I married Brenda Garno on October 27, 2012 on the Mark Twain steamboat at Disneyland, then again on November 10 at our house with a larger audience. We’re both very happy and she’s just amazing.

                          

It’s been a long time coming, but the decision has been made – Brenda Brathwaite (my fiancé) and Tom Hall (my good buddy) are teaming together to make an Old-School RPG that harkens back to the 80′s and 90s great RPGs we all played and loved. They plan on making the game at our company, Loot Drop, Inc. located in San Bruno, CA.

Check it out here.

                          

The bad news is that id laid-off a batch of people earlier in January, probably because they didn’t need 100 people to sit on a brand-new team.

Also, it’s unfortunate that this birthday hasn’t been recognized anywhere, not even on id’s own blog. They’re probably too busy dealing with the massive success of Skyrim. Grats!

                          

Here is a step-by-step walkthrough of how to get Xcode set up for programming simple console apps like you would find in any basic C book.

STEP 1: Install Xcode 4

It’s in the Mac App Store. Search for Xcode then get it. I believe it’s free. Next, after it’s downloaded, you need to run the app called “Install Xcode” (if you’re running Lion, you can find it by clicking the silver rocket ship dock icon). That is what will really install it. When that’s done, you can move on to step 2.

STEP 2: Create a New Project

This is the first thing you will see. Make sure you choose “Create a new Xcode project”.

Next, choose “Mac OS X”, then “Application”.

Then choose “Command Line Tool”. Click Next.

Now choose the options for your project, and where to put it.

Click Next.

Make sure to UNCHECK the option to create a git repository. You’re just starting to learn to code – source control can come later.

STEP 3: Set Up The Project Window

Now the project will start up in a window that will look confusing since you’re not used to this kind of information. Don’t worry — you don’t need to know about this yet, and you can get rid of it so you can focus only on your code.

First, select your main.c source by clicking on the name in the left pane.

Next, let’s get rid of all the bothersome info. Click on the View buttons so they’re all off like this.

Now you should be looking only at pure code.

Click on the PLAY button at the top-left to run the simple main() code that was generated for you. It will open up an output window at the bottom of the edit area.

Now, make the output area fill the screen from left to right by clicking the View buttons like so:

There! Now you have pure code and pure output!

To clean up the output and make it only show you your code output and no compilation messages, change the pulldown menu from All Output to Target Output.

Finally, I don’t like coding with a solid white background blasting my retinas all day, so I always choose a dark scheme.

To do this, press Command-, (comma) to bring up Preferences. Choose Fonts & Color. On the left pane, choose the theme Midnight. Your screen would look just like this…

That’s all there is to setting up a new console-only C project in Xcode with a simple environment! This is the view that my girlfriend Brenda prefers because it’s easy to just focus on her code.

                          

At GDC 2011, Tom Hall and I did a DOOM Post-Mortem, which basically talked about the complete development of DOOM in a month-by-month format. You can watch the video and the slides right here.

Tom Hall has been working with me and Brenda at Loot Drop for an entire year, and it’s been a blast! He’s been designing and running his own game team, and his game is turning out great. Brenda is busy with her own game, designing and running her team (the game is COOL!), and I’ve been working on keeping the company running smoothly. My game, Cloudforest Expedition, is on a temporary hiatus.

                          

I wanted to make a social game last year, so my girlfriend Brenda told her employers (Lolapps, Inc., a social game developer in San Francisco, California) that I was interested. I started consulting in August 2010, designed the game in a few days, and got the team working on what I decided to call Ravenwood Fair. At the beginning, I did art direction toward a painterly style until the lead artist, Christine MacTernan, totally got the look and took over from there. I created and coded all the sound effects, and worked with a great composer named Aaron Walz from Game Audio Alliance on the game’s looping soundtrack. He did an excellent job, as the song can be played infinitely without annoyance – the true test of a great composition.

The team was very small: four programmers, two concept artists, two animators, a UI artist, a producer, Brenda and me. That’s only 12 people. In addition, the game launched on October 19, which means it took 2.5 months to go from concept to ship. This causes many a social game publisher to gasp, but there’s a good reason for it: the team worked very hard, and they had already been working on several game concepts for 7 months before I showed up, so they were already “at speed” and no ramp-up time was needed.

