Countdown to Mayhehhhhhhelping

So these next three weeks.  Yes.  I am terrified.  Terrified of how AWESOME they are going to be.

That might be a bit of an overstatement. I get two weeks of terror, followed by one week of awesome terror. It balances out.

So if you’re a family member wondering why I haven’t called in the past however-long-it’s-been-since-I-last-called (I’m assuming that’s why you’re reading this), here is why I will be:

February 22-February 28: Working on homework. Polishing up outside projects. Trying to get portfolio, business cards, etc. all prepped for GDC. Getting a little more worried.

March 1-March 8: Full-blown panic. Call whenever you want, because I won’t be sleeping, but in all likelihood I won’t remember where my phone is. Trying to cram three weeks of homework into one, practicing for Screenburn, and still finishing up last-minute portfolio stuff, because that’s how I roll.

March 9-March 13: GDC, from the moment it opens to the moment they kick me out kicking and screaming, and I promptly collapse on the pavement in exhaustion. Did I mention I’m excited about this? True fact. After a week of awesome crazy and CA mischief HELPING, at 11:15pm Saturday night (right after the afterparty), I catch a plane to Austin.

March 14: Screenburn at SxSW! I probably won’t have slept or fully sobered up, and my presentation will probably be better for it. Massive amounts of excitement and terror!

Heart Gold and Soul Silver also come out this day. I’m debating whether it’s excessive to put a game on hold halfway across the country. Current opinion: no.

Remainder of quarter: Sleep and finals. Nothing else. Well, except Soul Silver.

Extra Wow!

I’m pretty sure I wrote too early to talk about this last time, but I found out last week that I got accepted as a CA at GDC.  So that was exciting enough, and plenty to keep my week good and my first two months impossibly jam-packed, but apparently good things are determined to keep bashing down my doorstep, because today I found out the game I submitted to SxSW’s Screenburn competition is a semifinalist!  Whoohoo!

What does that mean?  Well, put simply, it means that I’m one of ten semifinalists who get to create a five-minute powerpoint pitch for their game, out of which four will be selected to actually be presented by their owners.  So mine needs to be awesome!  To that end, it also means that on top of the usual homework from five classes, approximately 100 models (best case scenario- worst case 50), work, and my internship stuff, I have to have said Awesome Powerpoint done by Monday.  Needless to say, I’m excited, and panic-stricken, and lots of other good things like that.:)

Thankfully I already had most of the design doc for the game I submitted done, but this is a nice push to me to a) get my ass in gear and quit sleeping in, and b) keep working on this game.  Yeah, the presentation has to be shipped off on Monday, but I’d like to spend the next month or so developing it up to the point of a demo/prototype if I can.  Tall order, especially on top of the other billion effing things I’m doing, but right now I’m a bit too psyched about it to care.

Next time: a character a day and those 100 models in a week.  Ew!:D

An Evening as a Zombie

Yesterday I went to a protest for zombie’s civil rights (or lack thereof) down at Civic Center. The people there were kind enough to convert me, so that I could be a fellow zombie rather than a

First, on a rather disconcerting note, I’m pretty sure I make a more attractive zombie than person. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this.

Anyways, it was quite fun. Two of the more enthusiastic zombies rushed a newlywed couple on the steps of City Hall (causing some confusion amongst both the couple and the security and cops that showed up shortly afterwards), but for the most part we shuffled about groaning about civil rights and brains.

Also I’m apparently also a zombie for gay marriage. (P.S.: This is awesome.) Someone saw me chatting with an (annoyingly guilt-trip-inclined) advocate from Equality Now, and since my sign happened to be relevant either way (“Equal rights are a no-brainer.”), there is now yet another person wandering around the Bay Area with strange photos of me.

On a side note, shuffling around looking like a zombie with a cardboard sign causes almost zero fuss in San Francisco. I effing love this city.

Some backstory on me (a.k.a. “Why Hadidjah should never be asked to write anything.”)

For my career development class, I had to write about what I wanted to be when I was little and how I came to my current career path. My goal with this is to teach her to be afraid of asking such things of me.

“When I was a wee bearn I wanted to be a veterinarian. Even when I wasn’t so wee, I wanted to be a vet. I even took the time to job shadow one, eagerly learning everything about what a cat’s uterus looks like (deceptively small and pointy) before you remove it. BUT. It was not to be.
I had a lot of animals, and I liked them a lot, right up to and beyond the moment we butchered them, plucked them, and stuck them in the freezer. The chickens, at least. But despite my bloodthirsty ways, I decided that killing animals just wasn’t for me. So veterinarianism went out the window. Five years later, I became a vegetarian as a way to escape my mum’s thoroughly bizarre cooking experiments, and came up with ethical reasons later out of sheer lack of anything better to do.

