I just realized that it’s been a good four or five months since I posted anything about my personal life. Since a lot of my friends and relatives are only able to keep up with what’s going on with me through the blog, I figured I’d post a little update on my life. Click the jump to read more:

Life is good.

Work has been going well. Dungeon Runners enabled billing in a still-limited beta release. Happily, despite having such limited numbers of people invited to the game, the conversion rate of free to paid memberships is phenomenal. The feedback for the game has been great, our players love it, our team’s having a blast and development is moving along smoothly.

I still love my job, and I’m learning new things every day. I’ve had a lot of extremely stressful situations come up, just basic development woes I’d never experienced before, as well as a lot of interesting lessons in politics and interpersonal interaction in a large organization, but everything’s still going well.

My level of stress is very high because I have so much to do at any given time, and I have to wear so many hats, but the same could be said of anyone on the team. I don’t know if most of you know the story, but we have a team of only nine people (plus a new producer that’s starting soon) that are developing and maintaining an MMORPG. We inherited the project from another developer, and the project was simply unfinished, and we didn’t have access to any of the original developers. We’ve basically had to figure out how to step into the middle of a game another developer worked on, off and on, for years, polish it up and finish it.

My role is as an Art Production Manager, which I’ve discovered means a lot of things. I jointly art direct the game with our lead designer, I handle the production, organization, implementation and bugfixing all art assets. I do all the candidate searching, contracting, hiring, invoicing and day-to-day management of all my artists. I also handle the budgeting and scheduling of all art production. Basically, if it’s art, it passes through me ten ways. That’s an awful big job to handle, so the stress is understandable. :) It’s been a series of increasingly interesting learning experiences, and I’m still happy doing it.

Fortunately, I’m able to turn it off when I come home. I’m starting to achieve a reasonable work-life balance for the first time. When I was at Liquid Development in Portland, I would work all day, come home, then read business books all night. I never turned off, and that caused lots of relationship problems. When I was at Ready At Dawn in Southern California, I’d stress hugely, come home at night and either keep making art because I didn’t know what else to do, or try and find some way to use the businesss and management skills I’d lost a professional use for. Eventually, crunch started, and that turned into a 60, 80, 100 hour week grind for a horribly long period of time, and life fucking sucked.

Going home and doing something that’s not work has always been incredibly difficult for me. It’s because I started busting ass to make art — my only hobby — into my fulltime job sometime around age 13. And I’ve never really quit since then. My whole brain is wired to work, work, work, work, work, and if I’m not working or doing something productive, I feel like I’m wasting time. I have so much energy to expend, so many thoughts, so many ideas, that they simply don’t ever go away, even if I’m trying to go to sleep. In the past, it’s been so bad that I feel guilty for watching a movie or reading fiction, because I’m spending time not working.

But now that I’m in Austin, that’s calmed down a bit. I know when to get all of that energy out, and I know when to set it aside and actually live my life and enjoy myself. I’m actually able to separate myself from my work, come home and relax. I can do something else without feeling guilty, or like I’m wasting time. I attribute most of this newfound ability to my little Eva.

Last August I met Eva through a work friend of mine. The night I met her I had literally sworn off of relationships for a year after a string of unsuccessful attempts to court women I quickly (and painfully) discovered to all be crazy white bitches. Eva is the incredibly beautiful, smart, funny, healthy and caring woman I’ve always needed to meet. We hit it off immediately, got into a relationship, fell in love, and she moved in with me last month. All is going phenomenally well on that front, and I’ve never been happier. :)

Hobby-wise, I’ve begun brewing my own beer at home. Some of the guys at the office had done it before, and I’d long had an interest in it, so I expressed it, bought the gear and very recently finished my first five-gallon batch. It turned out great, and everyone at the office loved it. It’s a really fascinating process to me, because I tend to find myself adopting an almost reverent fixation for liquids. When I was in Portland and California, I got so into coffee that I considered importing and roasting my own beans. I researched the history of coffee, the different types, what factors influence optimal flavor, what kind of gear I’d need to get the best possible taste out of coffee, and I turned the whole thing into a beautiful ritual.

When I was in California, I did the same thing with beer. I never really enjoyed beer until I had the chance to discover a wonderful place called Beverages & More that had a massive inventory of exotic beer from all over the world, each of which had a fascinating back story. I’d shop around online for new and interesting beers from countries I hadn’t tried, then order six to twelve different bottles at a time ($5 - 15 per bottle in many cases) then spend an evening sampling what the world had to offer. I especially loved reading stories of beer about how virtually medieval monks brewed it, how the ingredients in the beer are grown only inside the walls of their monastery, how the recipe has been unchanged since the 14th century, etc. Pure marketing, and pure joy for me.

And now I’ve really come full circle and I’m beginning to make my own beer, and that’s an awesome ritual all its own. And a social one! I can’t remember a time I’ve enjoyed myself more than when a few of us got together to brew beer, while drinking beer, eating pizza, playing video games and just bullshitting around on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. And then, a few weeks later, gathering around the keg once the beer is ready to drink and seeing how what we each contributed to turned out. It’s an awesome bonding experience, and a really incredible thing to be a part of.

I’ve also been reading more now than I ever have before in my life, but it’s all been fiction. Since December, I’ve been reading tons of graphic novels, crime novels and private eye novels from a variety of authors. Mike Mignola, Donald Westlake, Warren Ellis, Richard Stark, Garth Ennis, Robert Crais, Alan Moore, Dennis Lehane, etc. In this past month alone I think I’ve read 25 books. In the last two days I’ve started and finished two books. I’ve never really let myself sit back and enjoy fiction until now, and it’s been really liberating. I haven’t been able to crack open any non-fiction books in awhile, but that doesn’t really bother me. I figure that after spending a few years almost exclusively devoted to nonfiction that I could stand to mix it up a little.

Finally, I totally neglected to mention it but I went to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. It was one of the best trips I’ve ever taken. I stayed from Sunday the 4th until Saturday the 10th and had a terrific time. For the first couple days, all I did (after realizing too late that I can’t get into any of the tutorials, just the sessions which don’t start until Wednesday) was walk across the city, sample the exotic cuisines, explore all those famous places I’d heard so much about, and enjoy myself. I covered 18 miles on foot in those two days.

It’s impossible for me to gauge the amount of interest my readers may have in vacation slides, but I put all my photographs from the trip online.

San Francisco for GDC 2007, Day One

San Francisco for GDC 2007, Day Two

Some of my favorite photos:

(I’m pretty sure Morgan Freeman is glowering at me in this one)

That’s all that’s new with me, really. Life is good. :)