When I arrived at Lolapps, the owners told me I could create whatever, as long as the game would make money and launch by September 30. That was less than 2 months by the time I started working on it. I knew I had to hurry up and come up with a concept, so I quickly identified the best game on Facebook at the time, FrontierVille, and played it for three days so I could understand its design patterns and monetization model (I had been following the social game space since 2009). Then, I got the scoop on the engine we were using and found out it was really fast and could draw a ton of graphics on the screen quickly. I learned from the lead coder how much code had been written for the previous game prototypes, so I needed to use as much as possible to keep moving forward and not go backward much.

The idea for the game appeared very quickly. The setting was going to be a fairytale/storybook/magical place that floated in the air and was occupied by a slightly scary forest. Since the biggest games on Facebook were business sims, I needed to have the player build their own little business, and I wanted it to be like nothing else on Facebook. I thought a Fair would be a really nice obvious positive goal for the player to build, and there wasn’t a carnival/circus/fair sim on Facebook……yet. My thought was this: when you’re building a place for visitors to come and occupy, why wouldn’t you want them to be doing something really fun while they’re there? What’s more fun than Disneyland? I imagined what it must be like at a high-level point-of-view to actually RUN DisneyWorld in Orlando, Florida – to have to carve out a bunch of wilderness packed with alligators and other denizens, and then have to build a fun place in the middle of that – and KEEP it happy and fun, all the while the alligators and beasts want their place back. I figured that would be a fun game to play – as I cut back a scary forest, I build a Fair, visitors come and use all the things I’m building, and I get to interact with them in a light fashion. That was the basis of my design, so we had our first meeting, and the producer and leads wrote down the long list of things that we needed to start working on immediately.

After August, we were still working on the foundations of the game systems and entire art overhaul, when Brenda joined the team from Critter Island (it had been shut down by Facebook). Brenda immediately started working on the quests, the map layout, and the tutorial parts of the game. She had to basically try to get all the final parts of the game together while I was still working on the foundational stuff, and we had to make sure that they would meet in the middle and the game would be complete by September 30.

Near the end of September, to make the launch date, the game had been re-scoped and re-prioritized so much that it wasn’t going to be anything I’d want to play if we shipped it in that state. Facebook games are well-known to ship incomplete and get fixed post-launch. I’m not from that world – I’m from the world of “You only launch once” and the first impression is extremely important. There were game systems missing that absolutely needed to be included in the game for the design to harmonize, and it got very tense at the end of September with the execs pressing for launch and me holding the game back to make it great. Every day in October was a “Can it ship?” day. It took 19 more 12pm-to-4am days to get the game in a state that I’d launch. In fact, I held back on doing interviews about the game until I knew it was going to be something I’d put my name on. Finally, around October 15, the game was quality enough for me to do the Dean Takahashi interview in VentureBeat.

The game launched, but the team kept working. We had lots of holes to fill, and obscure bugs to fix. The launch on Facebook went as good as a launch could possibly go: millions of people played the game and hundreds of thousands still join every week. Brenda and I ended our consulting with Lolapps on February 25, 2011 so we could concentrate full-time on our new startup, Loot Drop, Inc.

Just recently at the beginning of March, Ravenwood Fair made the #15 slot on the AppData Top 15 Applications list – this list is of ALL applications on Facebook, not just games (over 125,000 apps are on Facebook). Ravenwood Fair is the #1 non-Zynga game, and that’s quite an accomplishment. Currently, over 25 million people play Ravenwood Fair every month on all social platforms (over 11 million on Facebook alone), and over 1 million play every day on Facebook only. I never thought I’d see the day that I would make a game that doubled World of Warcraft, player count-wise. I’d like to thank Brenda and Lolapps for giving me the opportunity, and the Ravenwood Fair launch team that worked so hard on the game.

Ravenwood Fair Trivia Time!

                          

After three months, Tom Hall officially joined us in May 1991. He wanted his transition from Softdisk to go smoothly, so he stayed to train his replacement. Our first year at id was spent mostly developing games for Softdisk’s Gamer’s Edge subscription disk – the product I started, but then left when the company could hold us no longer.

