One year ago I wrote, “When I’m fifty or sixty or seventy I’ll be looking back and I’ll probably think of 2005 as one of the most influential years of my life.” If 2005 was a pivotal year in my life, 2006 was even more pivotal. A year ago I was getting a raise at my job as a web developer and spending most of time sitting in a cubicle daydreaming about being a game developer. Doing the web development thing for a while taught me many things, but the most important was that I don’t want to be a web developer.

Around the end of February I finally finished my application for FIEA. While I nervously awaited word of my acceptance things were getting strange at my job. The company was splitting in two, which created all kinds of intra-office politics.

In April I got word of my acceptance to FIEA. I began making preparations to quit my job and move to Florida.

The summer was dominated by the World Cup, which totally engrossed me for the duration. It was an excellent tournament, during which the best of the sport was on display.

I visited Orlando with Gillian to look at apartments in the early part of the summer. The trip was somewhat discouraging, because most of the apartments sucked and were too expensive. Fortunately, FIEA was able to place me in a rental house with a couple other students.

Around the end of July I put in my notice and quit my job. Shortly thereafter I hopped in a Uhaul and drove to Florida. Just before the beginning of the semester I was lucky enough to be invited to go for an amazing vacation in Key West. When I got back, the semester began. To be continued…

I have been insanely busy for the past couple months. I have been working up to ninety-five hours per week. Is it worth it? I think so. I’m learning a lot.

Today we had two guest speakers, one from Animal Logic and one from retro Studios. Animal Logic is a visual effects studio in Australia that does special effects for films and for commercials. They are releasing their first feature-length film this weekend: Happy Feet. They worked on the special effects on The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, Moulin Rouge, Lord of the Rings, and numerous other recent movies.

Retro Studios is the only first-party Nintendo developer in North America, outside of the Nintendo of America headquarters in Washington state. They are located in Austin, TX, and are best known for the Metroid Prime series, which will soon see its third iteration released for the Wii.

The Animal Logic speech was very motivating, but was primarily aimed at artists and would-be producers. They only employ a handful of programmers, in their R&D department. I have to give the speaker credit, by the end I was contemplating a career in visual effects.

The Retro Studios speech was given by a software engineer and was much more technical, even going so far as to give us a high-level overview of the software architecture of Metroid Prime. The speaker talked a lot about Wii development and about the technical capabilities of the Wii. (Basically, it’s a Gamecube x2.) He also talked about the business practices used by Retro, a relatively small studio, in contrast with EA Tiburon.

There are three weeks left in the semester, including next week which is only two days long. Although I’m enjoying the work, it will be nice to get a little respite over the holidays.

Okay, I have a project due a week from Monday. I have to build a Flash game. I am totally at a loss for ideas. So I am turning to you guys for inspiration. What would you like to see in a Flash game? Is there a particularly good game mechanic that you would like to see used? A particular theme? Feel free to suggest anything.

The idea I ultimately choose must meet the following criteria:

• Time Limit: I won’t be able to work on it this weekend, which means I have about seven days to do the project to completion with art, programming, sound effects, etc. It should not be “large.” That is, it should not require creating multiple levels or enormous amounts of animations.
• Programmer Art: I am a programmer, not an artist. I can do basic drawing and animation in Flash, but I’m not very advanced.
• PG-13: If it got a movie rating it would have to be PG-13 or younger.

Additionally, the game should meet the following criteria, but it is not, strictly speaking, necessary:

• Innovation: It should have something to it that is new or innovative for a Flash game.
• Programming Challenge: The game should somewhat challenge my programming skills, so it should be more advanced than Pong, but it doesn’t have to be a full RPG engine or anything like that.
• Style: These projects are graded as much for aesthetics as for technical skill, so it should have a coherent visual and auditory style.

Again, feel free to pitch any idea. I’m really just looking for some inspiration.

I’m sitting in the Denver airport right now, using my FIEA laptop. My oldest brother got married yesterday. He and his wife are perfect for each other. I’m sure they will have a long and happy marriage.

I’ve attended so many weddings in the past six months, but I guess I’m just getting to be that age where everyone starts thinking about those kinds of things. It’s still weird to me to think about someone who’s only twenty-three or twenty-four getting married. I guess I just always assumed that getting married and starting a family were things you did after age thirty, when you were settled down and had money.

