Category Archives: Blog

Dec 27 2011

Year in Review: Personal (Part 2)

Hit all the usual suspects for job seeking. Then we get a phone call. A former coworker of hers heard about her getting laid off. Was working at a new place, and wanted her in. Interviews go great. But then a snag…former coworker had a non-solicitation agreement. I have Contrail make an appeal to the CEO of her former workplace to waive the non-solict for her, but we don’t hear back. So much for that idea. But KingsIsle is hiring, that could be interesting.  We start playing Wizard101 so she would be familiar with their game and end up liking it. KingsIsle or BioWare seem like the best options for her to quickly get a job.

Then we get another phone call. It looks like Contrail’s former company is going bankrupt, so are you still interested in working with your former coworker? Maybe for, say, twice as much money? Well, that puts a different spin on things financially. Now that I don’t have to scramble to figure out how to keep a roof over our heads, I can refocus on the Pokemon app. I design the visual look of all the screens, just need to fill them with the correct data. But Core Data is still being stubborn… Continue reading →

Dec 26 2011

Year in Review: Personal (Part 1)

On January 1st, I woke up knowing I no longer had a steady source of income. Unlike most who have hit hard times in this economy, I quit my job of 3+ years instead of being laid off. My goal: to start a game development company. How did I start? By playing lots of WoW :P

Around March, I started working on my first game collection. Stepping back into C++ and SDL was a bit rough. I’m still not sure about the structure of my classes.

In May, I had a mostly complete first game. It was going to require some serious rework on graphics (as it had none, really), some sound, and all that polish that would be required to make it a game and not a tech demo. However, I was learning that this style of game was being pounced on by some lawyers for a certain company. Although they had the flimsiest of cases, they would go after those indies (like me) that couldn’t afford a robust defense. So after talking to my partner, I scrapped the idea. Continue reading →

Dec 25 2011

SWTOR Crafting

The crafting system in SWTOR has some interesting choices. I’m not sure how I feel about it overall.

Crafting is accomplished by what are called Crew Skills. There are 3 categories: crafting skills, gathering skills, and mission skills. Crafting skills do what you expect: these are the ones that make items. Gathering skills allow you to gather resources out in the world, but also allow you to send your companions off on assignments to gather types of materials. Mission skills arelike gathering skills without the gathering part: you send your companions out on missions where they bring back certain types of materials. These are usually your rare components for the higher quality crafted items.
Continue reading →

Dec 24 2011

Initial Thoughts on SWTOR

So I’ve been playing for about a week. Here’s some random thoughts on the game so far:

The staggered early access was a great idea and should be stolen by anyone doing a major MMO launch. They kept too much info close to their chest though. It took a fan made forum thread to get concrete info on who  was getting invite to each wave. This could have easily been revealed by the CMs without impacting their desire for flexability.

I’ve played most of the classes through level 10. So far, it feels like the Empire has a better storyline, although that may be a consequence of evil being fun. The Smuggler and Jedi Consular seem to suffer the most in this regard. The Smuggler storyline feels too light-hearted; there’s never a feeling that you’re there for any reason other than because you can and to get your ship back (which feels inevitable). Continue reading →