See You at Gamefest 2011

August 17, 2011 //

Time to take XNA and Windows Phone goodness to the Washington State Convention Center this coming Monday and Tuesday!

For those that are registered for the event, I hope you’ll join me for the Windows Phone track; I’ll be giving two talks on Day 1:

MONDAY, AUGUST 22, 2011

10:00 AM to 11:10 AM
“From The Ground Up: Windows Phone Game Development”
ROOM 620

2:35 PM to 3:30 PM
“Shiny New Features for Windows Phone Developers”
ROOM 620

We’ve got ten more fantastic talks lined up for Windows Phone game development afficionados, from game studio postmortems, to independent developers sharing the secrets of ad revenue in games, to tech luminaries in Xbox LIVE and the Advanced Technology Group outlining brand-new features arriving on Windows Phone that are sure to delight.

If you haven’t signed up already, online registration closes this Friday, so be sure and get registered if you plan to attend this event!

For all the details, see www.microsoftgamefest.com. See you there!

Tags conference, game development, gamefest, games, microsoft, mobile, windows phone, xbox, xna

Categories Game Development and XNA

One-Eyed Gaming: Making the Most of My Monocular Vision

August 5, 2011 //

The one admittedly dubious plus about having a medical order stamped “BRAIN INFECTION”: it gets you service.

A little over a week ago, I woke up with double vision, worse in the morning and at night. I gave it three days, figuring something about my heathen lifestyle was simply catching up to me. On Friday, I casually took the continuing problem to the doctor.

What they saw, I still don’t fully understand. I hardly had time to react when the doctor signed an inpatient order, told me to call my wife, and before I understood what had happened, had me on my back in a Stryker cart, my only view a jungle of white ceiling tile and automatic double doors, with orders to get floated in a sea of IV antibiotics to control a potentially lethal infection that had spread to my brain.

“Hours count,” I remember the doctor saying, as I lay on a tilting table meant to draw my cerebrospinal fluid down by gravity into a waiting syringe stuck into the L3-4 space in my spinal column. After that, an MRI to find less-visible culprits, and an iodine-fueled angiogram CT to look for aneurysms, before spending a night in the hospital hooked up to a bag of bacteria-killing antibiotics.
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Tags call of duty, handicap, healing, measurement, medical, metrics, shooters, video games, vision

Categories Digital Life and Misadventures, Stupid Tricks, Smart PM, Travel, Friends, and Family

Stupid Tricks, Smart PM: Dissecting a Toast

July 28, 2011 //

Feeling squished? Like you’re unable to get your message across, pinned between organizations or competing interests? Blame our modern world.

I’ve told you how much email I receive. And I’m only a ground-level Program Manager. You should expect real decision makers to get three to five times that amount. With that much information load, reading isn’t really a first-strike option for dealing with an inbox – it’s a last resort. How can you ensure that your carefully-crafted communication is going to get noticed?
Read the rest of this entry »

Tags communication, development, email, microsoft, organization, outlook, writing

Categories Stupid Tricks, Smart PM

A New Book is Beginning [feat. Edits from the ONA]

July 10, 2011 //

Note: The Office of Narrative Affairs has reviewed this post for narrative security. In very rare cases, some material may be redacted. Your future enjoyment is important to us.

I knew I’d feel the itch again at some point. Losing my shot at Angry Robot books with Hash reminded me that life is a game of constant production, and really, I’ve always envisioned Hash as one of a (loose) trilogy. With great pleasure, I announce the start of work on Pulp, the second in this series of books.

True to the title, Pulp will be tilted toward noir-style storytelling and aesthetic but still within the world and timeline that housed Hash‘s City of the Future. Where did it start? It started with my fascination with the unsung hero of the noir world: the Hotel Detective (link, only mildly related).

