Right thinking people in this country are fed up with being sick and tired.

Hi All,

Day 5 of being infected with the plague.  I'm actually feeling better today.  I wish I could say that I wrote a lot, or completed some programming, but no.  I've been in a NyQuil induced stupor, coughing an dying by inches.

Since I feel better today, after waking up at 1pm, I'm going to try and do something

• Going to try to edit at least two chapters of my novel.
  
• Going to tweak the trailer and upload it here.
  
• Going to code for least an hour.
  
• Sleep.

He must have died while carving it.

Greetings and salutations,

I am alive and am currently not sick. I went to work day, but I so have tomorrow off so that's nice. Nothing planed for Xmas, Danielle is sick and I have to work the day after so doing a long commute to a gathering isn't really in the cards. I'm still re-writing my novel. Very conflicted over 3rd person Omniscient narration and limited 3rd person narration. I work a half day Sunday... Basically this is my schedule at the moment;

Work December 24th.
Dec 25th and 26th OFF.
Work 1/2 day December 27th.
Work December 28th - December 30th.
December 31st - January 3rd OFF.

I have plans to meet with my friends John and Chase to see Star Wars and test out John's new Gear VR on the evening of the December 27th and to meet with my friend Keith on January 2nd to play some D&D with a mystery group of people. Outside of that, my schedule should be fairly clear.

My current goals remain the same;

1. Finish re-writing my novel, run it past Danielle, if she approves it, I will publish it on Kindle, 
2. Finish Defend the Earth. 
3. Re-code game website. 
4. finish C# course. 
5. Finish Escape for the Salad Kingdom, once Danielle is over the flu. 

Nate and John are both talking about getting Dungeons running on Linux/Mac using some new binary compiler, sounds very exciting :) Better late than never as they say.

Outside of this? I'd love to do a game jam, or something. I've been wanting to attempt a short 3D game for some time now. But yeah as you can see my plate is kind of full. Re-writing a 35,000+ word story isn't something that is done quickly... Or maybe I just suck at it? lol... Ah well. Hope you all are having a good holiday, whatever you believe in. I will be spending Xmas with my cats.

William, Danielle, Nerbyl, Mochi, Spike and Petra.

Well, don't worry, sir, I used to suffer from short stories.

Well the great and mighty Xmas break is upon us.  I will be staying home with my cats, instead of seeing my family for a variety of personal and work related reasons.  However, I will be attending my Grandmother's funeral on the 22nd.  I actually finished my Defend the Earth trailer, got some feedback via my pre-screening on Facebook and am now tweaking it.  When it's done, I'll be posting it here.  I'll need about 2 hours of consecutive work time to fix it up.  

As for finishing the game itself, I'm going to need about two days of solid coding time in order to review my current code (regain a full understanding of what I've done) and then finish it up.  Unfortunately I'm only getting about 1-2 hours of inconsecutive free time a day, until break happens.  I even worked part of this weekend and was stuck doing chores, errands, catching up on sleep and such for most of it. 

So what have I been doing with my time this week?  Well I've been doing a perspective re-write of my novel.  Yes, I wrote a novel, a little over a year ago, I shared it with about two dozen people, of which about six gave me feedback, including a blow by blow list of issues provided by an actual editor.  My main crime is being a head hopper.  I just can't seem to master the omniscient 3rd person narrative in novel form, while it's super easy to do in film scripts.  So I'm attempting to re-write it into a limited 3rd person perspective, but I still want to have the narrative opening and closing via 30's serials... No idea how that's going to work.  In the end I might have to kill (cut) that baby, which is sad, since it's that kind of intro / outro that I use to love about classic sci fi serials.  I'm a huge fan of 60's - 70's sci fi novels, and it's unfortunate that their style of world setting openers is apparently "boring" to modern readers.  In addition I will be extending the novel, taking in some recent changes in society, some of the humor wouldn't fly quite as smoothly in the current market and I can add jokes that are a bit more bite-ing, in a different way, by today's standards.  This book was based on a script I co-wrote with Danielle about 7 or 8 years ago, and just look at how uptight things have gotten in that period of time.  Hell Dungeons highly offended some people and compared to Adult Swim or South Park it was pretty tame.

