Blade Edge

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weekend

December 15th, 2007 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Thanks to everyone who lent advice on the question of payment for contract work. In addition to comments here, I got several responses over at my blog on GarageGames and through Plaxo Pulse. I’ll get a better feel for things as I get more information about the project. I think I’m going to peruse through Eric Bethke’s Game Development and Production book again, that’s always a good read.

I saw I Am Legend last night, it was really good. Will Smith is an awesome actor, moreso given the fact that he was really the only actor. A few things annoyed me, (warning, mild spoilers) like his mis-interpretation of the alpha male’s reaction when he exposed himself to sunlight, assuming them to be fully de-evolved. He simply observed the behavior rather than really trying to think of a reason behind it. Kinda dumb for a supposedly smart man. You’d think after they sprung his own trap on him he’d take some time to collect his thoughts rather than go berserk, but losing his only companion obviously snapped something inside of him.

Oh, and what’s with walking around carrying just an automatic rifle and a freaking pocket knife? Seriously. If insane blood-sucking monsters were loose in my neighborhood I’d be a walking armory, nevermind the fact that they only come out at night. Two .45’s in shoulder harnesses, a .50 hand cannon strapped to my thigh, a short blade strapped to the other thigh, dagger in my boot, pocketknife, sword on my back, automatic rifle slung over my shoulder. He worked out, he could have handled the extra load.

Well I’m off for the weekend, taking care of a lot of little things that I’ve been meaning to take care of for some time now. Wish you all a happy weekend as well, see ya Monday.

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How much should I charge??

December 13th, 2007 · Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Had a meeting tonight with a fellow I met at the holiday party on Tuesday. He has a client who wants to take an existing board game and convert it to a PC game (the client created the board game) using Torque to get it on multiple platforms. He actually asked me at the party if I used Torque and when I told him I’ve been toying with TGB since its inception he was very pleased. So we had a pleasant conversation over dinner tonight about the game and all it entails. This seems a better chance then the last two contract works that floated past me at least.

So the question now is how much money to charge for programming. I’ve never done contract work before so I’m not sure what to offer. A friend of mine said recently that contractors got paid $50-$200/hr. I was thinking of around $35-$50/hr but apparently they want to budget out the entire 6-8mo dev cycle. This triggered warning bells in my head, because I know that if I set $50/hr for a certain amount of hours in those months to calculate my total cost, I’m going to be losing money because I sure as hell won’t be working the same amount of hours towards the end of the project than at the start. So I’m prob going to bump it up to $75/hr to pad the coffers to allow for the inevitable overtime (which still hopefully doesn’t come).

Anyways those are just numbers. I could say $35/hr contract or $50/hr for a budget. Or $75/hr contract and $100/hr budget. But those last figures seem unreasonable given my background. I’m still thinking of shooting for between $35-$75 though.

What do you guys think?

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IGF, IGDA GDC Scholarships, Contracting…

December 12th, 2007 · GameDev.net, Gaming, Personal, Software

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

IGF Interviews

Going very well, just got another batch of responses through today. It’s been less than a week and have already heard from over half of the finalists and nearly half of them are already into the second round of questioning. I have yet to decide how best to post them on the front page – I can’t even remember what I did earlier this year. The thing is I don’t wanna post up a new interview every other day and shuffle the other content off the main page so quickly. I think we made a third box for GDC stuff – I’ll have to think back.

IGDA GDC Scholarship Judging

I just got my batch of GDC Scholar hopefuls to judge. This is my first year participating, I may also be mentoring one of the scholars at GDC as well. If you’ve never heard of the program, keep it in mind for next year along with volunteering. Both are great ways to make it out to the GDC.

Journalism Stuff

I’ve got a bit of extra free time now, the reason for that I can’t say for another week or so, so I contacted my local newspaper to see if they were interested in any articles on the games industry. Turns out the Technical editor was thinking of doing a piece, so now I’m on his speed dial for industry-related stuff. We’ll see what becomes of that. He also managed to dig up for me a piece that was published in that paper back when I was a sophomore in HS. I posted it just before this, so scroll down to see if after this entry.

Contract work?

I’m heading up north to Montclair NJ, about an hour away, tomorrow to meet with one of the developers I met at the NYC holiday gathering event. He’s interested in using Torque tech to make a game. Dunno exactly what’s on the table for me in regards to this, but that’s what I’m going to find out tomorrow. Keepin’ my fingers crossed. All the other contract work that’s come my way has petered out for some reason or another, never anything to do with me thankfully.

More Guitar Hero

Played Agafaba online again, but I had such horrible connection issues and eventually got kicked offline completely. I managed to beat him in When You Were Young however (oh yea I also got him in My Name is Jonas the other night). He keeps telling me he should be 100%ing every song he plays, which I believe he can do, I just don’t believe he can do it every time, and yet he insists that he can. It’s getting a mite annoying but he’s good, so he’s fun to play with.