I can’t say any of it really stuck with me in my present career goals, aside from my innate desire to force obscure bits of knowledge upon (un?)suspecting victims and a fascination with animals, anatomy, biology, ecology, chemistry, geology, diagramming, medical illustrations, and map-making.

Now I want to be a 3D environment and/or asset artist. It’s a long story.

But you asked for a paper on it, so here goes:

When I was a wee bearn, I lived in a barn. Barns and technology don’t tend to see each other very much. Sure, they went to the same high school, and every once in a while they’d get paired up in science class, and they always kind of got along and flirted a little when one got the guts to do so. But even so, they went their separate ways, spent their time with different friends, and never saw each other much. Occasionally, though, they would look back on those fond high school memories, of younger, shier days, and decided to call one another up. They would meet up at a restaurant, casually avoiding the talk of their spouses and families, and spend long, steamy nights together before going their separate ways, unsure of whether what they felt was guilt or infatuation. Regardless, there was certainly the tingling sensation that this wasn’t the end.

The reason for that feeling, however, was actually because the barn (collectively) was pregnant. With technology’s child.

My barn was in the very early stages of pregnancy. We had a TV and an NES, and a refrigerator. The TV and NES being more relevant to my current career path, we’ll focus on those two.

(The refrigerator, to sate any nagging curiosities out there, was used to store strawberries and Mason jars full of goats’ milk.)

When I was bothering to be inside, it was usually to try and get the NES working. When, with passionate dedication, the game responded long enough to get past the start screen (kind of like my computer nowadays- oh snap!), I would sit down for a rewarding marathon of Super Mario Bros. 1 or 3, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles (the good one), Tetris, or Simpsons Trivia. I didn’t learn until high school what the Simpsons was (I lived in a barn, okay??), so I played that one mainly through trial and error memorization. But the rest were totally awesome and never inspired me to do anything at all.

When I couldn’t get the cartridges to run, I would watch VHSs of stuff like Star Wars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, DC and Marvel cartoons, and recorded PBS shows. If ever before then there was a chance of me being a not-nerd, the televisions geeky rays chemoed it right out of me, until every last cell in my body had taped glasses, buck teeth, and got excited about things like encyclopedia sets and the spectrum of visible light.

Eventually though, we moved out of the barn (mysteriously enough, still stuck in the same stage of technological pregnancy and still having so many bizarre cravings and mood swings that we escaped to a house down the street), and the NES was all but forgotten. I started going to school (I was about ten and possibly overdue for such things) and video games were forgotten in favor of things like chasing boys, dive-tackling them, and running pell-mell with the football in the opposite direction.

Then my brother got a GameBoy Color and ruined everything. He and I shared a single cartridge of Pokemon Blue, never getting anywhere because we kept erasing each other’s files to save our own, and pretty much okay with that. Then the nefarious Capcom team sent me a pamphlet of tips and tricks for their new games, Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. I begged shamelessly until they were mine.

And suddenly the world was bright, vibrant, full of clever puzzles, real-time battles, and interesting characters. I marveled at the brilliance of the games’ worlds. It burst out of the screen and gave my experiences with 8-bit graphics and colors limited to blue, red and green what-for, giving me a black eye and unrelenting affection in the process.

Inertia grew. At school, I played computer games with my friends whenever we could get into the computer lab. I got an N64 and Majora’s Mask for my birthday, shortly followed by a slew of Pokemon and Star Wars games. I was the feared master of the county Pokemon card game league. My notes were crammed between overflowing margins of character and monster designs, inch-thick reams of paper were dedicated to attacks, spells, weapons, world maps, dungeon designs, and other assetly-nonsense. Over the years, my brother and I acquired every iteration of the GameBoy, a Gamecube, a PS2… I expanded outside my favorite IPs and discoverd a slew of titles, from Final Fantasy, to Golden Sun, .hack//, all vivid, full of character and varied gameplay. I loved pixels with a passion and games in general even more.

And I always figured that video games were made in a magical place far across the sea and several galaxies, and possibly a wormhole or two. When, a lifetime later, everyone was eagerly talking about where they were going to college, I asked my best friend to show me the animation school he was going to. Browsing the website, I discovered that video games were not made in a magical galaxy of elves and nerds, but about five hours south of me…”

P.S. This story is absolutely true. Especially the part about technology and barns.

Actual interesting stuff should return soon. Hopefully.