I’m Not Dead

I’ve just been really busy with a sizable project. There’s a webcomic out there called Drowtales. It’s a beautiful piece of high fantasy chock full of interesting characters and political intrigue. The plot is complex and winding and there are well over a hundred characters.

And I’ve taken up the task of revamping their wiki, which is several years behind.

This is a massive undertaking that I’ve little to show for as of yet. I’ve been combing each and every page for every tiny detail, and I’m almost ready to start actually writing entrees accurate up to the beginning of the current arc. This is going to be an ongoing process as they like to update daily. On top of all of this I’ve been job searching and doing my usual full workday job, as well as dabbling in Photoshop here and there.

Keep updated. I’ll be sure to make another post within the next half year.

The D&D Mechanus Campaign is Here

Boom.

Mechanus campaign

Mechanus Characters and Loot

The Mechanus campaign is quite short and linear. My players are just starting out on my next scripted adventure, which incidentally I designed before this one. It is a vastly different (and lengthy) experience. The Sythian campaign is a sandbox adventure involving just as much town interaction as dungeon crawling. Look forward to it in…. a while.

The Good

Not everything has been bad this past month.

After a year of separation with my best friend from college, I recently started talking to him again. Over the course of our disassociation he’d joined a local organization known as Unallocated Space. It’s essentially a “hacker space,” a place where people with backgrounds in networking come together to pry their craft. I’ve since taken him up on his offer to join the group mainly because it’s made up of a conglomerate of like minds. So far I’ve stood out a tad mainly because of my difference in focus; most of these guys know very little about video game design, and at the same time I know little about network security. None the less, it’s an amazing place to network.

I have also joined a job search group at the University of Baltimore. Hopefully it will help me in my career-quest.

And finally, FINALLY, my first D&D campaign is coming to the blog. It’s been played through, tweeked, and now merely in need of final proofing. You can expect it either tomorrow or Friday.

The Bad

So much has happened over the past few weeks. Where do I even start?

There has been very little professional progress over the past month. It all began with my grandmother in Florida who, after a six month fight with lung cancer, finally succumbed in late may. A week and a half I spent in Florida by her side in her final hours, helping the best I could with the piles of work involved with the ordeal, all cumulating with the funeral.

My coping mechanism has been most unconstructive: Escapism. Where I normally reserve my X-Box for social gatherings, I burnt through Assassins Creed 2 and Brotherhood along with Darksiders over the course of the next two weeks. As much as I knew I had to work on kick-starting my career, I was simply too apathetic to anything to be bothered. Thankfully my boss, who had lost his own father not a week prior, was more than understanding of my irritability. Fortunately I feel that this phase is behind me.

There was also a catastrophic hard drive failure somewhere in there. Thankfully it wasn’t my primary drive and not the one where I store most of my work. I’m still trying to get everything up and running at full tilt again, but at least I haven’t lost anything vital.

And another draft

Possibly final.

A little tweeking

And my card looks a lot better. Gray for you, but those I hand a physical copy to will experience a slice of the kaleidoscope.

It looked better on paper.

At least that’s my excuse for my last iteration of business cards. Well, they’re gone. The new wave is here.

A Little More Business Stuff

My business card endeavor continues. Though I am happy with the design, a trip to the printer’s revealed that I had half-way feared: There’s just too much going on upon this little piece of paper. Time to start from scratch on a new round. At least I’ve got something now in case a business card needs to be given.

Today is a Thursday. Thursday means D&D night. Maybe enough people will show up tonight so that I may finally polish off one of my campaigns so that it may be tweeked and posted. Maybe not. Time will tell.

A little business stuff

Up to now I’ve been stuck using Windows 7 and an incompatible printer. My new printer is perfectly compatible with Win7… until I try to print something from Adobe Illustrator. Then it just saves some useless file to the same folder and looks at me like a dog expecting a treat for a job done wrong.

Looks like I have to pay a visit to my old school and deal with the hassle of their ridiculously complex printer network. At’s a 30-minute drive and, if I’m lucky, the printers will be in working order. But at least I have a chance over there.

This is an update

One of these days I’m going to wake up and not have a crisis to deal with. Be they migraines that completely incapacitate me, coworkers looking for someone to cover their shift, or car problems, I can’t seem to catch a break.

I have had some time to brush up on 3DS Max and the UDK over the past few weeks. I appreciate you being so patient. Here, have a spider.

I can’t exactly take full credit for this model’s design as it was part of a tutorial, but it’s there none the less.

Next on my list of things to do is my UDK demo stage. It will basically be a world where I place my engine experiments about like museum exhibitions.

Peace!