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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.]]> MMOs http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry081024-080745 Michael Gribbin Fri, 24 Oct 2008 12:07:45 GMT http://www.theworldtakes.com/comments.php?y=08&m=10&entry=entry081024-080745 http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry081006-024652
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.

]]> Other Games http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry081006-024652 Michael Gribbin Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:46:52 GMT http://www.theworldtakes.com/comments.php?y=08&m=10&entry=entry081006-024652 http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080906-005312
Opinions appreciated.]]> Other http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080906-005312 Michael Gribbin Sat, 06 Sep 2008 04:53:12 GMT http://www.theworldtakes.com/comments.php?y=08&m=09&entry=entry080906-005312 http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080904-090852
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.

]]> Other http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080904-090852 Michael Gribbin Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:08:52 GMT http://www.theworldtakes.com/comments.php?y=08&m=09&entry=entry080904-090852 http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080720-155750
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.]]> Other Games http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080720-155750 Michael Gribbin Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:57:50 GMT http://www.theworldtakes.com/comments.php?y=08&m=07&entry=entry080720-155750 http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080709-181321
The first thing is Adam Martin's blog. He works for NCSoft, so he's already cool to a Lineage junkie like myself. But in an ultimate reversal of things, he's actually blogging about the systems that make Kongregate such an awesome destination! Check out the blog he wrote about our reputation systems.

Really good stuff in there -- and it's awesome to have someone writing so in depth about the site. I've been feeling a like we'd been getting looked over by the industry folks as he suggested, but clearly some are taking good notice :D

So that was rad, but the next awesome link comes from something Raph blogged a little bit back. It's a NY Times article about Eve's Council of Stellar Management player summit in Iceland. Really cool idea. At Kong we have a really good connection to a lot of our users. I talk to no less than 5 different users every day on instant messenger, and dozens through email on a daily basis. However, the people we chat with don't really have the same sort of goal as the folks in this article. It's a really cool idea. I'd love to experiment with something like that if it turns out to be a good idea for CCP.

Anyway, that's all for now. Email queue is HUUUUGE back to work!]]> MMOs http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080709-181321 Michael Gribbin Wed, 09 Jul 2008 22:13:21 GMT http://www.theworldtakes.com/comments.php?y=08&m=07&entry=entry080709-181321 http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080706-215735
I don't have much to say about the lunch. I learned a little bit about running a microtransaction system that will be applicable to my job. I was largely on the same page as Daniel when it comes to this indie industry of online games, and the ways in which we earn our money.

Oh well, should stop wasting time typing here, and get back to making games - right?

Just thought it was worthy of mention :)

Addendum: In an effort to make that lunch sound much cooler than it was, I may have excluded the fact that I would not have gone had Jim not invited me, and Matt and Greg had not allowed me to go and represent our community/support side of the site.

So to clarify, Jim and Emily are much cooler than pirates -- even though Emily lied by telling me that San Francisco would be cold. Well, half lied. It's cold between the heat waves.

=.=]]> MMOs http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080706-215735 Michael Gribbin Mon, 07 Jul 2008 01:57:35 GMT http://www.theworldtakes.com/comments.php?y=08&m=07&entry=entry080706-215735 http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080629-215534
Turns out, we cant do that. On the other hand, at least it provided the impetus to spend our time wisely in game development while we're out here in the same room. I'm hoping the result will be a few games produced over the course of the summer, but maybe not. Who knows.

Other things going on:

On Wednesday of last week the entire company of Kongregate was together in the same building for the first time ever! We went bowling. I was not that great, but not that terrible either. We finished the game, climbed up on the roof of Kong HQ and got drunk.

Thursday, we planned a group activity of sailing around the bay. We all got on a boat, and sailed around the bay, past Alcatraz, under the Golden Gate Bridge, and saw lots of cool stuff. Unfortunately, it was incredibly cold, but still pretty cool. We went to dinner afterward at a pretty awesome Italian place, where our server noticed my 'mc chris live 2007' t-shirt, and struck up a conversation about it. I told him that Chris Pasley formerly worked at Adult Swim with mc chris, and we chatted with that dude for a while as we waited for our cab. It was almost as cool as being noticed for working for Kong. Being noticed for working with a guy who worked with a guy who does nerdcore rap is sort of cool... kind of...

Friday we did our company offsite, discussed the future of Kongregate and things like that. A motion was raised to turn off the site and go start a new company that sells grape-flavored apples. Unfortunately, we discovered that the graple business is a tough one to break into, so we decided the Kong will stay up and running for now, and we might even release Kongai soon! O_O!

Oh and there's a couple of other massively awesome things coming to the site soon. But such things will be made public in time I guess!

Fourth of July is this week. Hopefully will do something rad for that, and then get back to trying to make games at some point!



]]> Other http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080629-215534 Michael Gribbin Mon, 30 Jun 2008 01:55:34 GMT http://www.theworldtakes.com/comments.php?y=08&m=06&entry=entry080629-215534 http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080625-013420





Sorry for the blur/focus on that last one. It was getting dark, so we had to use a long exposure time setting, but my hands are quite shaky and it didn't work out very well.]]> Other http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080625-013420 Michael Gribbin Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:34:20 GMT http://www.theworldtakes.com/comments.php?y=08&m=06&entry=entry080625-013420 http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080621-145732 Sea Cliff, so we walked down through there and gazed upon large homes on our way to Baker Beach so we could see the Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific (sort of, its more like the bay than the ocean).

Anyway, we went down to the actual ocean at Ocean Beach last night. Its this rad beach nearby where people have bonfire party type events on most weekends, especially this weekend where it is hot as all hell. We didn't take any pictures, but generally speaking, it looked like this. (note: I had a better picture, but it was taken down after I direct linked to it...)

We even saw some dude doing this.

There were around 25 fires going up and down the beach, and a few hundred people walking between them. There were some people doing live music, just jamming with whoever brought an instrument so we sat and listened to that for a bit. Then we walked down and found a small fire and chilled with those people. They were a little younger than us, had all just graduated high school. So I shilled out some Kongregate information, told the one kid who knew of AddictingGames that he should definitely check our site out, passed out a few business cards, and ate their marshmallows. Went down to the water. Touched it. Manifest destiny complete.]]> Other http://www.theworldtakes.com/index.php?entry=entry080621-145732 Michael Gribbin Sat, 21 Jun 2008 18:57:32 GMT http://www.theworldtakes.com/comments.php?y=08&m=06&entry=entry080621-145732