Another while with no update. Decent reason for it though. Been busy. :)

I’ve decided to leave Liquid Development. My final day is October 1. It’s definitely an amicable parting, and I gave a bit more than the standard two weeks’ notice. I decided it was time to get back to my core skills: Namely, 3D art. I’d moved into sales and marketing earlier this year and I began to miss doing what got me into the industry in the first place. Also, Portland, great as it is, never felt quite like home.

I’ve done a bit of interviewing and finally decided to take a position at Ready At Dawn Studios, which is based in Santa Ana, California. It’s a startup composed of senior developers from Blizzard and Naughty Dog that are working on an unannounced Playstation Portable title. I flew down there a couple weeks back to interview and fell in love with the studio immediately. It’s an amazingly talented and diverse group of people, the location is great, the studio environment itself is totally wicked-awesome, the game is incredible and the general atmosphere and work ethic really felt right. I knew I’d sorely regret not taking the job, so after a bit of deliberation, I accepted their offer.

My starting date there is October 13. Right now I’m in the process of packing up all my crap and moving down there. I’m having to go through a bit of hassle and heartbreak to get things ready, but fortunately, I have more than enough time to get things ready. I’m trying to sell off my weights and weight bench, a DVD rack, and my mostly non-working car that I haven’t driven for ten months. Also, tragically, I’m having to give away my beloved little baby rats because of the ridiculous costs involved in transporting them, paying pet deposits, and the fact that we couldn’t find any apartment complexes that accepted more than two pets.

The costs are astronomical… you could easily fit a single rat inside a coke bottle and have room left over, and yet, airlines require that I spend presumably hundreds of dollars getting certificates of health for all nine of them, that I spend $30 on a cat carrier for each individual rat, and then pay $375 per rat for VIP class travel through the airplane. The only alternative to VIP class is to put them in the cargo area, where half of them are quite literally guaranteed to freeze to death during the flight. And then, even if I were to find an apartment that accepted more than two pets of any type (fish included), I’d have to pay $250 to 1000 per rat as deposit. Altogether I’d spend upwards of $9,000 just to transport all my rats to California.

It was an incredibly difficult decision to make, but we’ve decided that there’s no alternative but to give them away. We have a taker for our six little girl rats, and a possible taker for our three little boys. :\ We’re going to buy a couple kittens when we get to California to hopefully ease the pain. I’m sure it will for Dea, at least.

On a happier note, we found a freaking badass apartment. Most places around Santa Ana had 500 sq ft apartments for no less than $1600 a month, which is almost three times as expensive as what we have now for 175 sq ft less. Fortunately, I have a friend in Huntington Beach who lives in a complex that offers 2bed apartments with 1125 sq ft for only $1400 a month, which is AWESOME. It’s also a five minute walk from the beach, which is pretty outstanding as I’ve never been there before. Huntington Beach is about 40 minutes south of LA, which is comfortably far away enough that I can breathe without feeling like I’m dying.

So yeah, things are going pretty well. I’ll miss the folks at Liquid Development, but I’m ready now to close that chapter of my life and begin anew in California, working in full game development again on what’s definitely the coolest project I’ve been involved in to date. I’m really happy again. :)

I don’t even know who reads this, but in any case, I’ll begin making more substantial and frequent updates from now on, now that I can break the silence. Work has been my life this past month and a half and I’ve hardly had time to breathe… and that’s nearly over.