Hey all. For the rest of the road trip story, check below. You'll notice that the look of the blog has changed; I built Lily a website over the weekend, and it made me itch to get in here and change up the colors and stuff. Anyway, since I haven't done a post all semester, I thought it was about time I did my usual rundown of all the stuff I'm working on right now. So, without further ado:

Ragnarokk: Yep, Ragnarokk is still in production. We're scheduled to be working on it all semester, and it will be displayed as part of this year's IMD Thesis Show exhibition in May. There are some screenshots, as well as music from the game, at PlayRagnarokk.com. Developments this semester include revising the art style, fixing everything that's still buggy or straight up broken from last semester, and the addition of an intro cinematic and hopefully an epic sea serpent boss battle.

Thesis Prep: As you might know, my MFA is a three year program. The first two years are spent in coursework, and the third year is devoted to the production of a thesis project. This semester we're taking a thesis prep course, where we figure out what we want our theses to be, do some preliminary research and prototyping to see if our idea is feasible, and do a proposal at the end of the semester to get faculty approval for the project we settle on. I'm still working out a lot of the details on mine, but I know it will be a game, it will be multiplayer, and if at all possible it will involve players facing each other instead of a screen. I have some thoughts on how I can make this happen, but I'll do a separate post about that later, when I have a better idea of what I can/want to build. I am pretty sure that there will be custom hardware involved, since I'd like to do away with being tethered to a PC/console and a screen. I will probably regret this by, oh, say September of next year. Ah well.

Interactive Design/Production: How ambiguous can a course title be?! This class is, as near as I can tell, devoted to giving us techniques and tools for designing and building...stuff. So far, we've designed our own memorial monuments (mine was a holiday), made objects that were designed to be put in a fire (I experimented with household chemicals to see if I could produce colored flame...I couldn't), had drawing lessons, and learned to build models using foamcore and glue. This class is always interesting, because I just have no idea what we'll be doing from week to week. One time, the professor came in and has us all play patty-cake for five minutes before we could start class. He wanted to establish a "good energy" in the room, he said. This is how I know that I'm in art school :-P

Experiments in Interactivity: This is another one of those "learning to build stuff" classes, although it focuses more directly on technology and interactivity. Our first assignment was to make an image or video for use in the Zemeckis Media Lab, a room where three of the walls are covered with a long continuous projection screen. I had a Play-Doh landscape with a little Lego guy in a Lego car that drove from one wall to the next all the way around the room. Our current project is being done in groups of four. My group is making a set of fun audio tools to be used in ZML, since that's the main lab for IMD grad students. One lets users who log into the classroom chat room (we run an AIM chat during large classes, where people can post relevant comments and Google links during lecture) generate sound effects by typing keywords in. "Crickets", "wompwomp", "laughtrack", things like that, just stuff that it would be funny to have access to during a discussion. Another tool is the one we're calling Grand Entrance, where you carry an RFID transmitter so that when you enter the room, a receiver knows that you walked in and starts playing theme music for you. We haven't built it yet, but my entrance music is totally going to be "Stayin' Alive" by the BeeGees. I love the idea of making an entrance to that song every time I have class or something in the lab :-)

Advanced Game Production: This is a class that's designed to just let us make a really cool game. We're making a game to be played in ZML, so we can take advantage of having the three projection walls. The game is designed for 6-8 people, and will use all three walls. Two walls will have a series of planets on them, with the last wall containing maps of the solar system. To play, users are divided into two teams who are competing to conquer all the planets in the solar system. You conquer a planet by going to that planet and getting the high score in an arcade-style game that occurs on that planet. You can also go to a solar system screen to see how your team is doing in terms of territory conquered, and you can play a "macro" game where you fly a little rocket to one of the planets in the solar system and harass the person who's trying to play the arcade game there by bombing the planet (making the arcade game harder). There's about 8 people in the class, and I am of course the only girl :-P We're making the game in Flash, which makes me extremely happy, because Flash is a tool I know something about (as opposed to the Torque and OGRE game engines that I didn't know at all). I'm actually not going to be very involved with the creative vision on this one, nor will I be producing. I'm going to be the network programmer, of all things, because I'm the only one who's used Flash in that way before. Should be veeerrrryyyy interesting for awhile but I think I've designed us a system that will work well to keep all the different screens and minigames and everything coordinated. Wish me luck!

