John Zeitler

I’m gonna try an experiment with this blog over the next thirty days (since it’s not like I have much else to do in the meantime). I got to thinking about the way I’ve spent the last week: at work I’ve been focused on my tasks, getting myself ready for this coming month or so. But outside of work I’ve been a neurotic, frazzled mess because I’ve been bombarded with advertising. Not advertising from a marketing group, or advertising from a company, but advertising from people who I’m fairly certain aren’t being paid to advertise. It’s mostly been negative advertising, too: trashing certain products, implicitly praising others (or sometimes not so explicitly). Sadly, I’m just as guilty, which frustrates me to no end.

Fortunately, I have the chance to do something about it. So, for the next thirty days, I’m not going to write about any commercial products on this blog. None. If it’s a proper noun that’s not a person’s name (and, in the case of names, the person isn’t a celebrity or brand in their own right), I ain’t typing it here. It might not make a difference in the grand scheme of things– I almost certainly know it won’t– but it’s mostly just a way for me to gauge how easy or difficult it would be to “genericize” my life.

The thing is, I’ve complained at length about how we’re not supposed to be defined by what we own. If we allow our possessions to speak about us on our behalf, we quickly become slaves to them, because not everyone has the same perception of that object’s brand, make, or model. By tying what we have to who we are so closely, we objectify ourselves more than any sleazy magazine could possibly do– we become passive objects, things, instead of individuals acting on the world, people.

I’ll still post. It’s just that I’m going to be telling you more about what I’m doing, rather than what I’m doing it with. The Twitter feed is going to go generic too– heck, I can’t even say “Twitter” come tomorrow! The only exceptions to the rule are going to be e-mail (and even then only work-related e-mails) and technical forum posts (because it’s damnably hard to get help with a program when you can’t say the name of the program). Since we’ve got two days left in January, we’ll say that the product placement floodgates re-open on the first of March. Oh, and yeah, it’s not like I’m going to stop playing games or watching TV or anything like that– any Game Clear notices are going to be post-dated to the 1st as well.

And, on the off chance that you’re a corporation, celebrity, or other interest who might think this is going to be harmful to you somehow, first, please stop doing drugs. Second, more seriously, there is a way out of this. I will “unlock”, with full disclosure on this blog, the proper nouns and trademarks related to a company if and only if that company pays me $5000, cash, up front. That doesn’t mean I’ll post about it every day– just that, if I wanted to, I could. Third, there’s a catch: each time a company buys me out like that, the price goes up by a thousand dollars for the next one. (I don’t expect to make a single red cent on this, mind. Just tossing it out there in the interests of full honesty; every man has his price, after all.) Companies considering this, ask yourself: is word-of-mouth really that important to you? I could easily turn around and say that your company is a bunch of shallow, money-obsessed drones. That’s basically what years of negative advertising has created with word-of-mouth: six billion people who will more readily drag your trademarks through the mud than recommend you to anyone else.

Believe it or not, folks, tonight’s a busy night. So I’ll just leave you all with that little thought. Have a generic night, and tomorrow have a generic day.

There is something profoundly strange about sitting in my living room, dressed in a Professor Layton costume, killing some time before the convention by playing Gears of War.

See the previous post for the excuse.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, let me drop thirty-five hundred “I’m Done!”‘s on you right here:

Folks, I don’t advertise too much on my site, particularly not for A Civics Lesson. Granted, that may be why it’s garnered almost no attention whatsoever, but I think there’s another reason: it’s really hard to get caught up. Fortunately, I’ve managed to change that aspect.

You can now read each chapter in linear order as they are completed.. I recommend spending the next couple of days getting caught up through to the end of Chapter Five (it’s a doozy); Chapter Six will be done in a week or so, so you can catch it there then (or start here, now with the “next segment” tag), and from there I really recommend using the RSS Feed to stay current.

I’d also appreciate it if you folks could spread the word about the book again. Thanks.

Over the past couple of days, there have been some… interesting revelations regarding how well XNA Community Games have sold on the Xbox 360. To sum up the GamerBytes article in brief: ( they don’t… » )

Code work for the XNA Project Tech Demo is complete. Which is kind of a big deal. It could have been done yesterday if I had not been struck by a massive case of Lazy. Still, today is just as good, since it’s a whole nine days before I expected to have to code like crazy in order to get it up in time for Tekkoshocon. As I said on the Twitter feed, though, it’s not “done” done yet: there’s a handful of tweaks I need to make to the script in order to get it to a point where it really shows off what can be done. But, by the end of March, you folks will be able to download a demo that you can play, so you can finally find out what the hell I’ve been running off at the mouth about for three months. Just have a little more patience, please.

At the very least, I think I’ve earned the right to enjoy this convention.

Okay. I spent a bit more time working on the game last night, but today’s progress– even thus far– has been tremendous. I’ve got a preliminary loading screen, I’ve got things set up for dynamic loading (read: loading only what you need for the scene ahead of time, then unloading only that when switching scenes), I did up the character positioning setup and drawing code AND created artwork for the demo characters…

…and I got it running on Windows. It’s optimized for 720p right now (which means it’s WAY too big for average screens), so my biggest problem right now is getting the art rescaled to a standard size for the Windows version. I also have to set up an alternate control scheme, as I’m not going to demand that the people I’m giving this to have 360 controllers attached to their computers. Overall, I think I’m about 6 more hours away from a publishable alpha game (I chose not to put any music in for this alpha, beyond some sounds that will probably need to be replaced).

Those six hours are going to be next weekend, folks– I’m going to go enjoy the rest of this one, now that I can.

I’m still not feeling 100% better, but today has managed to be productive in spite of my hazy mindset. For example, I finished the script for the tech demo, figured out the preliminaries for sound and have working sounds in the demo, and fixed a VERY nasty bug that would have bit me in the ass if I didn’t catch it now. I really only have the character framework to do tomorrow, and then the hard part of getting the Windows version converted will begin. The XML assistant program I wrote was good in that it saved me a ton of typing, but on the other hand it’s not terribly helpful when it comes to assembling dialogue fragments– THAT part had to be done by hand in notepad. All in all, though, today was damn good for six hours’ worth of work.

I’m still holding off on the celebrations until I have the executable available for download. But I’m so very close.