Greetings PotBS fans, I’m the new Game Designer here at Flying Lab. It looks like I will be spending a lot of time working on balancing and tuning the game, especially in the ship department. Since there is not much I can discuss about my work yet, I’ll tell some stories in an attempt to distract everyone from the complete lack of content in this devlog.

Background
I’ve been in school for most of the past 21 years and I’m still a student. That’s about how long I have been playing games, too. Sometime around a decade ago, I stopped simply playing games and started analyzing them. I took mental notes on everything about the games I played and my reaction to the decisions the developers made. That approach helped me land a job as a freelance writer for Computer Games Magazine when I was still in high school. Persistence didn’t hurt either; I just kept emailing them reviews I wrote. One day they responded because I was sending in a review of Planescape: Torment (great game) and they had not reviewed it yet, so they gave me a shot and published my review.

Around the same time I started volunteer work as a designer on a Multi User Domain (telnet projectbob.game-host.org 4000) that my brother coded. It’s still running and has a number of players who have invested between 2,000 and 6,000 hours. On the MUD, I spent a great deal of time creating and balancing game systems, items and areas. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time on scholastic pursuits and now I’m at my fourth college. A year ago I was in my third college, University of Phoenix, and I was about a year from a Bachelor’s in Information Technology. However, I wanted to try something else so I dropped out and started attending ITT Tech. I decided to take a gamble and go with something I wanted to do – game design. So I enrolled in the Multimedia / Digital Entertainment and Game Design Bachelor program instead of continuing IT. I’m still over half a year away from entering the game design portion. You can see some of my multimedia projects here, but I’m only going through multimedia to get to game design.

After a couple years at CGM I slowly dropped out of freelance writing because of changes in the market. I started working for my dad and I spent the past four years learning architectural detailing. A year ago I started doing it independently. It was high paying and convenient to work from home, but I didn’t enjoy what I was doing and I had less motivation to do it when I wasn’t working for my father. I didn’t apply for other jobs because I didn’t want to take a big pay cut to get just any game development job. I wanted to work in design, especially for MMOs. Then I saw a Junior Designer position here at FLS and decided to give it a shot because it was so rare to see design positions that didn’t require shipped titles. About a month after the interview they asked if I was still interested in working, and now I’m in my second week at Flying Lab.

Drifting Across Icy Waters
At lunch on my first day, I was surprised when I was informed there was a discussion on whether to haze the new guy. Although I was told they decided against it, shortly thereafter I learned it was simply a thinly-veiled maneuver. See, the other guys did not need to waste their energy on a hazing. Instead, they set my first day of work to be coincide with a snowstorm hitting Seattle. From there they just let nature and Seattle drivers do all the legwork. The result was a six and a half hour drive home (normally an hour in good traffic). I can honestly say that once I finally got out of Seattle, never before in my life was I so happy to be traveling 25 miles per hour. Not only that, but this is actually my first job that actually required commuting.

When I got home, I promptly went to sleep so I could wake up and drive back to work. That’s when I encountered the second part of their diabolical plan – abandon me to wander the dreaded Ghost Ship. I showed up despite the weather and found the offices to be decidedly eerie. I was the sole inhabitant of design’s corner office, primed and ready with the vast knowledge of one day’s work to guide me.

With the other designers gone, some of the guys in DevCo invited me to go along with them to lunch. When it came time to order, I was obviously out of the loop because they all ordered the same meal and they explained to the waitress that I ordered something different because I was the new guy. Apparently I should have listened – I ended up getting food poisoning (or food allergies or something similar) and had to miss my third day at work.

This is a great time to thank everyone for requiring me to write an introduction email to the company, because it allowed me to steal half the content I needed for this devlog (brought to you by: copy and paste). The one thing they did warn me about was that I should expect a barrage a tribute requests once I introduced myself. Interestingly enough, nobody came to collect after I informed everyone that I expect a massive donation to my college fund in exchange for tributes.

I believe this was all an elaborate ruse to turn me into a pirate. What they didn’t know is that I’m part of the stoic British Navy. Next time I’m ordering the cheese steak.

David Ryan Hunt
Game Designer
Flying Lab Software