Version 1.1 of mmap mini maps has been released. It is available at the GameMaker Marketplace.
Daniel Linssen is an indie game developer who lives in Sydney, Australia, who I came to know after playing his first Ludum Dare creation, Javel-ein, for LD28. After releasing the full version of Javel-ein, he was cool enough to reach out to me to let me know of its existence, since I had so enjoyed the version he had made for LD28, and since then we’ve corresponded regularly and become digital pen pals. He is also the creator of Busy Busy Beaver (which won Bacon Jam 07) and FFFFFF for Flappy Jam. His most recent game, The Sun and Moon, recently won first place in the Overall category for Ludum Dare 29.
CS: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview. Ready to begin?
DL: As ready as ever!
CS: First, do you prefer to be called Managore or Daniel? What does the name Managore mean?
DL: Daniel. In the past I liked having a unique identity while still being anonymous, but I’ve given up on that.
Fun fact: For a long time “Managore” was absolutely unique. Then a year or two ago a Bulgarian company released an online game called Managore and my uniqueness was lost. Oh well!
The name doesn’t really mean anything. Years ago I started writing a (really terrible) sci-fi novel and one of the characters, some sort of biological experiment, was named Managore. And the name stuck.
CS: How did you get started making games? How long have you been doing it?
DL: The earliest example I can think of is as a kid I designed some Sonic The Hedgehog levels on paper. I think I was around 8 at the time.
CS: That’s something I used to do as well, designing games on paper. I think I did my first game concept when I was six or seven…
DL: I’m pretty sure the levels I designed would have been terrible. I hope yours were better!
CS: Nah, the stuff I drew up wasn’t that sophisticated. I’d do a drawing of a screen shot, and then narrate the rules and the player’s goals, point values, etc. and my mom would write them down for me. I didn’t do anything so sophisticated as a full-blown design doc or anything. It was just about the enthusiasm and instinct to be creative, and wanting to do it for real someday.
DL: There’s an old DOS game called Jetpack and I spent a long time using its level editor. The idea of a level editor was pretty novel for me at the time. Over the years since then I’ve played around with RPGmaker, C++, Valve’s Hammer Editor and Flash but never made anything that I could really call finished.
CS: What game projects did you work on previous to your first LD game?
DL: Well a whole bunch of unfinished or unreleased games, unsurprisingly. Actually the only games I’ve released so far have come from game jams. My first experience participating in a game jam was three years ago, I was working with a friend of mine. The game we made was a one screen rhythm platformer for Reddit Game Jam 05 (the theme was “love”) called Give In. I worked on the player controls (which are way too slippery) and the graphics (which I still kind of like the look of).
After that I started using GameMaker and worked on some exploratory platformers which will probably never see the light of day. Then, half a year ago I took part in the Bacon Game Jam 06 (the theme was “rainbows”) and made an action platformer called Violet, which I think of as my first “proper” game, if you can call it that.
CS: How do you approach a 48 hour event like LD? How is it different from when you are working on a game without external time constraints?
DL: I try to start off well rested but that’s about it. Sometimes I have an idea of what aspects of the development process I want to focus on or improve on. Once I have an idea and I start coding, autopilot tends to kick in.
CS: OK let’s talk about The Sun and Moon. I’ve just read your post-mortem article on the making of it, so hopefully we won’t rehash too much of that. I encourage readers to check it out for themselves.
First, let me just say congratulations on another fantastic game. For the record, out of 1493 entries for the LD29 Compo, you placed 1st Overall, 1st in Theme, 2nd in Fun, and 3rd in Innovation. This was just your second LD entry! Obviously, no one expects to win a category, but how well did you think The Sun and Moon would do when you finished it?
DL: Well I went into it hoping to make a game which I could be as proud of as my previous LD game, Javel-ein, and I think I achieved that. When I finished, I was really happy with how things had gone. Everything (well, except the music, but I was too tired to realize that at the time) had pretty much falling into place and the game’s mechanic ended up being a lot of fun. I was lucky not to run into any major hurdles along the way.
My hope was to get a medal in some category but I knew there were so many utterly fantastic games to compete with, so it was always something I was hoping for but never really expecting.
CS: How does it feel to have won the Compo?
DL: It feels amazing. I couldn’t believe it. It’s a dream come true.
CS: What does the title, The Sun and Moon, mean?
