Resume & History

Although my Internet connection appears to be working, I can't connect to WoW. I can't even get to their homepage. Well that isn't completely true, I can kinda connect but both the game and the web page take forever to load and I get disconnected soon after.

I spent the day updated my resume and history pages and getting them up on Google Sites. The Resume and History links over the right now link to the updated version. The resume is pretty much the same except I am now Creative Director at Interzone. The history page was just updated to talk about Fury's shipping and me going from Auran to Interzone.

All I have left to do now is get this blog's graphics files up onto Google Sites and I won't have to worry about Hostopia, the actually people who ruined joseph.hewitt.org, not NetIdentity, whose email hosting I will still try to keep.

Anyway, I'll do that later. I think I am going to play some more Left 4 Dead, because Zombies aren't going to kill themselves.

Lay On McDuff

The job search is still on going though it is completely stalled since it is the middle of the holidays and everybody is on vacation. I’ve taken advantage of the situation by not doing much myself except trying my best to be up and in the shower before noon. I do have several projects I’ve been wanting to get started on though, some writing, a few t-shirt ideas to put up on café press, taking that new picture of myself with short hair and reorganizing my audio book collection off my iPod and back onto a computer. I had been buying, downloading, and storing them on my work computer and am still thankful that my new iPod is was big enough to store all the ones that I had not already copied and taken home.

We do have to be out of this apartment by the middle of February though, as the owner sold the place and the new people plan on living here. Hopefully I will have at least some idea of what is going on by then. My mother has dropped more than one hint that we could always move in with her back in Vegas while I look for another job back in the U.S. I do miss the states a little. I somehow was found myself watching an episode of Cops that came on after one of those FBI profiler shows where I was too lazy to change the channel. I was glued to the TV watching the guy in the patrol car drive around Vegas trying to pick out landmarks I knew including one excited shout of “Look! A Wienerschnitzel!” Oh chili cheese dog, how you haunt my dreams.I do want to thank Pandemic Studios; another Brisbane based game company, for throwing a Christmas party for all the ‘retrenched’ Auran people. Somebody over there found out our Christmas party had been canceled as part of the whole company being insolvent thing. They stepped up and managed to put together a party for us at the last minute. I won a $50 Myer gift certificate as one of the door prizes.

As 2007 draws to a close amidst a dark cloud where I am out of work, will cease to have a daily excuse for writing 2007 with a little hanging bit and the cross through the center of the 7 that I learned from David Copperfield back in the early 80’s and we find that Spider-Man’s continuity has been rewritten so that he was never married to Mary Jane. I’m sorry if I’m spoiling the end of the “One More Day” storyline for you but we pretty much expected that’s how this awful arc would come to an end.

To 2008 I say this:

Lay on, McDuff, and damned be him who first cries ‘Hold, Enough!’

Looking for Work

It’s been a wild four years, but Auran Developments has been declared insolvent and officially let everybody go today. There is talk of re-hiring a core Fury team to move the game forward to its release in China where I expect it will do very well. I don’t know if I am going to be offered a place on that team or not but as of now officially looking for another job.

So if anybody is looking to hire a game designer let me know. I do interface design, specs, world building, writing, quests… content designer sort of stuff. I have a good deal of experience with MMO games and generally enjoy all aspects of multi-player gameplay.

Resume and full list published titles available in the link over on the right, under my picture that I still haven't updated now that I cut my hair.

eGames & GCAP in Melbourne

I will be heading down to Melbourne Wednesday for the eGames Expo. I feel Auran's official press release for the topic covers all the points nicely:

We're sending some of our unwashed* staff to the eGames Expo in Melbourne, which starts on the 16th of November and runs through to the 18th. If you're in the Melbourne region, get along to the expo and visit the Fury stand to have a chat. We'll have copies of Fury for sale at special show prices as well, so come with some cash to pick up a copy for you or a friend.

* Staff will be patched before the show to remedy this bug.

If you have yet to sign up as member of my rabid legion of followers and you happen to be near Melbourne next weekend; stop by eGames and bring your own pen. I swear newbie legion members steal more pens from me.

I will actually be switching between our booth at eGames and a booth at Game Connect: Asia Pacific (a.k.a. GCAP), an industry conference event also being held in the Convention Center; but I shouldn’t be that hard to track down.

Ashwin also just let me know that the Electric Playground video of me interviewing Connie and Baxter here in the office for is up on their site. I won't linking to said video because I look like shit. This is what happens when you live somewhere with high humidity, fry your hair by bleaching it blond and not know when you leave the house in the morning that you are going to be doing a video shoot.

I have dyed my hair back brown as you can see from the picture to the right, but half that length is fried. The natural curl is starting to come back but unless I use excess hair product it frizzes out halfway through the day. I am probably going to cut the damaged length off when I get back from Melbourne.

If you really want to see how bad it looks, feel free to go find the Electric Playground site yourself, but just remember. I warned you.

CDC Games Invests in Auran

This story has been going around the business news wires:

BEIJING, China --(Business Wire)-- CDC Games, a business unit of CDC Corporation (NASDAQ: CHINA) and pioneer of the "free-to-play, pay-for-merchandise" model for online games in China, announced today it has signed a definitive agreement to invest in Auran, a leading developer of online games in Australia.

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What I love is this bit that always gets included in Auran press releases:

About Auran
Established in 1995, Auran is one of Australia's oldest and largest game studios and has won numerous technology awards. Boasting a team of internationally experienced developers, Auran's staff have worked on a titles including: Asheron's Call 1 & 2, Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online, Mythica, Middle Earth Online, Need for Speed Underground, Magic and Mayhem and many more.

