Reflections from ACen

I've got iTunes on an infinite loop of Starship's “Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now” while April and Colleen doze off next to me, in the last row of the flight to Oakland. It seems as good a time as any to think back on the past few days.

Memory #1: Vista let me down big time.

So we showed up with Colleen's desktop development station, a fairly modern dual-core AMD Athlon64 running Vista32. This system was supposed to run the demo that hopefully most of you got a chance to poke around in. I should emphasize that this is the workstation that Colleen uses to do day-to-day game builds (as in, it's used on a daily basis).

We showed up on Thursday evening around 5pm, with 2 hours to pre-stage the booth. So I plug in the well-padded system (lesson learned from a previous shipping attempt of another system; we now pad EVERY single nook and cranny of a system with packing bubbles to ensire that parts (like, you know, nonessentials like heatsinks, GPUs, and hard drive cabling) from UNMOUNTING and JOSTLING around the case like a giant rattle)).

The system powers up, and takes us to the login screen. Excellent! One less thing to worry about.

Then I go to log in.

"Invalid username or password". What?

Me: "Colleen, come log in."
Colleen: "Uh...weird. I can't."
Me: "#$%@#!!!!" (Starts with F, rhymes with truck)

The demo, incidentally, was the thing that I had promised in my last blog. You know, the nice thing to look at that I hope would make up for our lack of updates. We needed for this to work.

Just then, it occurred to Colleen. "Run it on your MacBook. You dual-boot WinXP on it, right?"

So, that demo that was on the floor this weekend...that was my baby. My precious. And I was deprived of its use throughout the convention weekend. *sigh* Nevertheless, I'm so proud of my MacBook.

Well, at least the demo seemed to run stably. On Friday, we saw one crash to desktop while April "The Jinx" was idly playing the demo. (She's the Jinx because she has a strange knack of taking something that everyone else thinks is stable, and breaking it...usually within the first 5 minutes of touching something. Needless to say, you may want to watch your genitalia when she's in a "grabby" mood.

Saturday and Sunday, however, went by without a single crash or glitch.

Wow.

Memory #2: Children grow up way too fast.

When Okashi Studios showed up at ACEN this year, my expectations were that aside from the handful of ACEN people who presently frequent the forums, that everyone would be new, and nobody would really care. We'd have to "start over" essentially...perhaps not entirely, but maybe a few steps up the hill, with the rest of the mountain ahead of us.

It was not like that at all.

It's like, I never really noticed it for a whole year, since it's something that's with me on a daily (more like hourly) basis.

It's the ones you're the most closest to, sometimes, that are the ones you just stop noticing are even there.

But that's not because you don't love them. It's because you love them so much that you can't imagine life without them. The fusion is so utterly complete that to talk about the parts becomes completely meaningless.

But in those rare cases of deep introspection that transcends even this level of soul-merging, you idly glance at your life partner, your counterpart. And what you see completely bedazzles you.

It feels like just yesterday stitching together the strands of code for the HDC engine. A blink, and it's something that I no longer recognize because it's achieved far more than what I could have possibly put into it myself.

It's the bricklayer who never looks up at his work, and one day something catches his eye and...

Or the child that, just yesterday, thought you were the smartest person in the world. And now you suddenly realize that he/she has surpassed you in every aspect.

Something catches the bricklayer's eyes, and he looks up. And what he finds are all of the people who've been supporting him throughout the year, passing the bricks, mixing the mortar, preparing the meals, and lighting the candles for when it becomes too dark to see.

And in that crowd, I see Josh (Unka Josh) and Kimberly (Shurafuzzi) and Alex (post, damn it, so I can remember your username) and the rest of the gang from last year, mixed in with the Okashi Studios dev team. And I see some newcomers (the sleepless guy in the front row, the gentleman who was with Shirafuzzi, the guy on our far right...too many to mention!) to this crazy place and dream that we call Shira Oka.

Because these are the people that I take for granted, that have become so intertwined with my life that I no longer think of them as something separate.

I think that, at the end of the day, Shira Oka belongs to us all.

"We can build this dream together....standing tall forever...nothing's gonna stop us now..."

Let's please enjoy the ride.

Memory #3: Russian Sausages.

I'm cruising along River Road with Olivia, looking for some grub to feed the troops at the booth. We had McDonalds the night before (I hate McDonalds, anyway...once a year is enough for me). The previous night, we had White Castle (an ACEN tradition for us, since White Castle does not exist in California to the best of my knowledge). April hates Subway (she says, though we ended up getting her a BLT from there).

Despair sets in. We had been gone for 2 hours. Colleen is going to kick my ass.

Olivia: "Dude, what about that deli?"

Sofia's Deli.

We pull over, and enter.

Literary descriptions don't do this place justice. We were completely transported to another world.

Everything was in cyrillic (cyrillic's pretty hardcore-looking). There was this couple speaking some language that we can only assume was Russian (we heard "Da" at some point). An old lady is busily shuffling back and forth behind the counters of meats, filling orders for the couple.

And the meats! Holy crap, I have never seen so many moldy sausages!

It's times like this that make life really worth living.

I really, really wanted to cry.

We somehow ended up buying two items. One was this giant, bright-red, 3 pound slab of ground and packed, cured meat (I think it's a sausage) which can only be described as a giant erect phallus that some car had rolled over.

(I later slapped Olivia with it really hard on the ass, and supposedly, it hurt a lot.)

The other item had a similar, crushed phallus shape, except that it was covered in what looked to me like green mold.

These were recommended to us by said Russian (again, I only assume) guy when I asked him to point out to me the most hardcore, nastiest meat on sale.

I invite those of you who partook in the Sunday Sausage Sensation (I was cutting samples for most people who came by on Sunday) to gush on about the heavenly taste of this Eastern European treat.

I think a new ACEN tradition has just been born.

Oh, and does anybody who's reading this actually live in the area of Rosemont? I would pay well for anyone to ship us random meats from this deli every month or so. Okashi Studios HQ will be forever grateful.

A long-awaited update

Thanks to our forum member leetbeef, I realized that it's been a while since we've given an update on the status of Shira Oka: Second Chances. As I've said to people time and time again, while I still stand by the whole "It's done when it's done", I also stand by the notion of giving enough information out so that people can form their own conclusions.

So here goes.

Read more: A long-awaited update

GDC after-report!

Last week was the annual Game Developers Conference right here in in our backyard, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. I'm actually still recovering from GDC-- both with catching up on work from last week, as well as shaking off the nasty cold I picked up at the con. (Who here has gotten sick from a con? <_<   ...and then promptly infected someone else as soon as you got back? >_> )

This was my second year at GDC, but the first year that I worked (volunteered) as a Conference Associate there. I've always wanted to try staffing at a con sometime, but these days I'm usually manning a booth at the cons that we go to. So I was quite happy when I found out I was chosen to be a CA this year... and admittedly a bit apprehensive to find out what I had gotten myself into...

Read more: GDC after-report!