And just to kick things off, I present a few notes that I’d taken over the last day or two about some of the twists and turns:

“Hotels” are actually ██████: the detectives themselves reside in ██████, as ███ but hold a single ████
Tommy and Marissa, after ██████, stumble into this world in the ███████
The big reveal: The world has actually been ███████
“Andy” is a mysterious ██████.
Andy is thought by Tommy and Marissa to be ████, but then discover he’s ████████ by ███████ in Hash.

As you can see, there’s a lot to ████ and I’m incredibly ██████ to ████ as soon as possible. Stay tuned, and of course, I’ll be working out other angles for Hash to see the light of day.

Tags info-horror, pulp, writing

Categories Writing and Bookish Things

Living in a World Without “Done”

July 4, 2011 //

Sit right back, and I’ll tell you a tale of a grand world where people, smart people just like you, put software in boxes and shipped it – without patches, without updates – and called it done.

What? You don’t care? That’s good; you shouldn’t. It wasn’t the right way to do business, and it’s over besides. These days, it’s not about finishing one thing one time. It’s about finishing everything, faster, all the time. The big challenge for any worker has been with how to get to done in a world where done simply doesn’t exist.

I know you remember from my earlier post that I’ve still got a lot to learn about finishing projects; it seems doubly important as we all adjust to a world where every project, from games to simple social communication is a service with decades-long updates and patch plans. So, how can you throw off a project that’s “done enough” and escape a world of endless patching for everything you make? I’ve been fighting this battle for years; I’ll share the lessons I’ve learned.

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Tags development, management, microsoft, negotiation, organization

Categories Digital Life and Misadventures, Game Development and XNA, Stupid Tricks, Smart PM

Time for a Break: Ribs!

June 19, 2011 //

I wanted to take a moment this Father’s Day and share with you a recipe that’s become a fast favorite around these parts: Smoked Dr. Pepper-n-Honey Baby Back Ribs.

You’ll want a grill that can smoke. A Weber with smoke chips works great. Or, if you’re a Traeger owner like me, simply keeping a controlled temperature will do fine.

You’ll also want to buy the real-sugar Dr. Pepper, the kind with the old-timey font and iconography. Having real sugar is a must. Get honey, too, which kind won’t matter too much.

This recipe will take six to six-and-a-half hours, so be ready with that grill by noon if you want to eat these ribs by suppertime. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags barbecue, cooking, parties, ribs

Categories Travel, Friends, and Family

What I Learned from Startup Weekend

June 18, 2011 //

With a week’s worth of retrospection, I feel like I can look back on Seattle Startup Weekend and try to distill some lessons down from it.

I suppose it’s worth saying that these lessons come hard-earned; my company of eight people produced a viable prototype, but failed to land any prizes in the final competition against the twenty-one other startups at the Weekend; I have some ideas as to why.

So This is What the Future Looks Like

For those that haven’t been, the Weekend is a little surreal. It’s entirely based around tech startups – and a surprisingly homogenous class of web-app-like technology at that. I suspect that the negligible cost of remixing today’s information economy has allowed something of a gold rush mentality, complete with the shabby chic and messenger-bag cultural tide that carries tomorrow’s gurus.

My own part was as makeshift team leader – I had a dream of starting up a game company and racing to a first prototype in 48 hours, using a mixture of the Unity engine and backend metrics through an analytics engine like MixPanel.

I found out quickly that games weren’t really represented during this weekend. Information mashups, yes, automated forms, sure, but not games. Maybe they weren’t known, maybe nobody cared. Whatever the case, our initial team of three were the only game developers willing to represent there, when all was said and done.

Undaunted, I pitched the game company idea during the Friday “speed-dating” portion of the weekend, and it stuck well enough – out of the 60 ideas that were looking for teams, mine made the final cut of 20. By Friday night, my initial team of three had become a team of eight. By Saturday at noon, I promised, we’d have our game idea chosen and coding started.

It took us until Sunday afternoon to have everything done; we’d fought through idea changes, tech failures, sickness and absences, and a metric ton of conflicting priorities to come up with something viable – and a business plan around it – to show off to investors Sunday evening.

Thinking back on it, we really made a lot of mistakes.