DL: Good question. I have all these good answers for why I chose “Violet” and “FFFFFF” and “Busy Busy Beaver”, but I don’t really have a good answer for The Sun and Moon. I was really struggling to come up with a unique and meaningful name. I had all these ideas written down. They’re pretty bizarre so they might be entertaining to read:
A World Divided, The World Beneath, It Spoke Quietly And No One Heard, A Hollow World, The Sun and Stars Both, The Sun and The Moon.
If you’re curious about ISQANOH… I honestly have no idea. I liked the sound of it.
Anyway, because it is such an abstract game, at least as far as my games go, I wanted the name to be up to the player’s interpretation, but I did have a reason for choosing “The Sun And Moon”. As I was developing the game I realized I needed to make the player change appearance while underground, and from that point onwards the player kept reminding me of the Yin and Yang concept. The dark version which falls and the light version which rises. The air and the ground. Complimentary forces. And one representation of the Yin and Yang is the Sun and Moon, so I went with that.
CS: Yeah… what was interesting to me about the title was, there wasn’t really any literal sun or moon in the game! I wondered about that, and was interested to hear what the story was, if there’d been some plan to get them into the game but you ran out of time, or… if, like the Sun and Moon were just metaphorical somehow..
DL: I worried that people might find the name a little too… artsy? But as far as I know that hasn’t been the case.
CS: I think it’s a fine title!
CS: The core mechanic of The Sun and Moon is to traverse a series of obstacles by selectively passing through solid platforms. How did you come up with the idea? How long did it take you to refine the specific mechanics (requiring a jump/fall to pass through the floor, buoyancy within a solid platform, the acceleration/momentum upon ejecting out of a solid platform, etc.)
DL: It just sort of came to me, after a long string of bad ideas. I was thinking about a bubble in a world made of water and air, and the idea evolved from there. I had a pretty vivid image in my head early on of diving into the floor and shooting up into the air and from that point I felt like I had come up with something fun. I stuck with that mental image and built the mechanic around it.
Originally you didn’t have to jump to pass through the floor. I planned to make the player “wobble” up and down if you were standing on the surface and held down the action key. The way I happened to code it meant that when you held down the action key, since your vertical speed was zero, the “wobble” wasn’t there. This worked well enough so I just left it that way.
CS: At what point did you realize you were on the right track?
DL: When I started making the levels. I posted a gif of one of the first levels I made and the responses were really encouraging. The more levels I made, the more content I was with how my game was going.
CS: How long did it take you to build the basic engine?
DL: Surprisingly not long at all. I mentioned it in the post mortem but I made a movement and collision engine called the Beaver Engine which I used as my starting point. The Beaver Engine is a stripped down version of Busy Busy Beaver, one of my previous game jam games, which took about 12 hours to write the code for.
It took a little rewriting to add in the underground physics and make it all work properly but overall the basic engine was pretty painless.
CS: What design decisions were hardest to make?
DL: We’ve already talked about it, but the name! I was actually starting to panic a little towards the end because I couldn’t come up with a name! Oh, also the player’s trail. I went through five or six iterations before I found something I was happy with.
CS: What features/ideas did you drop from the game?
DL: I’ve started to get a pretty good idea of how much I can realistically get done in a game jam, so I kept my feature list pretty minimal. I actually had time near the end to add in a few features such as the level select screen, which I wasn’t originally planning on including.
Speaking of features I wasn’t originally planning on including, I should definitely mention how much of an absolutely huge help it was having you give the game a go a few hours before the deadline. I remember you saying you wish there was a way to know which level you were on, which led to the level number appearing at the beginning of each level, and you said it would be useful to know which level had been played last, which led to the player sitting on top of the last played level in the level select screen. These were really important features that I wouldn’t have thought of at the time.
CS: Absolutely! It was an honor to have been asked, and to be able to provide a little feedback so you could refine the finishing touches on the game that ended up taking 1st Overall. I remembered thinking right away that it was a very strong entry, and I liked it from the first couple levels. I had the idea about the level numbers because when I was giving you feedback, I didn’t have an easy way to reference which level I was talking about. So it was a fairly obvious suggestion.
DL: Fairly obvious to anyone but me! I guess it just really helps to have a fresh perspective with an eye for what’s important.
CS: True; when you’re in the final hours before deadline, your focus tends to be on the most critical elements of the game, and finding bugs. Being able to look at the game with a fresh perspective just isn’t possible, so it’s valuable to be able to get feedback from someone who hasn’t been staring at it for the last 40+ hours!
How would you compare The Sun and Moon to your other games, Javel-ein and Busy Busy Beaver?
