Well, I haven't been kicked out yet due to the graciousness of several people, but the solution was only temporary. If I can not find a job within the next week, I will have to move out of here - and now I am at a point where I don't care where I end up at, so I might just travel again.

Its sad, I wanted to build up something here, but apparently everything is conspiring me to look elsewhere for my glorious destiny that I was promised when I signed up for this life.

Well, this isn't really meant to be all doom and gloomy - just a casual update to let people know how I am doing. However, as it is:

I am currently unemployed, broke, and don't have enough money to pay the rent next week, which means I will probably be kicked out. I have no friends in this city, no family to help me out.

The past weeks I have applied every day to at least 20 places (more usually, up to 50) and visited all of the temp agencies, looking for work. I know I am a good worker, motivated, have skills and talents, and can work everywhere from tv production over office and clerical work to good old fashioned warehouse labor - but nobody is looking for anything, not even the fast food places.

So, in one week I will be screwed... yay me. This sounds -so- familiar to me.

This is the first in a projected series of blogposts leading up to the reveal of my current project. However, they are not meant to hype or detail that project in any way, but rather detail and discuss some topics I have and am still learning along the way which might be of general interest to others.

The most important lesson of all is believe in what you do. Now, this sounds rather obvious, but lets talk about my own previous gaming projects in a very open and honest way.

I have failed at making games. Now, I know that I have the talent and creativity to make games, and to a certain extent, I have a certain amount of programming skills in a wide variety of languages. Anything I can't do, I can easily research and implement quick enough. However, there is something missing in me. Something intangible that some might deem to call "ambition", or maybe possibly "passion".

Why did I make games? Did I really want people to play them? No, I don't think so. For the most part, I made games to prove to myself that I could do them. And that is the crux of the problem - whenever I progressed far enough into a project that I could honestly say to myself: I understand now how this works, I can make it - then I had no real interest in continuing.

As soon as I learned platformer physics and made a demo, I was satisfied. As soon as I made a Zelda-clone in textmode, I was satisfied. As soon as I made a random generated dungeon with ore streams, I was satisfied. As soon as I made a dynamically configurable MUD codebase, I was satisfied. And as soon as I made a custom scriptable game engine with an advanced syntax all on my own, well, you can see that I haven't been working on SEx:Engine for a while.

In making games, I am a failure. I am a success in posing challenges to myself and achieving them, however. My hard drive is full of rather nice unreleased tech demos of board games, a 4k zombie killing co-op game, solar system generators, and the like. However, I have no interest in completing them.

So - what can we learn out of this? Look at what you are doing and think about what you are really getting out of it. Am I disappointed at all of the time I "wasted" with game programming? Of course not! I had hundreds of hours of left-brain fun, I have met interesting people, and I wrote articles on game design which were well-recieved, which is rather ironic, but I do admittedly have more talent in designing that actually implementing.

However, that is not what I want to be remembered for when I die... although I wouldn't mind people playing a game of splattertag in my honor - actually, it would be a fun thought to add an easter egg with a splattycorpse in it if a certain admin code was entered... to beannounceed in my last will and testament.

So, what do I want to be remembered by? And how does this "passion" or "ambition" work, how can you awaken it, and how can you build it up in everyday life?

Stay tuned for the next blog entry, where I talk about how to choose the one idea which can change your life forever.

That strange unusual tentacled beast who has created such BYOND superhits such as... well, possibly splattertag, and if you consider "a game that some people may have tested and then gave up when they couldn't complete the block puzzle" to be equivalent to superhit, then minigame, too.

So, whatever happened to that guy?

Well, he is currently stationed in the US, and he is preparing something. Something big. Something innovative. And something... not computer related.

Well, that was a bit disappointing, no?

I have discovered a rare screenshot from back in The Golden Days of BYOND - I hope you enjoy it. Its a picture from Chatters, where I reformed a channel in text-mode to look like a crossword puzzle, and everybody joined in to fill out certain letters. :-)