Has it really been three weeks since I updated?! In my defense, it's been crazy. And not always in a good way. I'm constantly torn between keeping my blog accurate and wanting to focus on the positive things. Suffice it to say that I've been on a mental/emotional rollercoaster. Every time I think I've gotten off, I'm plummeting downwards on another drop. There are times when the rollercoaster goes up. How long it stays up though is a crapshoot. That said, a lot of good things have happened this month too!
I finally went to my first game jam (!!). Molyjam Duex was held July 5th-7th at the New School Game Club. We made a platformer called Return to Sender. What did I do? Haha! I spent the weekend co-writing the creepy love letters that appear at the top of the screen. We were all working really piecemeal. So I had no sense of what everything would look like until it was put together. In retrospect, there are things in the writing that I would've changed. Still, I had a lot of fun. It was really great working on a team! =D
Earlier this month, I got a job offer as a QA Tester (!!). After a lot of consideration and back and forth and gathering input of all kinds, I turned the position down. This was incredibly difficult because I've been feeling particularly antsy and useless lately. There were a lot of red flags about the company's upper management though. To top it off, the commute would've been a bitch and the pay was meh (i.e. not enough for me to move out). I don't have any regrets about turning it down. The biggest downside is that it means I'm back to the search.
The Universe works in strange ways though. A little after I turned down the QA tester position, I began helping Last Limb promote their Kickstarter campaign for their game Organic Panic. I first saw them demo the game at the NYC Games Forum demo night in March. It's a puzzle platformer with amazing physics effects and super cute characters. I don't normally care for platformers (because nothing in life should be determined by my ability or inability to time a button press), but the puzzle aspect of using the physics and the characters' powers is really fun. (I got to play it the week before last~ nyaha!) Most of what I've been doing to help is reaching out to game news sites and telling them about the Kickstarter. It's not hard, but it's incredibly time consuming looking up the sites' contact info, attaching images to emails, following up on previously ignored emails, etc. Thankfully (!!), we got two articles (YAY!) -- one in GamePolitics and one in Eurogamer -- and a shout out from Blue's News. The press has helped generate some traffic and yield more backers. That's been awesome, but there's still more to do. I only hit the top 50 game news sites. Up next for this weekend is sites 100 to 200. Ugh. It's gonna be fun.
In other work things, I feel compelled to mention how things are going with GoPrezzo. We launched in the UK earlier this month (also YAY!). Admittedly, it's hard for me to find interesting things to say about what I've been doing because it's been very much the same all this time. I post to their Facebook page daily. Every few weeks, I write up a blog post. Every month, I attend the NYC Games Forum demo night (which is this coming Tues, in fact).
One of the more interesting things I can say is that GoPrezzo has introduced me to the world of community management... which I'm finding I really enjoy. I used to think it was a nothing position, just a title given to some social media intern. The more I've learned, the more I've come to realize it's a legit role. I suppose with the importance of social media nowadays, everyone is trying to reach out to their user base. It's not something I ever thought I'd be doing. So I'm pleasantly surprised to find how much I like it. It has its toes in the marketing side of things, but it's less business-y and so much more fun. I recently read a fun Buzzfeed piece on 26 Signs You Work in Social Media.
Phew, this post is getting incredibly long. Wrapping it up, in addition to all the good things, I'm so behind on a number of things. I finally started working on a map for the LinkedIn project that I joined. Previously just called Ruby RPG, the title is Tribe Banished. It's my fault how far behind I am. That's not the only thing I'm far behind on either. I mentioned before that I'm working on a platformer in GameMaker. Ugh. I still need to finish that. Even if it's broken and crappy. I can't say much about what it is at the moment beyond the fact that I really need to finish.
Probably due to my mental/emotional exhaustion, I've skipped out on a lot of events too. I was super psyched about Phoenix Perry's Code Liberation class before. But at this point, I've missed so many classes I'm not sure I'll be able to catch up. In a similar vein, last last week I meant to go to Come Out & Play, a festival on physical games. That Friday, I had something else going on and couldn't make it.
As I started off saying, there've been a lot of good things and some not-so-good things. I try to remind myself that that's just life. It's hard to do that though when my brain gets spacey. I like ending posts by talking about upcoming things, nut there aren't any big things coming up. So, vaguely, here's to hoping the rest of the month/summer/year will be mostly good things!!