Crap it’s already 4:15??? Where does my time go?!? When are they going to invent that hood thing from James Bond Die Another Day that makes you only need to sleep like 3-4 hours? I’d love that. 5-6 suffices for me but I still hate it. Plenty of time to sleep when I’m dead.

*sigh* nite

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IGDA NYC Holiday Party

December 11th, 2007 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll



I hopped up to the city today to attend the NYC IGDA chapter’s annual holiday get-together. Which means game developers from all over the city and outlying suburbs converge in one location, take over a bar and party and drink. Good stuff. The bar we took over was the Hi-Fi on Avenue A, easily reachable by subway of course. When I got there a bit after 8 the place was pretty jam packed, which wasn’t a surprise as 257 people RSVP’d for the event, and the bar wasn’t that big. But that’s usually the case with parties like these anyways. Not to mention that these places are always loud, because you have the music and then everyone talking, so you’re talking over the music and other people while they try to talk over you and everyone else and what you end up with is a cacophony of noise. It was also so damn hot in there that I had to step outside twice to cool off.

Lotsa game developers!

Okay enough of my whining right? Really I just wanted to give an idea of what these kind of parties are like, since it’s just the same at GDC and other conferences. So I’m actually used to it by now. Anyways I got to see a lot of people I don’t get to see often, which is always great. Got caught up on a lot of goings on and met up with several interesting people. One guy was talking about using Torque to build a computer board game from a real board game and when he found out I used Torque he was like “we need to talk!”. Then there’s another developer I was introduced to that was working on some really cool tech he said he’d be happy to write up about for the site – so I gave him my card and hopefully I’ll hear from him after GDC. Talked to the folk from Heavy Melody about audio content, and met an artist who said he might be interested in doing some content as well.

GDC Game Preview!!

The highlight of the evening however was Gamelab’s beta test of their GDC conference game – Destroy All Developers!. Now this is finally a game I can play at GDC because it involves networking, which is something I love to do anyway! The way the game played out tonight was you pick a team to be on – programmer, designer, musician, artist, production, business (I think that’s it) – and are handed a card with a mission. My mission was Phone Digits: bugging communications. I had three missions I could do:

  • Casual Mission (20pts) – collect 3 business cards with a phone number that ends in even digits
  • Gamer Mission (50pts) – collect 2 business cards with a phone number that ends in 0
  • Hardcore Mission (100pts) – collect 10 cards, each with a phone number that ends in a different digit

Once you complete one of the missions, you turn the card in for points and are assigned a new mission. You can “level up” by earning enough points to reach Gamer and Hardcore levels. Hardcore players get special assassination missions, where they’re assigned a random participant to seek out. I got there too late and was too busy chatting with people to bother to take the time and learn how to play, but now that I know I’m definitely playing at GDC.


Mark Kauffman (Heavy Melody) celebrates his win for the Audio team, and Eric Zimmerman (Gamelab) thanks everyone for participating

So it was a good night of hanging out with great people. I love the NYC development scene. It’s still small enough that you can know pretty much everyone, but big enough to be considered a serious development community in its own right. If you’re in the greater NYC area I’d definitely recommend you look to attend these gatherings if you can. Ride a train into the city and the subway will take you wherever you need to go from Penn Station. Heck if you’re a bit unsure ever just email me and I’d be glad to help you get out to one of these events.

Here’s the rest of the photo gallery:


Ben Serviss (game design consultant) chats with Sande Chen from the Writers Cabal / Nick Smolney (Crisp Wireless) and Karen Schrier (Scholastic)


Brad MacDonald and Wade Tinney from Large Animal Games minding the door / Tom Toyton (Bloomfield College, left) talking with some of the Heavy Melody guys


It’s a party!!! Robert Hura (Blinking Eye Media), Brian Robbins (Fuel Industries) and Brad MacDonald entertaining the ladies / Ben Serviss hanging out with fellow design consultant Roger Pedersen

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Kicking off the work week

December 11th, 2007 · Gaming, Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Guitar Hero: Me vs. Agafaba

So Agafaba and I battled in GH III earlier tonight. Our first round of best of 7 games was cut short – Agafaba said the game told him he won but the record was only at 3-2 (in favor of him) and on my side the game said he quit. So I dunno about that, and we definitely chose 3 songs each. But whatever. Second round, best of 5, I beat him 3-2. He says he can usually 100% every song except Raining Blood and Through the Fire and Flames, and yet I beat him in Cliffs of Dover, The Metal, twice on Impulse, and he had to steal the win from me towards the end of Paint it Black (I made a few stupid mistakes). I’ll match him again later this week – no matter what it’s a fun time, oh and playing against him in Impulse – I seem to do crazy good under pressure so now I’m ranked #5 for that song. w00t!

NYC Holiday Party

I’m catching the train up to the city right after work to attend the NYC holiday party, all the games studios in the city take over a bar for the night. Should be fun, I’ll bring the camera and snap lotsa photos, post them up later.

