Why do I feel like it’s always on me to save the day?

I’ve noticed this trend with me. Maybe it’s because I was never a leader type back in my childhood. Nobody trusted me and nobody believed in me. Now here in FS people do and maybe I feel too much like it’s my obligation to do everything for everyone. To be THAT guy. I kinda stuck in limbo about how I feel about it too. I guess this is #oneaday right?

Day.Better()

So today started out horrible. I woke up after little to no sleep all grumpy like still feeling miserable. Our team had a meeting with Rob Coble the Career Development Industry Outreach Manager. He enlightened us on the resume building process and touched up on networking (a subject I happen to like).

Afterwords I got a text from my roommate notifying me that my electricity had gotten cut. This is a cause of an on going falling out between my two parents. Awesome, right? So on top of all of the crap this week I had that hit me. But things quickly got better as I was given a deadline. I work amazing under pressure so this was a blessing in disguise. I swiftly finished my task for my deadline and instantly felt better.

Soon afterward I met up with someone who I generally enjoy being with. This made me infinitely more happy as I went on to dinner. After dinner I came back and saw this person again just to get another dose of awesome.

Amazingly right after I got a text confirming that all of my issues this past week have been resolved and life can return to normal. It's like all of the weights on my back were suddenly lifted and I could work to my potential again.

Watch out final project, I'm back.

Meh.Feel();

I haven't been feeling so hot these last couple of days. I don't really know if it's from one reason or a multiple but SOMETHING IS causing it. I received some terrible news yesterday and I haven't really felt like working since then. I've been so angry and saddened that I can't really keep focus on this project. I really hope this changes because I WANT to make an amazing game and I WANT to be excited about work but as of right now I'm not. I feel like I'm constantly letting my team down as of late as I haven't really been on task these last couple of assignments. I mean I only have one more task to do but I feel like if life hadn't decided to crap on me I woulda had this done last week. I mean I can't even play the Halo: Reach beta anymore. I need to relax I think. I hope we meet code freeze so I can just get some time to myself.

Blog schedule.

As production picks up and the Halo: Reach beta goes on blogging will go down to a one day a week thing. Sorry :(

Impending Awesome!

So today was a pretty relaxing day in terms of work. A bit of my work that was planned for this milestone got changed around. Yesterday was interesting as our team had some issues with re-structuring our game but we had our EP come in and sort things out for us.

Feature Frag 1 is now about polishing and completing our CORE gameplay mechanics. As the rendering guy on the team I'm more tasked with fixing the art pipe line and helping out with feedback withing our game. All in all a short and sweet day!

Also the Halo: Reach Beta starts early tomorrow for special people! I hope I get in early! I really can't wait to play the game, it looks like they've improved so much on their last game! A ton of the new gameplay mechanics have me excited! Anyways, thats all for tonight!

Cathedral.Built("Yeah, we did");

So the proof of concept milestone presentations went extremely well! Dark Matter is looking quite nice if I do say so myself. After long team-wide 19 hour crunch days for the last 5 days we all took the night off to relax and rest up for whats to come. I DID say that we at Avant-Garde were going to be SPRINTING towards our goal of finishing Dark Matter and blowing people away.

While we have hit our fare share of blockers it seems that we have been able to overcome them time after time. We no longer have team issues for now, we recovered our build from an alienbrain crash mid submission, AND our artists were able to re-rig and edit the assets just in time for a late sunday submission.

Unfortunately we had to push past code freeze because of our set backs but they extra time really allowed us to push our idea on to the players and show them what exactly we're about doing. The next two days will be filled with modifying the technical documentation and fixing bugs/hacks in our code base.

It's been a tough week. Good night.

"Assembling a cathedral out of a hurricane"

Yesterday I ran what we call in the video game industry a "crunch". Well whats a crunch? Why is it useful? Why is it bad? Is it a bad sign? Fear not readers. I'm going to answer all of these questions.

What is a crunch?
Essentially a crunch is when a person works and pours hours and hours past the scheduled and mandated work to get their work done/make their work better.
Why is it useful?
Crunch, for the most part, makes you get your shit together. Crunch happens usually around a milestone turn in. Be it an internal milestone or an external one crunch is when you devote every second of those days before the turn-in to working. I LOVE crunch because I work amazing under pressure. Crunch, however, takes a toll on your quality of life. Make sure you plan a crunch before a free day. Coma days are amazing.
What is a coma day?
A day you devote to sleeping past 12 hours.
Why is a crunch bad?
During crunch it's possible to completely break your game. Crunch is spawned by a multitude of reasons: Your behind on your work, you want to cram as much as you can into your game, or you need to do other peoples work to do yours.
Is it a bad sign?
Usually crunch is a bad sign. Unless it's voluntary. 

So why am I talking about crunch?
Yesterday I worked a 19 hour work day. With only 3 hours of sleep before then and when I woke up for today's 8 hour work session. I got my work done a day ahead of schedule AND I was able to get it into our build.

So our game has rendering now which is amazing but we're behind. VERY, VERY BEHIND. I've been stressed but now I am trying VERY, VERY hard to keep cool. Today I'm going to rest for a long time before tomorrows work session. I'm crunching again, I WANT a good game.

Hurricane warning:
So today myself, Brian my teammate, and David another teammate had an incident. This revolved around some personal attacks from David to myself and Brian and we weren't going to put up with this. The way we were attacked today is completely un-professional and un-acceptable. I'm dissapointed with not only what happened today but also how it affected our work cycle today. Constant setbacks aren't a good thing and we need to get ready for POC or FF1 is going to end up just as poorly.

I'm just going to use tonight to relax, calm down, and relieve stress. I'm enjoying today as much as I can because I know for the next 3 months I'm going to be SPRINTING to this gold turn in. I want this project to shine like nothing else before it and to pull this off we need to remove blockers like incidents like these and potentially, if it comes down to it, the people behind it.

I've spent two years of my life training to be able to do this. This project is my statement of what I learned and what I can do and I am not going to let ANYONE get in the way of that. If I have to crunch everyday I WILL. I am dedicated to this industry and I want my feelings and goals to be reflected in this game. I hate to sound so cut throat but that's how I need to be.

These two years of my life are GOING to be sent out with a bang. Of this I promise myself and my family who have supported me.

I apologize for this turning into a rant but I've got very, very mixed feelings right now.