It was good to get to see the whole extended Forget family. I also got to meet my half-brothers’ maternal family. I sort of knew them when I was really young, but not very well. A lot of them live in Florida, so maybe I will visit them now that I know them.

My mom officiated the wedding ceremony. In Colorado the only requirement for marrying someone is that you have to know them for at least three years. The ceremony was in the City Park in Denver, which overlooks the skyline and the mountains. The view was lovely.

Everyone thought it was going to rain (it had been raining for days, an oddity in Denver at this time of year), but it cleared up at the last minute and it was clear and sunny for the ceremony. We really lucked out.

I have a project due tomorrow. (Technically it was due on Friday.) I’m having a hard time motivating myself to finish it. I should have plenty of time on the Atlanta-bound leg of my flight. It’s going to be sad leaving my whole family behind to go back to Orlando. On the other hand, school is really getting into high gear and it’s really exciting. I can’t wait to get into the really tough course work.

I’ve probably rambled enough and I should stop procrastinating so I’ll have time to play Dead Rising when I get back home.

I think lightning just struck the building. We didn’t lose power, but the internet was gone briefly. It was pretty loud. There’s an alarm going off somewhere.

FIEA’s going really well. I’m still getting settled in and establishing a routine. I have already learned a ton, mostly about Perl and Flash. Next week we are starting assembly for the 68000 processor in my programming class and I will be trying my hand at some basic animation in Flash. In the production class yesterday we practiced analyzing a game (Fable) the way a developer would. I think we’ll be doing that a lot in that class.

Over the long weekend I went down to Miami to visit G. I had a really good time, but even with the extra day on Monday the weekend just wasn’t long enough.

It seems like I just got back to school yesterday (I did.) and I’m already heading out-of-town again tomorrow. I’ll be in Denver from tomorrow (Thursday) night through Sunday night for my oldest brother’s wedding. Pretty exciting.

I put up a few photos of FIEA and a whole bunch of photos of my trip to Key West. More to come.

This one is my favorite.

Bee-Tee-Double-Ewe: The workstations at FIEA are AMAZING. My monitor space is 3800×1200 pixels.

The first two days of classes are over. I love the FIEA program so far. Yesterday I had Programming in the morning and Rapid Prototype Development (A.K.A. Digital Media Development) in the afternoon.

I didn’t get a good sense of what the programming class is going to be like yet because we had a test yesterday to assess the level each of us is at coming in to the program. The test was not as hard as I was expecting, though I am a little rusty on my C and C++. Tomorrow we are again foregoing the normal lecture. Instead we will be meeting with the professor one-on-one to discuss our background, our test results, and what we want to get out of the program.

DMD sounds like it may be my most taxing and most fun class. The schedule moves in two-week rounds developing a new game in each round. All of the work for DMD will be in Flash. The first couple weeks are spent learning Flash 8; then we start making games. There are two solo projects and four group projects. With such a short timeline for each game it’s going to be hectic. One thing I like about this class is that everyone will be getting a chance to try out all the roles: production, programming, and art.

My one class on Tuesdays and Thursdays is Design for Media. It is intended as an introduction to the production and business aspects of the industry, though not in as much detail as the dedicated producers are getting. I am not crazy about learning all about scheduling and budgets, but I understand why it’s necessary and I look forward to having that knowledge–hopefully it will make me a better game developer. It sounds like, in this class, we will be developing one game idea over the course of the whole semester, but not developing the game, just exploring the production process.

The only class I haven’t had yet is my Improvisational Theatre class, which meets on Wednesdays. I have done some improv in the past. The class could be really fun.

I finally got my camera cord in the mail that I had left up in Virginia, so I should be able to post some pictures of my house and of FIEA pretty soon.

We had a going away party in Virginia Beach. Not everyone I wanted to be there was able to make it. Still, it was fun.

The couple of days immediately following the party were hectically spent trying to pack all my earthly possessions into a ten foot Uhaul. The drive was last Tuesday, the eighth. I left at 9:30AM in my car. I was to be the vanguard for the Uhaul which left exactly twelve hours later with my brother at the controls.

The drive was long, but not as long as I originally anticipated. I had to make a detour through Gainesville to pick up my house key; but even with the more circuitous route it only took me thirteen hours to get to my new house. It took my brother twelve going the direct route in the truck.

