To sleep... perchance to dream...
We've been in crunch mode... well, kinda forever, but the serious crunch at The Day Job hit this week. The entire office looks like a scene from a George Romero movie (complete with screams and violence --- albeit Nerf-gun violence). Yesterday was the worst - I wasn't entirely sure what day it was (I was barely aware it was daytime). Everyone has been pretty sleep-deprived, and we've been having all-hands meetings at 1:00 in the morning. That kind of thing.

Reminded me a lot of my days working full-time in the videogame industry.

The first year or two of SingleTrac's short existence were pretty amazing. We were ridiculously short-handed, and so everybody gave it everything they had because they knew nobody else would be there to pick up the slack. You'd think being able to play videogames all night long (and get paid for it!) wouldn't ever get old. But when it's 2 in the morning, and you are staring bleary-eyed at the TV screen watching the AI once again perform some really whacked-out logic, trying to capture a trace of what set of conditions are triggering what actions that result in that bizarre on-screen behavior you are seeing... well, it's still kinda fun sometimes, but it's exhausting. Fortunately each of our machines had a PlayStation dev card inside of them, and we had a bunch of consoles in the conference room attached to a big-screen TV, so if you really felt yourself dozing you could boot up a fast-action game to get the blood flowing again.

Here, we've got nerf guns.

And you know, when EVERYONE gets so sleep-deprived, the smallest things become really, really funny. That helps keep us going.

One plus side - yesterday (what day WAS yesterday, anyway...?) the Tome of Horrors revised came out at Drive-Thru RPG. The original was a collection of monsters from previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons that hadn't been translated to third edition, and which Wizards of the Coast claimed WOULD never be translated. Well, after they gave Necromancer Games permission to do the translation AND release all of the monsters into the Open Gaming License (so that ANYBODY could publish something using this content for free), Wizards went ahead and made their own versions of these creatures. But if you are going to use a third-party adventure (or publish one yourself), you'll want the Tome of Horrors. The new version has been revised for 3.5, and is a real bargain (especially if you never had the original).

(Note: I'm not affiliated with Necromancer Games, I've just done some writing for them in the past. And I really like their books.)

Anyway - sorry for the ramble. I'm still just a little brain-fried.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:36 PM (Permalink)