Plaidophile

My job's pretty decent, I guess, even when I do work 10+ hours a day...

• Gérard is throwing us a holiday/shipping-congratulations party later this week
• Today I had fun implementing subpixel-precise compressed-span image blitting to put one last finishing touch on the current project's graphics engine. (Of course, there's a few more "one last finishing touches" to implement, like the trippy colorspace-transform effects which are in Sprung. Tee hee.) As a result, this game will look way better than other games on the particular platform (the subpixel precision is only on the horizontal axis, though, and it's not as efficient as it could be... ssh, don't tell!)
• I also finished some character facial animation stuff with said subpixel-precise image blitting, so characters' heads and eyes can move around in realistically-subtle ways. I might have to tone down the realism on the eye tracking — it's kinda spooky, since it's too realistic-looking for a cartoon...
• Like I said earlier, we got complimentary copies of Sprung. There's also starting to be some actual posts about the game (and not what people assume it'll be) on Gamespot's forums. I broke protocol a little and posted a comment in one thread, but it's pretty neutral content-wise. (It was just a polite response to someone calling us a bunch of idiots for placing our fictitious ski resort in Colorado when there's a real ski resort by that name in Utah.)

I definitely feel appreciated right now. Also, one little late-evening conversation reveals that Jason is afraid that I might not be happy here — I offhandedly asked, "So, now that the game is published, do you know the MLA style guide for citing a video game so I know how to put it on my CV?" and he asked, "What, are you looking for another gig?" I quickly explained that no, I was going for humor, because, you know, now that it's published I wonder if there's a way to reference it as a publication. (I specifically used the phrase "CV" to avoid the job-hunting connotations of "résumé," even.) At least the writer who was still there got the joke.

There's currently an office pool running regarding when Gamespot will post their review and what the score will be. Some people have some pretty interesting tactics behind their choices of which (and how many) slots to choose. My particular choices were based on Gamespot's latest "preview" article and the overall level of enthusiasm they showed for it, as well as the other DS launch titles.

Anyway. I'd like to say more about the project we're working on right now except that it'd lead to a lot of (well-deserved) cynicism and/or people cursing our choice of platform, considering that it's one that I have specifically steered people away from the vendor of in the past. I've probably dropped enough hints on here for people to figure it out anyway, though. Feel free to post your rampant speculation here. :D