The Juices are Flowing!

So I am not sure what the change has been recently, maybe being in a professional game development atmosphere everyday or the fact that I have free time and am playing games again, but the creative juices are flowing in me again. This last week has been really crazy I have woken up early a few times with an idea burning in my brain so I have to wake up and write it down.  On the way to New York City Monday night some ideas came screaming into my brain while on the Chinatown bus. I am super excited about these ideas. I have decided I am going to learn Flash so I can prototype these ideas and see if they are going to be fun or not.

So how does this effect things at work? Well I told my lead I wanted to learn flash and he offered to help and told me if I get time at work to start trying stuff. Also Thursday I was sitting in my cube talking to the guy next to me when we started talking music, this lead to an insane game idea that was sort of a joke. I told all of the guys at work and they laughed and said it was funny but wouldn’t work. Then our Creative Director came over and just too keep it up I pitched it to him, he laughed said it wasn’t bad and walked away. Flash forward 15 minutes and here he comes back to my cube and says that he loves the idea and has started to flesh it out and he thinks we might MAKE IT!!! So we talked for about 10 minutes on what we could do to keep it awesome, we will see what happens with it.

In other news I saw Bob Dylan on Tuesday night in New York City, my sister signed me up to work the show so I got to stand about 20 feet from the stage for FREE!!! It was awesome, he is getting old though. Also I beat Metal Gear Solid 4 today, awesome game if you don’t mind the overload of cutscenes and storyline. But as Matt said “I wouldn’t want my Metal Gear any other way.”

Till next time,

Grant

Three Weeks In

Well I’m back. It has been a crazy last month, vacation at home, wisdom teeth pulled, moving to Philly, starting a new job, multiple visits to the big sister in New York City, but it is all settling down now. So that kind of sums it all up but now to talk about stuff more fun.

So what has it been like my first month at Merit. Well it has been pretty awesome when I came in I had a week of training and time to just get used to their systems. The next week I jumped right into the major task of overhauling their sound manager. At first this started out as a simple task add pausing, that took twenty minutes, but then my Lead came over and we started talking and came up with this whole system we wanted to do with the sound engine. So basically I took the Sound Group design from FMOD and implemented it in the merit sound engine. This was fun but kind of hard mostly because no one at the studio had ever really touched the engine so I had to learn it inside and out then start my work. It also was a bit of a challenge coming back to coding after a five week break. But after two weeks I have it all done and we are having a code review on Monday to make sure everything is cool. I’m loving the studio the guys are awesome and we get free food all the time.

Now for a movie break…

OK so if you have not seen The Dark Knight and WALL E you need to now. No NOW. Alright so if you have done that enjoy with me the return of American blockbuster films to actual cinematography. They were both near perfect films and very likely to be near the top of my list at the end of the year.

Now I also wanted to comment on dodgeball no not the movie the actual game. Last week I went up to NYC to play dodgeball with my sister and her friends. I just have to say I am a beast if this was an Olympic sport I would be on the USA team yea I rock.

Well that is about it I still want to write a postmortem for Smashout but I’m not sure when I will get time to do it. That is about all I have for now.

Grant

PS I finally updated my website it is snazzy now.