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Samuel Drake and Baby Crunch Time

Our first child, Samuel Drake Worch, was born a week ago. It was quite a journey: from rushing home because Victoria’s water had broken; to driving to the hospital and seeing my wife go through six hours of painstaking labor; to supposedly seeing him being born “any minute now”; to rushing to surgery for an emergency c-section because as it turns out, Sam was so tangled up in the umbilical cord that it was pretty much impossible for him to come out the natural way. But mom and baby are doing fine, and we’ve been home since Sunday. The first few days have indeed been challenging – little rest, irregular sleep patterns, mid-night feedings, lots of diaper changes, and the ever-present need to care for somebody who simply doesn’t yet have that capacity for himself. I should be absolutely exhausted and dead in the water right now, but somehow I’ve managed. And I believe that a lot of that has to do with thirteen years of professional game development. Because really, all that Sam is asking of us is yet another crunch time.

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GDC 2010 Session Times

(201) Level Design in a Day: Best Practices from the Best in the Business
Speakers:
Coray Seifert (Game Designer, THQ – Kaos Studios)
Matthias Worch (Senior Level Designer, Visceral Games)
Neil Alphonso (Lead Level Designer, Splash Damage)
Ed Byrne (Creative Director, Zipper Interactive)
Forrest Dowling (Lead Multiplayer Level Designer, THQ – Kaos Studios)
Joel Burgess (Lead Level Designer, Bethesda Softworks)
Jim Brown (Lead Level Designer, Epic Games)
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 10, 2010)

What Happened Here? Environmental Storytelling
Speakers:
Harvey Smith (Game Director, Arkane Studios)
Matthias Worch (Senior Level Designer, Visceral Games)
Date/Time: Thursday (March 11, 2010)   3:00pm — 4:00pm
Location (room): Room 125, North Hall
Track: Game Design
Format: 60-minute Lecture
Experience Level: All

New Wheel of Time Game

Red Eagle Games has partnered with Obsidian Entertainment to develop a new Wheel of Time game. Awesome! It’s a tough universe to do justice to (I think Glen and everybody at Legend did a good job, but we weren’t making an adventure/role-playing game at the author’s request). If I imagine developers like Feargus Urquhart, Chris Avellone and Josh Sawyer working on the franchise, I get my hopes up!

The only worrying part is this quote:

We are not licensing our WOT development rights and stepping back from the process of building these video games. Quite to the contrary, Red Eagle Games will have an internal development team of its own. However, rather than staffing up a 200 person studio from scratch, we decided some time ago that for our first games it would be far more prudent to hire a small in-house team (e.g. positions such as Art Director, Game Designer, Story Writer, Software Architect, Quality Assurance Director, etc.) and rely on a third party developer to provide the majority of developers and their associated overhead and infrastructure.

No offense to Red Eagle Games (to be honest, I don’t know much about them – even after reading their executive bios), but Obsidian isn’t the kind of studio you hire to do the grunt implementation work, or try to impose creative decisions upon. I hope there will be a real exchange of ideas here, and the development effort will allow Obsidian to do what they do best: create great RPG experiences.

Why High Fructose Corn Syrup Is Evil

Much has been made of the food industry’s overuse of High Fructose Corn Syrup as an ingredient in… well, pretty much everything (especially in America). Is it unhealthy for you? Dangerous? Or simply a natural sugar replacement that, just like anything else, can and should be enjoyed in moderation?

For the answer, I urge you to watch Robert H Lustig’s lecture “Sugar: The Bitter Truth”. While not singling out HFCS, it makes a very compelling argument against high fructose corn syrup, and for cutting foods with HFCS (and that includes most bread you buy these days) out of your diet.

Wondering why HFCS is bad for you? And in fact worse than regular table sugar? The short answer is “because it’s ubiquitous and metabolizes like fat and a toxin”, but I suggest you watch these videos for a much more comprehensive answer. It takes 70 minutes (don’t worry, I promise you’ll get hooked), and will help you make much better food decisions in the future.