I want to get this book finished up and on Amazon, so I can move onto three other stories which I think they would be a bit more interesting and unique.  Already have the outlines and slug scenes written.  Unlike my current work, "Captain Hairdo Conquers the Cosmos", they are not really based on anything directly, or spoofing anything, but rather my own "world" and hypothesis of what things may come.  They are completely original stories, any one of which I could see randomly appealing to some of the younger adult audiences.  I'm good at getting a first draft out, I basically need about 20 cups of coffee and a weekend alone.  Polishing that manuscript, as you can see, takes me YEARS.  lol.  Oh and no my blog is nothing like how I write books, this is glorified email / journal writing to me.  I don't proof read this (much) and just write how I think.  Oh and I have two different versions of cover art for the book that were made about eight months ago.  I'm leaning towards the semi-realistic one of the right, but the cartoon one looks much more crisp.  What do you all think?

Oh and yes I did do SOME work on the game this week, I updated the level select system, check out my amateur artwork ;)

Working for a living.

Hello everyone; male, female, other and undefined,

I am alive and now living in Kirkland.  I landed that job I applied for and have been working there for the past three months.  The cost of living in this area, is much higher than I anticipated, but not unmanageable.  Essentially, my disposable income hasn't changed very much, but at least I'm employed and alive.  I am interviewing for other higher paying positions currently.  Between the two hours of commuting and the 8 hour shifts I have about two hours of time to call my own during the day, so that has resulted in my blog being neglected.  So you have no real idea of the things that have changed in past few months.  I'll give you a quick rundown.

We presented at Seattle Six, got a lot of people excited about Dungeons: The Eye of Draconus and walked away with a lot of contacts.  We moved to Kirkland, both Danielle and myself getting contract jobs at the big M$ and having our lives revolve around work, food, unpacking and sleep.  The front of my car was ripped off and had to be bolted back on, since we didn't have the money for it to be replaced or repaired properly.  I am receiving medical treatment for an issue that has plagued me now for about eight years, thanks primarily to this job.

"Defend the Earth" has not been canceled, in fact it's about to enter Beta!  I will be posting up a trailer this weekend.

"Escape from the Salad Kingdom" is not canceled either, in fact I am switching animation systems to make it easier to animate / code.

My current personal goals are; Finish "Defend the Earth", wrap up my online C# class, Finish "Escape from the Salad Kingdom," complete several of my Blender tutorials and make a VR test project.

I may be participating in an Online Bootcamp starting next year.

Oh and today at noon my Grandmother died...  She will be missed, hate to end on a downer, but I feel like that needs to be shared.  It's probably the reason I felt that it was time for me to update my blog.

A dead parrot.

So when do I become a programming super saiyan? I'm already blond and blue eyed, perhaps it's when I reach Gabe status of physicality? I'm well on my way ‪#‎sittingdoesnotaskinnymanmake‬

I'm just excited, because I'm remembering so much of what I use to know and applying it. Ordered a new Zip Disk drive so I could grab my old FPS artwork from the 90's. Figured I'd make a free little demo game for GameJolt or something, using the old art assets from my High School project, since I've made a crude little sprite based FPS system. :P

Oh and I finished another crash course in C#... I learned nothing. So I guess that's good! The beginner courses have nothing new to show me, onto the intermediate! I took a course on Programming concepts, which is more about logic and theory rather than code. It was informative, but most of it was just review. I also did a quick 1 hour JavaScript course as a refresher. Yep, still know enough Javascript to be dangerous. :D

I'm currently 28 hours into my beginner to pro C# unity course called, "Learn To Code by Making Games".  It's 45.5 hours long and I have to say it's taught me a lot.  After that I'll be going into an 6 hours advanced C# Unity course and then a 3 hour course on procedural generation (since that seems to be all the rage these days).  

I'm happy to have the time to learn / re-learn all this stuff!  I'm just very worried about my future.

With a herring!

Well I heard back from the two jobs that passed my resume onto their hiring leads.  I was past by both companies, so I'm back to square one.  I wish I could just focus on deving From Beyond, but that simply isn't possible without something to live on.  I also was denied unemployment, because they won't include the most recent quarter, and the 1st quarter they included from last year was terrible, due to a mill shut down.  So yeah, I have no income and am jobless.  This isn't good.  I have 14 days to find work that pays at least 35k or I will be in a dire situation.  I am capable of relocating, since I am not tied to a lease at the moment, so please, if anyone out there is hiring (or wants to fund a revolutionary video game ;) ) let me know.

Over the past few days I've plowed through  series of certifications, just to refresh my skills set (since I thought I was getting a job that would require them).  I am almost done with a course on SQL and another on Javascript, but as of this posting they both sit around 50% completed.

