I’m ba-ack…

Has it really been four months since my last post? Man… I don’t know how some of you guys keep up a regular pace. I mean, with work and family and friends and traveling and all, finding time to blog is pretty much a not-happening thing for me.

Needless to say, I don’t even remember what I was going to say about GDC back in March, when I promised to post additional thoughts! Since then, my game (about which we will say nothing) has made amazing progress. My team and I have been working hard on our own and (get ready for the cool factor to go way up) in collaboration with folks from Disney Feature Animation and Pixar. If I say anymore, I’ll get in trouble, so let’s just leave it at that.

In addition to “work-work,” I’ve been doing some “semi-work” — speaking at the Game Education Summit at SMU’s Guildhall, with my boss, Mark Meyers (Disney Interactive’s VP of North American development) and, solo, at MIT’s Gambit lab. I’m pretty blown away at the quality of student projects at both places. Folks are really pushing the boundaries out there in ways that I hope feed back into the commercial space someday (soon!).

Been doing some gaming, too, though not as much as I’d like. Lots of research play (and I won’t be saying much about that, either, since to do so would be to reveal far too much about the game… and then we’re back to cone of silence, not ready to announce anything territory…). In addition to research play, I’ve managed to put in a fair number of hours on Professor Layton and the Curious Village, but the game that has my shorts in a knot right now is Guitar Hero: On Tour. Other than some wicked hand cramping, I’m loving it. I’ve beaten it on Easy and Medium, and am well into Hard. I can see myself falling to pieces when I get to Expert, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. I’ve got a bunch of stuff on my to-play list, but I think I’m going to dive into Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past (again!) next. I’m getting that itch and it must be scratched.

The final (and probably worst) distraction from blogging — wait, when did blogging become the thing I’m distracted FROM, rather than the thing that distracts me from other activities?!… anyway, the big distraction right now is Facebook. I’ve resisted the siren call of social networking sites and, as I’ve made clear over the years, I’m basically immune to MMO-addiction. So imagine my surprise when a desire to play Scrabulous with my sister (and mother, if I can ever convince her to sign up for something she perceives as being for kids) led me to a place where I have hundreds of friends and play a dozen games (and often a dozen instances of those dozen games, simultaneously). It’s totally weird. I don’t quite grok the whole Facebook thing — I mean, it isn’t exactly a “place” but it isn’t exactly a “site” and it’s oddly difficult to navigate around and find stuff… But I do find myself spending an inordinate amount of time “there.” And the asynchronous communication paradigm really appeals to the control freak in me — I get to determine the level of interaction I have with people. Nice…

Anyway, put that all together and it adds up to no blogging. But recently, a bunch of stuff has come up that has my keyboard fingers itching, so it’s likely I’ll be back here again soon. (It’s not like I have all sorts of free time all of a sudden, but I should be able to post some stuff sooner than four months! And I tend to do this in spurts, so there could be a little tidal wave of posts from me. Who knows?…)

For those of you wondering why you’ve slogged through all this confessional stuff, the things I’d like to talk about are a bit less, well, confessional. Let’s leave it at that for now — every time I say I’m going to write about something specific, or make anything resembling a promise here, I get myself in trouble. See you again soon (I hope).