Antipwn

Voting for the fifth Council of Stellar Management went live today. This is a player advocacy group that has been established by CCP to work with the dev teams in Eve online. The remit is to raise visibility of player issues and to help prioritise them in the dev schedule. I was an alternate in the last CSM which meant that I could take part in the closed debates and vote if a full delegate was absent but I couldn’t bring issues forwards myself. I’m running again as a candidate for CSM 5 and those of you with active Eve Online accounts can vote for me by following this link.

You’ll find my official campaign thread on the Eve forums here and my general campaign site is here.

Vote early, vote often and tell your friends. Voting is open from today through to the 19th of May.

Thank you for your support.

So Cuppycake asked a question that she thought would be controversial, namely ‘Are games designers who blog worth reading?’ Not particularly surprisingly (except to Ms Baribeau apparently), the answer was a resounding ‘depends’.

Now clearly I have a horse in this race as a games designer who blogs and so you should definitely be listening to me. It’s posited that there are 3 kinds of design blog (Scott Jennings adds a fourth in the comments):

1. Ivory tower theoreticians
2. Enthusiastic amateurs
3. Guys who know what they’re doing and show a good example

(Scott’s fourth category was ‘Guys who know what they’re doing but prefer to spew bile becasue it’s more entertaining than playing nicely”).

For what it’s worth the blogs I read regularly are all linked in the sidebar to the right and the vast majority of them are in category 3 with a few of Lum’s category 4s for the slow news days and you should read them too.

Once you’ve visited here of course.

Don’t worry, this isn’t about the new guy in charge over on the other side of the Atlantic it’s about something far more important than that. Me.

So as you all know by now, I’m off to pastures new. I’ll be leaving GOA on Friday and getting everything packed up to go to Germany next week. Over the past five years at GOA, I’ve filled a variety of roles and experienced some real highs and lows along the way. There have been disasters and triumphs and each of them has taught me something new and important. I would have learned a lot of those lessons in a different way if I’d had the choice but, you take what you’re given and make the best of it.

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Seeing as it’s becoming public knowledge, I need to do a bit of rumour control. It’s true that I handed in my notice at GOA yesterday, I am for the moment still employed there and won’t actually be leaving until the end of January.  I’ll be tidying up some loose ends here in Ireland and then jumping across to Germany to start a new job which takes me back to a development/design role.  If anyone’s interested, the game I’ll be working on is Parabellum and I’m enormously happy to be part of such an exciting project.

For various reasons I’m really not interested in talking too much about the circumstances of my leaving GOA, I will say that I’m going to be sad to leave some really awesome people behind and that I will be taking a lot of very good memories away with me. Anything beyond that is a matter for my exit interview and some carefully written parting emails. I will have been here nearly five years when I leave and it’s been a valuable experience every day. Not always good times but I don’t regret any of my time here.

Finally in my last blog post Belsameth asked if I had more pictures of my Grumlok miniature in progress. I forgot to upload them for ages but I finally got around to it today so here’s a gallery of all the pictures. The darker ones were taken with my digital camera at home while the brighter ones were taken by our studio A/V guy here hence the stark difference in quality between them.

I haven’t abandoned this blog, I’ve simply been in a bit of a grey area as to what I want to do. As many of you will probably know, my work has changed somewhat in the last few months. I’m not particularly able or willing to talk about it here though.

Things are happening, there are bright things on the horizon and some exciting changes on the way which I’ll expand on in time. Meanwhile, read my Grumlok painting guide. I had fun writing it and I hope that people will link me up with pictures of their completed work too.

A proper update coming soon, in the meantime, I’m not dead and I still have opinions to share.

If you aren’t a veteran Games Workshop fan then this post will make no sense to you. Shoo! Go away! This one isn’t for you.

So at the weekend I was over in the UK indulging in my secret vice which happens to take place somewhere between Nottingham and Derby. Many years ago I lived in Nottingham and so I like to visit friends and my favourite stores whilst I’m there and so it was that as I was killing an afternoon before the flight home, I found myself in the Friar Lane Games Workshop store. Had a bit of a chat with the staff as you do then I browsed the books for a while. Not long after, another chap walked in and the staff did their customary greeting and sizing up routine to determine if he was a true believer or simply a confused passer-by. As it happened it was Jake Thornton – former White Dwarf editor, games developer, Fanatic Press manager and all round Nice Chap. If you cut him crossways you’ll probably find the letters of Warhammer going through him like a stick of rock. Needless to say the staff didn’t recognise him and so he and I had a bit of a reminisce and a general catching up with what had happened since I had left GW.

The accidental meeting however did remind me of possibly my favourite memory of my time in GW. We (being the games development team) had gone into Nottingham to buy reference books to use as source material. As it happened, the big Waterstones was right opposite the GW store on Friar lane in those days (this is when the Design Studio was still on Castle Boulevard and so it was only a short walk round the corner for us). On the way out we decided that we’d say hi to the guys in the store and so we crossed the road and wandered in. We had Andy Chambers, Nigel Stillman, Tuomas Pirinen, Gav Thorpe, Ian Pickstock, Warwick Kinrade, Andy Kettlewell and myself. Apart from me (who was still pretty new) all of these guys were featured multiple times with mugshots in every issue of White Dwarf, we barely had time to let the door close behind us before the over-eager red shirt came bounding up to us.

‘So’ he says, ‘Do you guys play the games then or are you looking to have a demo?’

Good times.

Don’t worry I’ll talk about computer games again soon.

I need to gather some stats and I’d like to ask readers or visitors to this blog for their assistance.

I can’t imagine that any one reading this blog doesn’t fit the profile but just in case, please only answer if you are a player of computer games.

All I need you to do is to copy and paste the following questions into the comments field and add your answer to each one where relevant. You don’t need to register to take part but please don’t submit the poll multiple times.

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