Heyyyyy! I FINALLY splashed out and bought myself a new laptop, and now I can write stuff while curled up comfortably on my sofa! Hopefully this means my productivity will shoot up, since I no longer have to choose between watching films and working/blogging.

But wait, there’s more! Using its Bluetooth connection and GlovePIE, I can hook it up to Wii and PS3 controllers and use them to play games! This means I can make stuff in Game Maker and then play it on my TV using ‘real’ control pads! THIS IS AWESOME! I don’t dislike PC gaming, but I feel happier with a d-pad and as few buttons as possible.

My dog game is in the final stage of polishing up, but is still some way from being finished. I wanted it finished by the end of March, but now it’s looking more like mid-May. If I’m going to catch up to my ‘one game every three months’ goal, this basically means my next game will need to be completed in a single month! I feel bad about letting the project drift this much, but considering my lack of art/programming training, I’m still quite proud of how it’s turning out. Creating complicated, multi-faceted arty stuff on your own feels pretty great!

In other news, some of the stuff I’ve been writing for DarkZero has started to appear on the site, and we are doggedly maintaining an almost-weekly podcast schedule despite assorted minor chaos in our personal lives. Fake journalism is giving me a lot to think about. I came into it feeling pretty cocky about the quality of my writing, but when I step back and re-read my articles I still find lots of imperfections – usually to do with weird topical jumps, where I’ve edited a group of paragraphs half a dozen times and lost the original narrative flow. I have no formal training in this sort of thing, and I’m becoming more aware of that fact.

More importantly, I’m reassessing my views on the games journalism business. I’ve become even more critical of sites that publish press releases as news, but my cynical view of PR goons is softening. Now that I’ve started to come into direct contact with these people, I’m finding that some them are genuinely likable! I think it’s a point of ‘professional’ integrity that I don’t let my personal relationships influence my writing, but I can see how they would – I already feel a bit awkward about some of the things I’ve published, which is surprising. If I wanted a serious career doing this stuff, I would probably start glossing over negative opinions and not challenging anyone too.

Fortunately I don’t!