DL: Well I knew while making BBB that it just wasn’t going to be that innovative, so I focused on making it fun and silly and pretty. For The Sun and Moon I went the opposite direction and focused on making it unique and innovative, at the expense of a story, detailed graphics and humor.
And then Javel-ein is sort of a blend of the two.
CS: This game focuses on mechanics rather than story, and, I think, stands up well on those merits. Have you thought about adding story elements to the game, or do you plan to leave it abstract?
DL: I’ve thought about it, but I honestly don’t know what direction I could take it.
CS: Your sense of level design and mechanics for 2D platformers is, if I may say so, pro quality. Can you describe your process for designing levels?
DL: In general, if I have a game mechanic to work around, I try to explore that mechanic in as much depth as possible. For The Sun And Moon, I looked at all the different types of movement that the mechanic allowed for (e.g. diving down into the floor, jumping up and through a block, falling off a tall platform and diving deep into the ground below, jumping through a thin wall, jumping into and up through a block) and came up with levels that made the player use these tricks. I wrote all my ideas down on paper first since I’d often have multiple levels ideas come to me at once.
CS: Do you have interest in making other types of games than 2D side scrolling platformers?
DL: Definitely! I think it’s just been the case that the ideas I’ve had that have worked the best have always been tough platformers. On the backlog I have a color-based puzzle game I’ve been working on as well as an idea for a top-down naval exploration game.
CS: The art style of The Sun and Moon would be best described as a minimal, GameBoy style. But it works very well, especially the “clouds” in the background. How did you come up with the idea for them?
DL: For the clouds? Early on the background was a solid color, and I realized that if you flung yourself really high into the air it was impossible to tell how fast you were going. To fix this I decided to add a parallax background in. My game, with its monochrome palette and dark-foreground-on-light-background style, already looked far too similar to Luftrausers, so I wanted something abstract and different.
When I was coming up with the idea for my naval exploration game I experimented with perlin noise and other techniques to generate a huge ocean with lots of islands and interesting coastline, so perlin noise was still fresh in my mind. Because Photoshop’s “Render Clouds” filter creates tileable perlin noise I knew I could use that to quickly make a suitable background.
CS: Interesting that it was a feature driven as much by gameplay needs (having a reference so the player could gauge their speed) as much as cosmetic needs. Visually it’s a very pleasing effect!
How much have you added to the game post-compo?
DL: I’m up to 67 levels at the moment, though I lot of the newer ones still need some work. I’ve added controller support and made the game run on mobile devices. I’ve added a timer for each level that records your best time. I have a lot of ideas for mechanics that could add variety to the gameplay and I’m currently playing around with these to see which ones work the best.
CS: Wow, sounds like you’ve been busy! What are your plans for developing the game further?
DL: Even more levels! However many I can come up with while making sure each level is still unique and fun. I’ll work on the visuals a little bit but I want to keep it looking minimalistic.
More importantly, the music is going to be completely redone.
CS: How about some technical questions?
DL: Sounds good!
CS: You use GameMaker: Studio for your games. Do you work with any other programming tools or environments? What do you like about GM:S? What do you wish was better?
DL: Not at the moment. I think what I like the most about GM:S is that I’m so familiar with it. And that it’s very easy to prototype new ideas. There are, unfortunately, a lot of things I wish GM:S did better. The built-in level editor leaves a lot to be desired, the program occasionally crashes and I lose progress, Windows builds and html5 builds can be wildly inconsistent, and a lot of other, smaller issues.
CS: How did you get into GameMaker?
DL: Two of my favourite games, An Untitled Story and Spelunky, were made in GameMaker. They inspired me to begin making games seriously so I guess I thought it was a good idea to use what they used.
CS: Are you active on the GMC forums? Are there any other good sites for game development that you frequent?
DL: Not at all. I browse /r/gamedev and /r/indiegaming on reddit, but that’s about it.
CS: You mentioned in your post-mortem that you experimented with a couple of different motion trail techniques, before settling on a line drawn out behind the player. How did you make the line taper?
DL: Okay so each frame an object is created. This object stores the players current location (x,y) and the player’s previous frame location (x_p,y_p). The object draws a line from (x,y) to (x_p,y_p) of a certain thickness, starting at 5 pixels and decreasing by half a pixel each frame. So, at any one time, the trail is made up of 10 objects, each drawing a line of varying thickness.
If the player is underground it’s a little different. It still creates objects which store the player’s current location but these objects draw a circle instead of a line, and instead of the circles shrinking their visibility is decreased each frame.
