can’t chase me because he’s dead before he hits the ground. I turn and dash only to feel a searing pain in my leg. I fall, blood gushing out of the wound. I roll onto my back and unload on the raider who shot me. More are still coming behind him. I pull out my only two frag grenades, which I had hoped to save for selling. Toss. Wait. Blast. Toss the other. They know to keep their heads down this time. Putting pressure on my thigh to slow the bleeding, I crawl into the first unbarricaded door I see, careful to leave no blood trail for them to follow inside. I collapse against a battered reception desk, panting heavily and holding onto the cold metal of my 10mm for dear life, waiting for bullets or men to fly through the door. They never come. Instead, I hear the shouts and whoops of the raider gang fade into the distance. Lowering my pistol I heave a heavy sigh of relief. I take a moment to check my pip-boy to ensure it wasn’t broken by any of the explosions or falls, then pull off my shirt, cold sweat clinging to my back. Unsheathing my belt knife, I begin the process of cutting a new set of tourniquets.  I wrap one around my leg and pack the others into my right-hand pocket, then carefully stand up. A bit shaky, but I should be fine as long as I find some antibiotics soon. I reload and check my gun, then limp further into the dark confines of the unmarked building that has become my salvation.

I only hope it doesn’t also become my doom.

On Deadlines

I'll make this simple.
I don't. Like. Deadlines.

I really don't. I'd rather have a serial killer looming over me than a deadline. At least with the serial killer there's a chance that they'll miss or you won't be their target. With a deadline, it's a sure thing.
You can sometimes use deadlines to motivate people, of course, but I always get the sinking feeling when a deadline draws closer that whatever my assignment is, won't be finished in time.
Nobody else I work with ever seems to share this feeling. "It's fine," they'll say "We've got plenty of time."
Well, no, no we don't. By the time I'm stressing about a deadline, there's next to no time left compared to the scale of the project and the amount of time a day that can be spent on it. But it's no big deal to anyone else, for some reason. I've even had a team member abandon a project on the final day, after assuring everyone else that his work would get done, then not doing it. I ended up having to be the one scrambling to finish it, of course. We did not do well on that particular venture.
But of course, it's fine as long as I'm the one holding the bag, right? Not your problem.

So if you ever work with me, and we have limited time, don't slack off. I prefer to have time to breathe at the end of a project, time to relax or add that one last optional feature. And if you leave me alone to the wolves, you won't like it when I get back.

Stand back! ... ... CLEAR!

[This post was originally supposed to be made at the beginning of the month. Dunno why it didn't get published]

Greetings to my small (And, according to the traffic stats, comprised of a single russian using google chrome) audience.
So, it's been quite a while, eh? Have a seat by the campfire, and let me tell you what's been going on with ol' Jeff. Since my last post, 3 months or so ago, I've started attending school at a small technology university. The atmosphere here is great, and I've met a lot of like-minded individuals, at least some of whom I will work with in the future to create magic. I've also been stuffing my face at the all-you-can-eat buffet provided by my residence meal plan.
Oh, and before I forget, I've started another blog on wordpress, this time for school. I figured I should use a different service, so I don't get confused and post personal stuff on there, or school assignments here. That sounds like something I would do.
Aside from that, I've been trying to find some time to work on the Hazard Course in what little free time I have. For some reason, the team hasn't gotten fed up with my new absenteeism and fired me yet. I guess I must be valuable to them or something, despite the level designers being the biggest part of the team, and thus making me more expendable.
All is, of course, quiet on the romantic front, (I have a blog, so that's probably not hard to guess.) and I think that's how I like it. More manageable than the alternative, which in my experience consists of a single action; feeling like crap. Of course, neither of these scenarios actually has any romance involved, but, the chances of taking a third option have always been pretty slim, no?
And that's been the monthly quota of joking self-deprecation filled. Which means I won't have to do any on my birthday, which is coming up in the near future. And by near future I mean before November.

In news that's more relevant to the actual focus of this blog, I've been playing a bit of the Battlefield 4 beta. Now, having never played any of the other games in the Battlefield franchise, this means I'm really very crap at it. But I manage to kill between 2 and 6 people every 800-ticket match, as well as assist in a lot of point captures, so I'm not totally useless. I'm still on the fence about buying the full game when it comes out, partially because the Battlefield franchise, like just about every other modern military-themed FPS out there, isn't exactly known for its strong singleplayer, and I am primarily singleplayer focused. The other main reason is Origin, EA's craptastic steam alternative. Now, to play the beta, I had to sign up for it, so my soul has already been sold. But something about keeping it on my hard drive just doesn't sit well with me. It's mostly because the interface is just so much bloat. It starts off on the store page, rather than your games library (I suspect as a not-so-subtle hint that EA wants more money from you) and when launching the Battlefield 4 beta (the only thing I have on Origin at the moment) it simply launches the battlelog site in your favorite browser. The site acts as your character options menu and a server list. What, EA, too cheap to integrate server browsing into Origin? Don't even want to let Dice put one in their game? What is this? It also makes me question whether or not I'll be able to play my hypothetically-bought copy of Battlefield 4 offline if, say, EA goes under, or I, god forbid, go out into the country (where my parents live, for instance) for a bit. Origin does appear to have an offline mode, but will it work with Battlefield 4? Hell if I know.

Anyway, I'll try to get my time management in order, keep abreast of any developments in the industry (or my personal life), and keep the updates a little more frequent than every 16 months. Until th