Category Archives: miscellaneous

No More GDC Austin

Well, not the usual GDC Austin, at least. It seems that GDC has decided to reformulate (and rename) the former GDC Austin as GDC Online, which is now geared towards “connected games including casual, MMOs, virtual worlds, and social networking games.” So instead of a smaller version of the more general GDC, it’s now focusing primarily on online games.

I’m disappointed, but I think I can understand the move. I really liked having a smaller, more accessible GDC than the big one in San Francisco. It probably makes more sense to have a meeting that focuses on a particular area of game development, rather than just another “mini” GDC, especially with the rise of other conferences and meetings like PAX and IndieCade, both of [More...] Read the rest

Also posted in indie games | 2 Responses

The Brew Turns Two

Programming alert: The Monk’s Brew officially turns two tomorrow.

As far as blogs go, that’s hardly enough to impress anyone. My two initial reactions are (1) I’m startled that I’ve stuck to it even this long, and (2) sweet, another way to mark the passing of the years while Vespers still isn’t finished. So, for those of you keeping score at home: four years of development, two years of blogging, zero finished indie games. Closer, but not there yet.

This is not a high volume, high visibility blog by any stretch of the imagination, so I appreciate all (ten) of you who stop by here every once in a while to check up on things and see if the furniture has been moved around at [More...] Read the rest

Posted in miscellaneous | 2 Responses

In Backups I (Should) Trust

I never was much of a backup person until I started on the Vespers project. As things progressed, I realized how much content there was to manage, and how important it was going to be to protect it from loss. So somewhere along the way I became a backup fanatic. By my count, I believe I now have somewhere around six active backups of my data, some full backups, some partial. Let me see if I can remember them all.

My main backup is a clone of my desktop development machine. I use an awesome program called SuperDuper! for this. It basically just makes an exact clone of my computer’s internal drive onto a secondary internal drive. I have that running nightly, so at any [More...] Read the rest

Also posted in Vespers | 5 Responses

Congratulations, You’ve Been Kickstarted

In what will amount to essentially a formality, the Jason Scott Sabbatical is set to be officially Kickstarted in just a few hours.

Scott, the digital historian, archivist, and documentarian (not to mention unusually entertaining writer and speaker) responsible for such intense goodness as Textfiles.com, archiving Geocities, the highly recommended BBS Documentary, and the soon-to-be-almost-certainly-highly-recommended text adventure documentary GET LAMP, is going on paid sabbatical. Scott recently lost his day job, and since he was doing all of this wonderous stuff on the side in his spare time, not having a steady income seriously jeopardized future progress on these projects. So he took matters into his own hands and, thanks to Kickstarter, a whole mess of supporters stepped up to the [More...] Read the rest

Posted in miscellaneous | 1 Response

Steve’s Cell Phone Number

So one of the cooler things that happened at GDC Austin took place at the Speaker’s Party, a nice rooftop patio party for all of the speakers at the conference with, happily enough, an open bar. I was there in Austin by myself, and I’m not the most extroverted person by nature, so mingling at a social event where most people seem to know each other and I know zero isn’t exactly my comfort zone. But hey, open bar.

So I got my precious free drink, scanned the crowd, and tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do next.

I finally saw someone I recognized, but only barely; Tom Abernathy, one of the advisors of the Writers’ Summit. I knew a [More...] Read the rest

Also posted in interactive fiction | 5 Responses