1 Hour HTML, 1 hour CSS, Agile Scrum Certification Prep, and Maintaining Cyber Security.

Danielle will be out of the house until Monday, so I will take this time to finish getting my certs, applying for jobs, and cleaning the house.  I'm just so severely disappointed about not getting either of those jobs.  They paid 55k and 70k, which to me would have been an entire lifestyle change.  Even the woman who interviewed me said I was more than qualified, I have no idea what happened.

My Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/william-mcdonald/6/8b/504

What's going on here?

What have I been doing over the past few months?

Well I cut together a new trailer for Dungeons: The Eye of Draconus in time for the Steam summer sale:

I lost my day job as Simpson Lumber was liquidated, because the new owner (the great grandson of the founder) didn't want to run the company anymore. :(  He has single handedly killed a community and caused over 300 people locally to lose their jobs (without the mill running Green Diamond loses it's biggest timber consumer, Simpson Railroad has nothing to run, etc. etc.)

http://www.theolympian.com/news/local/article26126665.html

I've been applying for jobs like crazy for the past few weeks and currently have two interviews setup.

I've been programming a solo project from scratch, called Defend the Earth, it's a simple arcade mobile game, meant as a way to buff out my programming skills. Traditionally, I'm more of project manager, builder, designer, animator, sfx, kind of guy.  I can program, but it's not my strong suite. My current goal is to change that.  Forgive my alpha art, it's based off Ed Wood and Earth vs the Flying Saucers.  It is still very rough.

Other projects I'm working on?

Escape from the Salad Kingdom, a graphic adventure game for tablets is still being developed.  With all the job stuff going on, Danielle is too busy to just sit down and pump out the artwork, but the design doc is ready and slowly it's coming together.

and finally...

From Beyond, my largest most ambitious project to date.  The ultimate game.  The one game that is actually me trying to do something different, in terms of gameplay, story, interactivity, co-op, it's Danielle's and my game concept that attempts innovation.  It's not an adventure game, an FPS, an arcade game, it's genre is unique and it will appeal to role-players, VR enthusiasts and horror fans on a very real level.  We've produced a detailed pitch document and I am currently working on the prototype.  It's just a very large endeavor and will require at least 30K in coin to get to a presentable level that could be KS'ed to completion.  This is my dream project, it's not unobtainable, but it will be difficult.  I will share more info as things progress.  We've shared the pitch doc with several publishers, one of which showed interest but needed to see a prototype, before committing money.  So that's our next step.  It may seem to be on the back burner, but all of the above it just preparing myself to undertake this masterwork.  Yes we have two other programmers on the team, who would be willing to contribute and probably will, but this is something I want to be involved in and understand from inception to completion.  I don't want to compromise, because I can't communicate the AI properly to the programmer or have corners cut in the design, because it makes something easier.  I'm damn proud of Dungeons, with everything that went wrong during production it was sheer force of will that we pulled through, but in the end it fell short of our initial vision due to compromise.  That won't happen this time, with the needed skills to do the work that's necessary to get it to completion as it is envisioned.

Good evening Gentlemen

Being a man of adventure and opinion I of course want to express myself.  As a result I often get into debates on my Facebook page, much to the dismay of my friends and family.  So I have decided to stop posting my opinions, complaints, politics, etc. on FaceBook and instead started this blog.  In addition I'd like to keep a public journal of my goings on as a Videographer, Tech Contractor and Game Designer.  Facebook has devolved away from actually posting what's going on in your life (ie an open digital journal) and is now more about liking photos of people's babies, cats and sharing memes.  So this blog will  be functioning as a journal too.

So Who Am I?

Game designer, director, writer, scientist, visionary; these are the terms I wish I could use to describe myself.  Graduating into a down-turned market left me pushing grocery carts with a Bachelors Degree.  Now, another degree later and in my thirties, my employment situation hasn’t improved much.  Throughout my college experience, I wrote a large number of screenplays that have taken to collecting dust upon a shelf.  In a desperate move to feel some sort of accomplishment in my life, I have taken to adapting these works into a series of novels and video-games.  Will this bring me success?  Riches?  A sense of self worth?  Probably not, but only time will tell.

So who would want to read this? 

I have no idea, I'm writing this for myself more than anyone.  Maybe someone who likes to read about the process of Game Design, the art of special effects in movies, screen writing,  sculpting miniatures, making pen and paper Role-playing games? 

TheWorldBurns.com is essentially my digital thought board.  I will be documenting the progress of my various projects, which will hopefully include my upcoming Ludum Dare solo mission on the 17th.  I am also taking online classes through Udemy to advance my Tech certification as well as familiarize myself with a variety of game engines / build up my programming skills.

Oh and my name is William.