My house is in a neighborhood in northern Orlando called College Park. I am near the Dubsdread golf club. It’s a great location–only three miles from FIEA. When I arrived I discovered that my housemates had not fully unpacked and the house was full of flea poison. I was exhausted from the drive, so I nestled up in a pile of boxes and slept.

The next couple of days (wed. – fri.) were spent cleaning and fumigating the house and then unpacking the truck, which had arrived on Wednesday morning. On Friday I was back on the road again, still headed south.

I dropped Andy (my brother) off at the airport on Friday morning and promptly made a wrong turn trying to get on the turnpike. The turnpike runs from Ocala, through Orlando, down to Miami. It took me about three point five hours to get to Miami. I arrived just in time to meet up with G and her friends, trade my car for one of theirs, and head south again. This time I was headed to Key West.

Key West was amazing. G’s friends provided beautiful accommodations for us and took us out on their boat. We had beautiful weather to enjoy boating and coral reef snorkeling. Now I want a boat. The town was lovely as well, if perhaps a tad too warm. We went to the Hemingway house and saw the cats with many toes and did other touristy things you should do while you’re in Key West. I took lots of photos of places and people. It was good to get to know G’s friends a little better.

On Sunday afternoon we headed back to Miami to get back to our normal lives. I stayed in south Florida until Tuesday, when I made the drive back to Orlando.

My first impressions of Orlando are not exactly positive. It’s sort of like a white-trash Vegas. I’m from Virginia Beach and Orlando looks like a city the size of all of Hampton Roads that consists entirely of the ugliest, most garish, most commercial parts of Virginia Beach Boulevard mashed up with the strip. I suspect I’ll find some nice enough areas after I’m here for a while.

My house seems nice. I’ll post about it later. I’m living with two art students in the same program as me. It seems like we have a lot in common and will get along well. We were all three a little apprehensive about starting at FIEA because the program’s still young and unproven. I can’t speak for my housemates, but my own fears were assuaged by our orientation on Wednesday.

There are about forty students in my cohort group at FIEA. The divide is like this: approximately one third (14, I think) are programmers like me, approximately one third (13?) are producers, ten are artists, and three (including one of my housemates) are “technical artists,” which basically means they are going to try to balance the art workload with the programming workload. It should be interesting to see if they are successful; especially because the technical director of the program made it sound like the programming track is going to be extremely taxing. The students come from a wider background than I might have expected. For one thing, there are a lot more out of state students than I thought there would be. The gender balance is pretty unbalanced, to say the least. There are two women in our incoming class. I thought there would be at least four, in keeping with the industry average of ten percent.

I thought it was interesting that some of the students haven’t even worked out their financial aid information or signed their registration agreements, despite the fact that classes start next week. All the students are required to be there at 9:00AM Monday morning for the rest of the orientation process: badges, laptops, parking passes, etc. Our laptops look pretty sick. They are high-end Dell workstation models. I am pretty excited about having a nice semi-portable computer.

My first class is at 10:30AM on Monday. It’s a programming class. On the first day the professor is giving us a three hour test which “most people will fail” to assess what material we already understand and what material he should cover in the class. I’m not too worried about it, though it’s been a couple years since I wrote anything in C or C++.

I will post about my other classes next week after I’ve had each of them at least once.

I’m wrapping up my next-to-last day at work at it feels really weird. Tomorrow will probably be a short day. After I pack up my desk there won’t be much point in my sticking around for the whole day. I’ll be going out to lunch with my coworkers, of course, but after that I’ll probably head home.

I should be picking up a Uhaul on Monday and packing it up to drive down to Florida on Tuesday. I should be getting in late Tuesday night. Uhaul hasn’t contacted me yet to tell me where to pick up the truck, but they have until Sunday. The truck was $600. My brother is driving down there with me–one of us in the truck, one in my car–and then he’s flying back here next Friday…

…Which is the same day I’m heading down to the Keys for a little arrr and arrr. FIEA orientation is on the 16th. I’m really excited. (Duh.) I’m living in a house a couple miles from the FIEA building (downtown Orlando) with two other students, both of whom are in the art track. I haven’t met them yet, so I hope we get along okay.

I will, of course, update with more details after the move.