CS: Thanks to gravity acceleration, you can achieve some pretty high vertical speeds. Was it a problem to handle collisions at such speeds? Did you have to do anything special to make it work?
DL: Good question! Because every object in the game (except the collectables, come to think of it) is 16 by 16 pixels, I only needed to make sure that the player never moves more than 16 pixels each frame, so I set the terminal velocity to 14 pixels a frame, just to be safe. I think the terminal velocity is pretty hard to notice in general.
CS: Is there anything else you’d like to say?
DL: Only that participating in Ludum Dare has consistently been a fantastic experience.
CS: I have to agree. Not just making games and having other people play them, or even getting to play a lot of cool games made by other people, but getting to know a few of the people in the indie scene, both through their work and through actual correspondence. Perhaps that’s been the most rewarding part of it all. Congratulations on your accomplishments, good luck in the future, and thanks for taking the time.
DL: It was my pleasure, thank you for interviewing me!
This weekend, April 10-13, 2014, will be Notacon 11. The last Notacon, apparently.
The first Notacon I attended was Notacon 2. I was less than impressed, as it seemed like the most poorly organized event that I had ever gone to. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was because the event was not put together by professional event planners, but by a bunch of geeks who were no older than me, who didn’t see any reason why they couldn’t do something they thought would be cool. But in those first years, the execution wasn’t quite at the level of the vision yet.
There were printed schedules for when talks and presentations were to be given, but due to last minute changes no one was where they were supposed to be, when they were supposed to be. I missed talks that I had wanted to see, and saw things that I had no interest in. Speakers’ presentation slides were projected onto bed sheets that were strung up in an improvised manner. If they had a microphone, maybe it worked but as likely as not it was low on batteries or cut in and out throughout the talk. I didn’t know anyone there, and no one seemed to be friendly or inviting. I tried to chat with geeks playing with legos and soldering irons, but no one seemed very interested in getting to know me, or talking about what they were working on.
So that was my first and last Notacon, until Notacon 6. A friend I knew from the interent, named aestetix, who I’d never met IRL declared in a blog post that he needed a ride from the airport so he could deliver his talk, and he offered to get whoever helped him in for free. I’d long admired his thinking and writing, and took him up on the offer. By then, Notacon had matured into a well run conference, with interesting talk topics and personalities. Drew Curtis from Fark.com presented that year, as did Jason Scott of Textfiles.com and the BBS Documentary, Archive Team, and the Internet Archive. And Mitch Altman, of Cornfield Electronics and TV-B-Gone, and a young comic book artist named Ed Piskor, who was working on a 4-part graphic novel on hackers called Wizzywig, and would later go on to create a definitive history of hip hop and rap music, Hip Hop Family Tree. Among the attendees was Emmanuel Goldstein, whom I had read about years ago in connection with the legendary 2600. I was afraid to walk up to him and say hello, but I was impressed that he was there, and amazed that I knew people who knew him.
I went every year after that, and made friends with a lot of people there. Aestetix introduced me to Paul and Jodie Schneider, Notacon’s primary organizers, and I met many others there for the first time who would become friends, acquaintances, and professional contacts. Most significantly, for me, I met a neurohacker I met at Notacon 6 named ne0nra1n, who was very friendly and made me feel welcome as a newcomer to this space, and corresponded with me after that weekend, giving me encouragement to present a talk myself. At the time I didn’t think I had anything that I was good enough at or knowledgeable enough about to make an interesting talk, and the amount of work that I felt I’d need to prepare something even barely adequate frightened me. My first presentation proposal, a talk on intellectual property and copyright reform, wasn’t accepted for Notacon 7. I felt secretly relieved.
But ne0nra1n’s encouragement changed my life. As a result of Notacon, I started this web site, not yet knowing what it would be. I participated in the founding of the Makers’ Alliance hackerspace in Cleveland, and through my involvement there, first encountered the Cleveland Game Devs, and became heavily involved with them in 2010. This helped me to rediscover my enthusiasm for programming and game development, which I’d put aside for many years.
I delivered my first presentation at Notacon 8, “How I (FINALLY) Made My First Videogame”. I put a lot of work into it, which was only possible because I’d just lost my job two weeks before, and that allowed me to pour 14-18 hours/day into working on finishing that first game, and to preparations more directly related to the talk itself.