See that "Star Wars Galaxies"? They have that in there because of me even though I really didn't work on Star Wars Galaxies. I was a CSR for Star Wars Galaxies for about 8 months back at launch between EA's closing of Westwood and starting at Auran. I was trying to get onto the Everquest dev team and my friend Shawn Lord at SOE recommended that I could easily get my foot in the door through the CSR department. He said that is where most of the Everquest designers had come from at that point. Anyway, I have brought up several times that the Star Wars Galaxies listing should be replaced by one of the other billion games I've worked on but there it is again. Come on, wouldn't you be more impressed by something like Command & Conquer than Star Wars Galaxies anyway? Lets face it, Star Wars Galaxies sucked.

Actually I just got an "Eye of the Beholder" fan mail yesterday from a girl named Irene. Thats right, a girl! I showed her where I hid my name in the artwork. :-)

Brisbane Australia Gamers Meetup

Yug from Australian Gamer and Hawk from Game Arena had a Brisbane Gamers Meetup party this last weekend. There are some pictures and links to youtube moves here.

Everybody loved my t-shirt which Connie had gotten me for Christmas.

Eventually some people from Auran turned up, including Michael and Joseph (who definitely won the prize for best t-shirt of the night).

It has a graphic equalizer display on the front that lights up in response to ambient audio input just as you would expect a graphic equalizer display. Yug took some pictures of it but I don't see any posted. If you look at the picture of the 3 girls dancing you can see me talking in the background on the right. See that yellow-ish smear of color? That’s my shirt.

You can buy one for yourself from Thinkgeek.

Battlestar Galactica Site Live

The website for Auran's upcoming XBox Live Arcade version of Battlestar Galactica is now up in running.

I havn't gotten an XBox 360 or any of the new generation systems for that matter. At first I didn't miss not having one. Fueled by my anger with region codes I was able to avoid them. But now as more and more cool games are starting to come out I feel the loss. Or maybe it is just that there is no really cool PC games I am looking forward to in the immediate future.

Like Football with Swords

I know I said wasn't going to post every little Fury news article from now on, but I really liked the analogy. Can you imagine it? First down would go from being a good thing to "Oh man poor Bob... he was first down!" Though in Australia with Australian Rules Football first down does kind of work that way. BAM! Cheers mate!

And to be fair I said I wasn't going to post all the Gamecock links and this is actually normal media not even specifically video game media. Speaking of that, you can expect to be blasted by Gamecock 'pimping' Fury here real soon as we are going to be their first game to market and GDC is rapidly approaching.

Anyway this was on the front page of the theage.com.au's technology section. Nothing new at all and it talks more about Auran the company than specially about any of our games.

And while I’m at it here is an interview Tony did with IGN last week where he talks about Fury, Xbox Live Arcade Battlestar Galactica and Gamecock Media Group.

Auran Loves the Gamecock

MCV, a big UK, game industry newspaper had Gamecock’s launch as one of their lead stories this morning: GOD Founders Launch Gamecock.

Kotaku has a second story, this time just focusing on Auran and Fury: Auran Loves the Gamecock.

So Fury is out there in the public eye now. The Alpha version of the game is slowly letting in more people and the Beta version isn't that far away. Which means I better stop writting on this blog and get back to work. Next task: finish up the last 100 or so Ability Icons... sigh.

Captain's Log, Supplemental:

Not going to make a whole new post for this link because 40 million post about Fury and Gamecock is already getting old. Anyway I found this one a few days ago when googling "Gamecock Fury" only when I went to the link it said 'server error'. Obviously it was pulled until after the official announcement. It is an interview with Gamecock co-founder Harry Miller at Games Radar.

When I was a kid I thought Supplemental meant something along the lines of "we're in trouble" because of the way Captain Kirk always said something along the lines of "Captain's Log, Supplemental: The Romulans are attacking!"

Auran's Battlestar Galactica game

Just a quick little post about this announcement that went out over the weekend:

Officials from Vivendi Games division Sierra Online officially announced plans to release Battlestar Galactica over Microsoft's popular Xbox Live Arcade service, as well as the PC this fall.

The space combat simulation, which is based upon the hit series airing on the Sci Fi channel, is being created by veteran Australian developer Auran (Trainz Railroad Simulator), and will feature both single and multiplayer gameplay as either the humans or Cylons.

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Stayed tuned for more incoming information...

Impulse Gamer Interview

There is a new interview with yours truly up at Impulse Gamer which you can find HERE.

You’ll notice I plead ignorance when asked about how Auran was formed. I just got the following email from my boss filling me in on Auran’s founding history.

Very good Joseph – you sounded reasonably intelligent.

For your historical knowledge, AURAN was “founded” by me and a hot shot “genius” gamer called Greg Lane. The company began with the name Australis Microprogramming on Jan 1, 1995. Its name was changed to AURAN about a year later.

The company was then “saved” by the Hilliam family who became involved in 1998. Tony commenced as a full time working director in 2000. He and I own the AURAN group of companies.

Greg lane has left the building.

Kind regards
Graham

My boss says I ‘sounded reasonably intelligent”. That’s a good thing isn’t it? “reasonably intelligent”? Wait, does “sounded” reasonably intelligent mean I’m not reasonably intelligent but I did a good enough job that I may have fooled people?

Well he does end with “Kind regards” instead of “pack your things and be out of the country by sundown” so I think I’m good. Whew!