In our first year, 1991, we created Shadow Knights, Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, Rescue Rover, Hovertank One, Rescue Rover II, Keen Dreams, Commander Keen: Secret of the Oracle, Commander Keen: The Armageddon Machine, Commander Keen: Aliens Ate My Baby Sitter!, Catacomb 3D and Tiles of the Dragon. Eleven games in one year! Not counting the Keen games, Softdisk paid us $5,000 for each game. It was a good thing our first Commander Keen trilogy was making money and gaining each month, otherwise our trajectory would have been drastically different. (In the halls of id Software, some of these games are on display in hanging frames.)

When we started creating Wolfenstein 3D in January 1992 (in Madison, Wisconsin), we still had one more game to create for Softdisk, but we didn’t want to do it. We were too excited to create Wolfenstein 3D! So, George Broussard, co-founder of Apogee Software/3D Realms, offered to create the final game for us. The result of his labors, using our game engine, was the rare and obscure game, ScubaVenture: The Search For Pirate’s Treasure! (An interesting trivia point about the game’s title: one of my programming heroes, Nasir Gebelli, wrote a game called ScubaVenture back in 1983.)

Our first year was the last time we were so prolific. As the games got more complex, and better, the time to develop them grew. Wolfenstein 3D took 6 months, DOOM took one year, Quake took 18 months. In between, our sequels took less time (Spear of Destiny, 2 months; DOOM II, 8 months), but they were using existing code we’d already written.

Twenty years, wow. That is quite an impressive accomplishment, due in large part to the torch-carrying efforts of John Carmack and Kevin Cloud, both of whom remain at id Software today. May id Software live another strong 20 years!

                          

In Mail.app:

1) Near the bottom, expand your GMail folder
2) Expand the [Gmail] folder inside
3) Select the All Mail folder inside
4) Go to the menu item Mailbox >> Use this mailbox for… >> Trash
5) Collapse the Gmail folder now; no need to look at it again
6) Press Command-, (comma) for Preferences
7) Select Accounts tab
8) Select the same Gmail account in the Accounts list
9) Click Mailbox behaviors
10) In the Trash section, KEEP CHECKED “Move deleted message to the Trash mailbox”
11) UNCHECK “Store deleted messages on the server”
12) Set “Permanently erase deleted messages when:” to NEVER
13) Close the Preferences window and click SAVE

Voila! Now when you delete messages from your Inbox, they get Archived. You can double-check this by logging into Gmail and deleting a message in Mail.app then refreshing your web Gmail inbox. I’m using Mail.app version 4.4, but i’m sure this setup works on many previous versions.

In addition, if you want your Mail.app emails to look just like GMails with threaded conversations, make sure you’re viewing your GMail account, then go to View >> Organize by Thread.

                          

Well, I think it’s awesome for several reasons. First, because I’ve been a huge Duke fan since Duke Nukem 3D. I absolutely loved that game. My memories of playing DN3D are as awesome as my memories playing Dark Forces, Outlaws, Jedi Knight, and Ghost Recon. Secondly, I’ve been friends for years with Randy Pitchford, the man who bought the Duke IP from 3D Realms; to carry the torch as it were. I’m really proud of Randy for doing that – Duke is a great character that deserves another major release, and I’m interested to see what directions Gearbox will take Duke in the future.

I visited 3D Realms in May 2000, right after shipping Daikatana. I went over to check out the latest on DNF. George Broussard showed me the game, and it was seriously awesome. Granted, I was seeing the best stuff they had available at the time, but what I saw was really great. I was excited to play the game. Alas, development of the game went through many changes, and not having a dedicated producer early on took its toll. When I heard 3D Realms had halted development of the game, I was half surprised, and half not. It had been 12 years, and that’s an incredibly long time to be in development – I mean, it’s really incomprehensible. I can’t fathom what it must feel like working on a game that long, then not releasing it, especially if you were there at the start of development.

But now we can all breathe a sigh of relief, those of us who kept the excitement at bay for so long. The Duke Nukem Forever development team that continued creating the game, even after being laid off, without being paid, for the pure love of the game, deserve an epic amount of applause and attention. These guys are the heroes. And I’m still excited to play DNF.