Business of Games: This class is...interesting. The guy teaching it, Tom Frisina, is an exec at Electronic Arts, the largest publisher/developer in the video games industry. He's been teaching us a lot about corporate game culture, what it's like to work and do deals in that environment, etc. Of course, for any of us who aren't interested in working at a huge company like EA, or who aren't going into video games at all, a lot of this information isn't all that directly applicable. But Tom seems to know EVERYONE in the games business, and he's really great about helping students network and get internships/jobs at their chosen studios; he regularly gets people interviews with like, the owners and executive producers at studios, rather than the HR department or whoever. So we're all really nice to him :-) The way we see it, if we sit through the class and only half the content is relevant, well, at least we got an amazing business contact out of it. Plus some of the projects for the class are fun. Right now we're designing and pitching a game, as if for funding, based on a comic book series. My team has Preacher, a story about a Texan preacher who gets possessed by the forbidden child of an angel and a demon(granting him superpowers, of course) and then decides to seek out and confront God for not taking better care of the world. His vampire best friend and sharpshooter ex girlfriend come along for the ride, because what else would they do, I guess. It's a...challenging story to make a game of, to say the least. We have two weeks to design a game based on the comic, figure out how long it would take to make that game and how much it would cost, decide how it would fit into the current marketplace and who its target audience are, and develop a pitch presentation that we'll give to the professor and a couple of guest judges. We're pitching next Tuesday; here's hoping we win, or at least don't get last!

Liberty Under the Law game: I'm actually not sure what this game is about, haha. I know it's supposed to help teach high school students about American government and the Constitution, and that the initial prototype is being developed in Flash. I also know that Activision, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and KCET (the Los Angeles PBS station) are sponsoring it. The director of the project came to me and asked me to do Flash work for them, because the two developers they have are new to Flash. You see, I have developed a reputation in my department as a Flash expert; I should point out that I'm not actually a Flash expert in any sense of the word, I just know more than everyone else because nobody else has learned it yet. At any rate, I accepted a paid position as the team's technical producer, which basically means that I'll be figuring out how the game should be built and then providing technical assistance/tutoring/advice to the people who will actually have to build what I spec out. If you know me at all, you know that I am a pretty big fan of NOT coding, so I rather like the plan we have going here. I start next week, once the team leads get back from the GDC conference.

Thesis Show 2008: Just kidding. I'm not doing the thesis show this year, because it was such a major commitment (read: pain in the ass) last year. I liked the paychecks, but I could do without the 60+ hour weeks (in addition to classes) all through the last month of the semester. I may be called in to do some advising or light management near the end, but that's about it. Huzzah!

Man, I didn't think I was doing that much until I laid it all out. Sigh, isn't that always how it goes? Anyway, as per usual, I'll update on most of these projects as the semester progresses, so check back from time to time to see how things are going.

Yeah, I know. I'm a bad, bad blogger. I totally started the semester and stopped updating in the middle of the road trip story. Sorry about that :-/ Below is the rest of the road trip stuff, and then I'll go ahead and do another post later about what I'm working on this semester. Then we'll be all nice and caught up. Won't that be fun? Of course it will.

EPIC ROAD TRIP 2008: DAYS 3 and 4

So here's the Monterey Non-Smoker's Motel, where we stayed in Albuquerque. This was by far our favorite hotel of the trip. It was cute, and really clean, and the people who ran it were a sweet eastern european (we think) couple who'd clearly been running this place for ages. The room had a mini fridge and free wireless, and the bedroom was furnished like something you'd find in your grandma's house (I'm pretty sure the sheets were a pattern Grandma Sharon used to have, actually). If anyone is ever in Albuquerque, I'd definitely recommend this place.

For Day 3, we didn't have as much driving to do, so we decided to hang out in Albuquerque for awhile before heading out. We went down to the old part of town for lunch and shopping. You can see me here being very excited about lunch, which we ate at this great place on the main square. It was built in what looked to me like an old spanish mission and the food was SO GOOD. I had a "Navajo taco", which basically just meant taco stuff piled on top of grilled flat bread. I don't think it had anything to do with actual Navajos, but it was awfully tasty. There was a pitcher of excellent sangria, as well as fresh sopapillas with honey for dessert. I'm pretty sure that if I lived in Albuquerque, the staff of this restaurant would all know me by name. We also popped into a leather shop, a few souvenir shops and a really cool candy store. A lot of the candy was homemade, and it was all awesome, so we bought quite a bit. They had prickly pear gummies and stuff like that, plus a back room with, um...adult themed chocolates. We didn't exactly take pictures of that part, but it WAS extremely funny.

