Just two links to totally freak your trip, maan.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081023/ap_ ... tar_murder

http://license.icopyright.net/user/view ... c2MzI4NA==

The line is blurred. I find it all very interesting :D

Unrelatedly, that image I posted in the last blog at the start of this month. Well, we've had a hard time getting that off the ground. But some other dope shit is going down, so whatever.

Indie life is good so far. I hope Im able to make enough cash to justify it, but the freedom alone is fantastic :)

Back to chasing the dream.

As of this Friday, I will no longer be employed by Kongregate. It was a fantastic year and a half, and I learned so much from Jim and Emily and everyone there. There's a couple reasons why I'm doing it -- but the primary reason is that I plan to work on games full time. I want to chase the dream.

Dave and I have begun pre-production of our first game with me as a full time developer, and it's looking great. We hope to blow away the expectations of everyone who didn't really understand or dig Oh Buoy by creating an amazing action game.

Here's a bit of concept art for the main character, not fully colored. Art by Joseph King.

My phone broke in Seattle. I need a new one, but there are many from which to choose. I have two requirements. I would like a QWERTY keyboard, and I would like for Gmail to *NOT* work on my phone. I do not want to be checking my emaail in the brief times when I'm away from my machine.

Opinions appreciated.

I'm back home. That was an extreme summer!

For those who read the blog post about my dad a few months back and may happen to still be curious, he called me on my birthday, and we're working to restore years of not talking. So that's very rad.

Last week was spent in Seattle with some very fantastic people including, but not limited to Alison Huffman, Matthew Luther, and natives Josh Frommer, and David Lamb. I can say with incredible confidence that I have never been happier or enjoyed myself more than I did during that extended weekend of good times, and it made an extremely suitable end to an extraordinary summer.

I'm back home now. In a new house, with a cool office basement. I've learned already that it's hard to tell what time of day it is from down here in the windowless underworld, and having jetlag from the west coast does not make that experience any less disorienting.

...I should backtrack and talk more about Seattle! I was up there for Penny Arcade Expo 2008, which was hugetastic and wonderful. Of course, we ended up spending more time outside of the con exploring Seattle, but thats just because all those core gamers scare us web game folks. I think they're upset with us for trying to undermine their wonderfully geeky past time.

A few great things in no particular order:

Pacific Northwest has delicious microbrews, some of which are localized to the street that you're on. Pike Pale Ale (brewed most likely somewhere on Pike Street) had never been tried by my beer drinking friend Josh who lives a few miles away in another part of town. I find that to be really cool.

Felicia Day, nerd hottie of Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog and The Guild fame, came out on stage and performed Still Alive with Jonathan Coulton during his amazing Friday night set.

Buckley's. I have nothing else to say about Buckley's other than that it's great. Here's where you can find it. You should go there and hang out with Josh Frommer.

The Warhammer Online trailer was sweet, and Aion played very smoothly. I have high hopes for it, but I know the stigma of Korean games will relegate it to a modest success at best. Probably won't do bad in Europe though.

Unrelated to Seattle, but related to Warhammer, Mr. Mark Jacobs, co-founder of Mythic and reigning VP of EA-Mythic, started a blog and seems to have put a whole lot of energy into his first night of blogging.. At that rate, I'm sure he'll burn himself out and stop blogging soon, but the post about Warhammer's success was interesting to me. As I posted in the comments, I've heard many great things about WAR, so I'm sure it will at least meet the benchmarks that Mythic is searching for.

Now I'm going to go work, because a 6 day long weekend leaves things a little crazy.

Oh, final sidenote: I'm writing this blog post from Ubuntu Linux running on a CD. Why? Vista crashed on me again. Having Davison come over later so we can make an image of my Hard Drive just to see if data recovery is even possible. I will officially be upgrading from Vista back to XP after this ordeal. Two driver failures causing complete loss of data is enough for me.

If you're a true fan, you may have noticed that the Oh, Buoy! preloader contains a short clip that reads "FENGRUSH" in green text.

Fengrush, historically, if the name of a dwarf in Lineage 2 that was operated by my good friend Steve Boland. I always found it funny that in Lineage 2 you'd be hard pressed to find a roleplayer, but if you put anyone in control of a male dwarf, they suddenly transformed their mannerisms to that of a disgruntled stout little man. Fengrush was no exception. I wish I still had the video from 2004 or so of Fengrush charging bravely into enemies and being slaughtered. These days, Fengrush is the name of Steve's Orc Destroyer on the Teon server who smashes skulls and shows no mercy, but the point of this whole thing is that I've decided to name my game operations after him.

So, back around early Spring when we were putting finishing touches on Oh Buoy, I met a fellow named Smith. He's a web designer from Romania, and has amazing talent. He's been slowly building up a site to host these games for me, and I think it's finally in state where others can start to appreciate it. Check out the fully functional blog at Fengrush.com.

I think it's actually a lot better than this canned premade blog here at The World Takes. He's added custom emoticons, has a blog rating system, and you need to be a registered user to comment which prevents spam -- even if it is a little less convenient for everyone who doesn't want to register.

The whole layout is extremely green at the moment. I like it, but I think we might tone the logo down. The green low contrast logo is a little much for me. But overall, I think it looks awesome and couldn't ask for anything better.

Let me know what you think, either here or there.