Resetting My Clock

Ever since I got a nasty nasty sinus pressure last weekend that was so painful I had to just lay in bed for half the day (moreso even), even after taking allergy meds and two types of Tylenol, my wonderful morning schedule has been totally thrown off. I was just getting into waking up at 10-11am to start my day, which is a nice time since I’m rising with the west-coasters and people in Europe are still at work as well. Now I’m back to getting up at like 2pm – yuck. So I’m staying awake with a few power naps to be able to get to bed early tonight and get back on schedule. Wish me luck.

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Please don’t cancel my shows…

December 8th, 2007 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

If you’re an avid sitcom/soap watcher, you’ll want to check out this blog that’s covering the writers strike daily. Seems Atlantis is okay, Battlestar is slightly crippled, and Journeyman may be in danger of being canceled. Bah. Bunch of whiny little… get back to work!!! How are you shows looking?

I’m up to 4% before I fail Through Fire and Flames on Expert in GH III. Better than 1% 😛 I’m making progress slowly yet surely.

Have a great weekend!

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I Haz Facebook

December 6th, 2007 · Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

I finally set myself up a Facebook account. It’s like, the only major social network I’m not a part of so I figured why the hell not. It didn’t take too long – I’ll play around with it and see what develops. If you’re on Facebook, feel free to shoot me a friend request.

Drew Sikora's Facebook profile

On a final note, I beat Guitar Hero III’s career mode on Expert today. Rock on!

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Montreal-bound

November 23rd, 2007 · GameDev.net, Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well, this coming Monday I will be departing north for Montreal to attend the Montreal International Games Summit. I just bought a digital voice recorder today so that I can tape sessions finally to improve my summaries and actually include more quotes in them too. My shorthand is only good for so much. I was hoping to pick up a Sony dvr with a memory stick so I could load sound recordings to my Sony laptop quick and easy since it has a built-in memory card reader but no luck – the model that comes with memory stick support is $185. Owch. I’ll stick with my $50 model with a USB cable thank you very much. Actually I bought a $40 one with no USB support, but I’d like to save my recordings so I’ll be getting the $50 one and returning the cheaper one. Anyways the conference looks to be rather informative, so I’ll be coming back with lots of cool session coverage.

Also, the MIGS press desk set me up with a tour of the brand new EIDOS studio that just opened this month. Supposedly it’s all cutting-edge and state of the art, so hopefully they won’t mind me taking lotsa pictures.

Oh and for some reason the article I published two days ago is failing to appear on the main page, so until it decides to show up, or Richard goes in and kicks it out, here’s the link – 10 Tips for Better Playtests

Ah yes, I also saw the Hitman movie Wed night when it came out. I was pleased. I’ve never played the game so I’m not a fanboy, but as a movie itself it was better than most in the assassin/action genre. The story was decent – the “love affair” between Agent 47 and the helpless whore slave was almost, almost overdone. They brought that to the edge of corny without tipping over. The depiction of Agent 47 as a character was great tho. Tim Olyphant had some great facial expressions, and the way he always walked around, arms straight at his sides and shoulders level, bespoke of his martial upbringing. I’d say go see it if you’re an action junkie.

K that’s all. Have a great weekend everyone.

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11-0

November 20th, 2007 · Gaming

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well I did battle some more with 5 more people tonight. My one challenge came from Londondobbs. I managed to play against him twice, not in a row tho. Both times it took us 3 songs (I always play best 2 outta 3) to determine the victor, we each got to choose the third song once and both times I had to steal back the win with some determined playing and strategic use of Star Power. Closest I’ve come to losing yet. If I face Jammamamma again I dunno if I’ll be as fortunate either. They’re the two players currently at the top of my “oh sh*t” list, although there are plenty of other people ranked higher than me on the individual song scoreboards, but prob not all of them like to play online. Anyways I was tempted to continue but my fret hand was getting tired so I quit and worked on some individual score rankings. Got 9th overall in Anarchy in the UK.

Man don’t you hate it when games take over your life? I suppose I could have done something productive tonight, like program or something… oh well either way I feel accomplished so I guess that works eh?

I haven’t had any challenges yet from any GDnet folk. C’mon we’ll play co-op if you don’t wanna go head to head. Remember, I’m overconfident and poised to lose! In fact I almost did just that today against Londondobbs. I had won the first and was winning the second song the first time we matched and the song ended… but not really, the music just took a long pause. But I had already thrown my hands up in victory when, to my horror, more notes began scrolling down the screen and I lost ground trying to replace my fingers on my home fret keys and ended up losing the song.

Yea, and then I did it again in the same song when it paused a second time. That almost sucked.

Really tho, I’m just tracking my record for my own enjoyment – there’s no win-loss stats tracked online for the PC version. Oh well.

Nite

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I have decided….

November 18th, 2007 · Gaming, Personal

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

… that Rain of Blood is a f**ked up song

… that Cliffs of Dover is an awesome song

… that Beowulf is the motherf**ker to end all motherf**kers

… that I am feeling sick

That is all.

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