I worked on the game and the talk I would give about how I had made it, right up until the last minute, and while I knew my topic and what I wanted to say, I hadn’t had time to rehearse, and no real idea if I’d fill the hour slot I had, or go over. But my prepared material fit the hour almost perfectly, and I received many compliments from attendees — this completely exceeded my expectations.
Presenting was a great experience. I was transformed that day. When I went to bed that night, it all hit me at once: I had done it. I had grown up to be the person who I had dreamed of being since I was little: a videogame designer. It was something I’d given up on when I became an adult, and I had tried to forget about for years, but I never had found anything to replace the passion I’d had for that dream, and life felt unfulfilling as a result. But, because of that chance interaction with ne0nra1n at Notacon 6, in two years I had become the person who I had always wanted to be.
Talking about that journey in front of a room full of people, had made it real in a way that it hadn’t been before. I felt, at last, like I had arrived, and I had a place where I belonged.
A friend recently asked what WordPress plugins I could recommend. So far, I have been happy with the following:
Jetpack adds a number of neat features that integrate with WordPress.com, so you can benefit from wordpress.com services with your self-hosted wordpress installation. It’s more like a suite of plugins, 31 different modules all together. Very good, highly recommended.
I have a few things that I’m looking for, too.
E-commerce: It should be easy to use, allow for selling digital assets, and have a “pay what you like” feature like Humble store or BandCamp. There are so many features to think about, and it seems like the amount of effort to set up and manage an e-commerce store is significant enough that you really don’t want to pick the wrong one and have to start over later with a different one if you can help it. It’s intimidating, enough so that I haven’t even begun to investigate it. But it’s a goal of mine to have it done sometime in the next year.
Code: I’m not entirely satisfied by the way WordPress formats source code. I’d like to be able to display both blocks of code as block elements, and in-line mentions of code keywords to be styled, such that it is obviously programming code, with good syntax highlighting. There are a number of plugins to choose from, and I’ve used a few different ones but I’m not ready to recommend one yet. I’m going to look into these and testing them out in the near future.
From the release notes:
This is a very cool feature indeed! The ability to add third party RSS feeds to the Tutorials and Demos promises to make the GameMaker developer community even tighter, by accelerating the sharing of knowledge and techniques. While there is a great deal of information on how to do things in GameMaker at the GMC Forums, on various websites, and on YouTube, now users will be able put everything into a nicely aggregated channel accessible directly through the GameMaker: Studio IDE.
I’m really looking forward to seeing what the community of developers, which likely numbers in the thousands or tens of thousands, comes up with.
Cleveland Game Developers Summer Jam 2013 is underway!
Theme.announce() {return “The Butterfly Effect.”;}
I’ll be posting builds in progress at https://csanyk.com/cs/releases/games/SummerJam2013/web
Haven’t really thought of anything yet.
I’ve started an idea, not sure where I’m going with it yet.
WhileTrueFork and TwoBitArt have teamed up to produce a game called Oregon Whale. It was released yesterday to much fanfare.
While I do not presently own any iOS devices with which to enjoy the game, I did have an opportunity to look at it during a recent encounter with Sam of WhileTrueFork fame. Gameplay is rather simple: you can choose to dive or jump over obstacles as your whale tries to reach Oregon before dying of an unfortunate malady such as tuberculosis or malaria or dysentery or ennui.
It’s the sort of game that people seem to enjoy on mobile devices, a nice causual distraction, with graphics and sound that are quite charming and well done. The music by Ian Faleer is just perfect.
It is currently available on iOS through the App Store for a mere $0.99, and the soundtrack is also available through Ian Faleer’s bandcamp site. A release on Android is planned.
No notes!
I’ve widened the wordpress theme for the site a bit more. This should allow for larger images, videos, and games. Unfortunately at the moment I think it’s made the text a bit harder to read than the narrower-width column was. I’m not entirely sure what to do about that at the moment. I’m interested in your feedback, obviously, so if this is too wide for your screen, or you don’t like it for some other reason, be sure to leave a comment and let me know.
I’m going to relate a story that just happened to me that got me to thinking: I’ve really met some amazing people in my time.
The other day, I was trying to log into the Global Game Jam website, and was having a hell of a time remembering my password. Stupid me had forgotten my password, which isn’t a big deal since the website, like just about any website has a forgot password feature. But for some reason this one was driving me nuts. I’d get the email to reset my password, click the link, log in, change my password, then log out to verify I now knew my password by logging back in again, and it would tell me I wasn’t giving it the right username/password again.