After lunch we got back in the car and headed for Phoenix. Here's a shot of the kind of countryside we were driving through. Mostly scrubland and lots of hills and rocks, although it was strange to see snow on the ground in the middle of what otherwise looked like fairly standard desert. We stopped along the way in a small town to get provisions, and found this place that boasted Native American silversmiths on site. That sounded neat, so we went in. It was so cool...two floors of cases full of handmade silver jewelry, a lot of it set with gems or shells. Sure enough, there were two or three artisans just hanging out and making stuff. The quality was good, and a lot of the pieces were beautiful. I have no idea why, but everything was half off the marked price, so we ended up with a silver ring for Lily and an opal-and-silver bracelet for me for under $100. Yay for souvenir jewelry!

So, these two pictures require a bit of explanation. See, along the highway right before the Arizona border, we drove by the most amazing billboard ever. It had dinosaurs on it, and it said "We sell knives and swords." Um, dinosaurs and swords? Of COURSE we were gonna stop. What we found was the Knife City Outlet, pictured above. No dinosaurs (still not sure what the deal was with the T-Rex and whatnot on the sign) but they sure did have knives. And swords. And batons, and machetes, and nunchuks, and brass knuckles, and basically all that stuff you can't buy in states that are concerned about their citizens having formidable arsenals. Drew got a set of practice nunchucks (how he plans to learn to use them I just don't know) and I picked up a butterfly knife because I think they're neat. The lady running that shop really knew what she was talking about, too. I am pretty sure that she could conquer half of New Mexico just using the contents of her shop. Oh, and the picture of the dinosaur up above there? Yeah, there's a series of dinosaur statues just out in fields along the freeway. They look really cool when you see them at sunset like that, when it's harder to tell that they're fake. I have no idea what they're there for.

So eventually we got to Phoenix, where we checked into the hotel and then met up with my friend Janelle (Janelle Tassart, from high school, for anyone who would know her). We had a late dinner at the worst sushi place ever, and then headed out to a bar she recommended. OH MY was this place magical. It was called Graham Central Station, and I am pretty sure it was built in what used to be a supermarket or something. It was in a big shopping center with a Rite Aid and I think a Verizon store. The place consisted of four rooms, each roughly the size of a small high school gymnasium, and each with a different theme. There was a "dance club" room that played hip hop (with go go cages, an absolute must), a country music room (complete with line dancing floor), a karaoke room (with staff who would act as your backup singers/dancers if you wanted), and a "retro" room that mostly played 80's music and had a light up dance floor. Each room had its own bar, and probably themed drinks on special although I wasn't really paying attention. The clientèle was...eclectic, as you can imagine. There were hip hop and country line dancing fans of course, plus people ranging in age from 21 to I'd guess around 55 or 60 in every single room, as well as all variations of single, dating, married, etc. Some people did like we did and drifted from room to room, although most tended to choose one room and stick with it. The exception of course was the karaoke room, where people from the other three rooms went when they were too drunk to know they'd look silly doing karaoke. We spent the evening wandering from room to room and just marveling at all the excellent people watching to be had. Then we toddled back to the hotel and crashed for the night.

In the morning, we packed up and left Phoenix for our last day of driving. We decided that since we were getting back to the west coast, the appropriate lunch choice was In-N-Out. If you have never been to In-N-Out, well first of all you should probably come out here so I can take you. For those in Illinois, think Steak N Shake steakburgers, but the fries are way better and the burgers come in varieties like "double double animal style," all ordered according to a code that isn't on the menu, you just have to know it ahead of time. It's pretty much the tastiest fast food ever. So we did that, and then got back on the road.

Right before the California border, we stopped at a gas station. We did that a lot, since the Aspire only has a ten gallon gas tank. At any rate, across the street was a guy selling flags. We went over hoping to find a pirate flag (there were several...I got one that says "GIVE ME THE BOOTY"). We found the little number pictured above; it's the best flag ever. For serious. I mean, it has a wolf, and an American Indian (is that the PC term now? I'm not real sure), and a groovy blue-to-purple fade in the background...you just can't go wrong. It's since been hung across the fireplace in Lily and Drew's living room, and it looks exactly as ridiculous as you think it does.

And that's about it. The drive through California to LA was boring and uneventful, and seemed to take forever. We got home around sunset, dropped all our luggage where it needed to be, distributed souvenirs to Lily and Drew's roommates, then went out for REAL sushi (in a different car...we were real tired of being in my car) and went home to bed.

And thus ends the story of our epic cross-country odyssey. It took four days, about 2000 miles, roughly 120 gallons of gas, a new chunk of exhaust pipe, and heaven only knows how many beverage and junk food purchases at at least a dozen gas stations across the country. Am I glad I did it? Hell yes. Would I do it again? Um...maybe in a much bigger car :-)