After a dozen or so times doing this, I went to the web site and clicked Contact, and wrote them an email describing the problem I was having.
I got an email the next day from Elonka Dunin. She suggested that I try logging in with my username as my username, and not my email address. A lot of websites these days use your email address as a login name, since they generally uniquely identify a user. And a lot of websites are done in such a way that you can log in either with your username OR the email address that you used to create the account with. In this case, they didn’t. But I didn’t know that. And because I didn’t sleep much that weekend when I created the account, I didn’t remember or didn’t notice, or both.
Now, ordinarily, who cares, right? It’s just one of those things, a “me being dumb” moment out of maybe a million I’ll have in my life, if I’m lucky to live that long. Nine times out of ten, I might have not cared about it enough to bother notifying the web site that it has a problem, and would have just not bothered logging out, or I would have just continued using the reset password method to get back into the site until I really got sick of it. But actually, in my case, I have been using the Global Game Jam site from multiple computers, and it was bothersome to have to go through the whole process every time, and, besides, it was driving me effing bonkers to have the web site tell me every time I tried that I couldn’t for the life of me enter my @#($#(& password in correctly, even when I @#(&%((^ well knew that I’d been @#($&#@&(^* entering it correctly. So, this one time, I bothered to write and let someone know I was having a problem, and someone was nice enough to help me fix the problem.
The story might end there, 99 times out of 100. But Elonka had written to me from a gmail account, and so the next day after I’d replied to her message thanking her for her help, I got a notification from pidgin asking me to authorize new buddies, and Elonka’s account happened to be one of them. I figured I didn’t need to chat with her, and probably wouldn’t ever need to again, and I’m not normally an outgoing type of person, but for whatever reason I figured “what’s the harm” and I clicked Authorize.
So, today, I get home from work and I’m all set to go swimming at the Y. I have a little time to kill, so I fix myself a quick dinner and I try to watch The Daily Show from their website. Only, their Flash seems to be all glitched up and the stream keeps interrupting and restarting, and then REALLY starts messing up and playing commercials over the top of the show, and then crashes entirely. I keep messing with reloading it, hoping to get the show in before I have to leave to go swimming, but as is often the case with computer problems, I get sucked into it and before I know it, it’s too late to go swimming.
So, because of that, I happened to be home when I got the IM from Elonka, asking me if I was OK with getting into globalgamejam.org. I say yes, wondering why she was asking since I’d already replied to her email with my thanks. Ordinarily I might have just ignored the message, not out of rudeness, but out of this driven focus to try to manage my time effectively. But for some reason, instead of closing the window I thanked her again and I figured that was going to be that.
By now, you might be wondering who Elonka Dunin is. Well, I wasn’t sure myself, although the name had sounded familiar for some reason. It turns out, this is who she is. So, I wrote to globalgamejam about an authentication problem and I didn’t get a response back from some volunteer intern college student, or an outsourced helpdesk monkey. I got a response from someone who happens to be Chairperson Emerita and one of the founders of the International Game Developers Association’s Online Games group, has contributed or been editor in chief on multiple IGDA State of the Industry white papers, and is one of the Directors of the Global Game Jam. I had no idea.
For reasons I’m not quite clear on, she went on to ask me if I was planning on attending Notacon this year. I was a bit puzzled, but I guessed that she had read a mention of it in my Game Jam project page or something. I’m speaking there, in fact, so I told her about my talk and about how I was organizing a tiny little Game Jam event this year. And she said, “Wow!”
=D
Dude, I got a “wow” from Elonka Dunin.
It turns out she has some family in Cleveland, and has herself spoken at Notacon, and she knows my friend Aestetix, who probably more than anyone else is responsible for helping me find my way into the hacker scene. Small world!
She also complimented me on my blog entry postmortem on the Game Jam, and mentioned that she had sent it to some other people as an example of good writing.
So I’m sitting here, feeling kindof struck at how amazing tonight has been for me, and how a series of seemingly inconsequential events strung themselves together to make it happen. And it also made me think about how many amazing people I’ve met and gotten to know at least a little bit in the last couple years since I stepped out of my comfort zone and offered to pick Aestetix up at the airport in exchange for being his “plus one” to get in to Notacon 6, just so I could meet this cool guy I’d been reading on livejournal since forever.
I guess I’ve come a long way from that time. In many ways I feel like I’m still just getting started, but I guess I should start getting used to the idea that people are going to know who I am before I tell them if I keep this up. What a strange realization to have for someone so used to feeling invisible.