I arrived at BioWare in March of 2005 with my wife and a four-month-old baby. A game called Jade Empire was a couple months away, and the team was deep in last-minute crunch. A game codenamed SFX, later to be named Mass Effect, was in very early development.

And I was living the dream working on Dragon Age (later to become Dragon Age: Origins).

I was only on for about five months. I wrote a training module about a search for a kidnapped war hound that Dave Gaider said he thought he could imagine seeing in the game, and then I wrote a pair of origin stories. Both were cut after I left -- one that wasn't very good, and one that everyone liked but which no longer connected with the rest of the overall world.

In July or August, I got moved to another project that needed a newb, and while I've been transferred up and down the length of the studio, I never got back to Dragon Age. When the Damsel joined BioWare, she came onto Dragon Age as well and did a bunch of editing for about a year before, like me, getting moved to someplace she was needed more.

The game came out today. Above 90 on Metacritic, great sales if the pre-orders are anything to judge by, and a whole lot of really excited fans. It was a game made with love, a deliberately old-school CRPG with cutting-edge technology. It's got a ton of content, from humorous Easter Eggs to epic magic to all-too-human intrigue. It's unapologetically hard, even on Normal. People are already comparing notes and realizing just how different their stories are based on decisions they made.

I'm going to play the hell out of this game, and I'm going to marvel at the amazing game the team put together and be grateful for getting the chance to have been a tiny part of it, even for a few months.

So, for reference, Subject Zero is a character revealed for Mass Effect 2. She stirred up a great deal of controversy, and I thought that she deserved a little bit of the Patrick Treatment.

Ergo, my Halloween costume, already tweet-spoiled:

So, in case you were thinking that I was just dressed up as a Thunderdome reject, take heart: I was actually dressing up as a Thunderdome reject in drag.

Much thanks to the Damsel, who applied most of the body paint (with my son applying the rest, including the nose for the smiley face on my tummy) and all of the back tats, especially my multitudinous tramp stamps, and also pretty much made the nipple-halter thing herself out of a belt and whatever else we had lying around.

The best part of the day was people completely failing to recognize me, which was kind of fun, as I am not usually a master of disguise. Evidently losing my crunch beard, which I'd had for about a month, had something to do with it.

Me: Okay, I'm wearing body paint and a nipple harness, and you think the disturbing thing is the fact that I shaved?

My Wife: Yes.

So there we go.

OH RPG GAMING SITES NO!

Quote of note, in regards to Dragon Age: Origins having homosexual romance options:

"David Gaider must really get a kick out of writing homosexual relationships.

In any case, I'm not going to buy this game. I don't consider being flirted or stalked by fags as entertainment in the slightest sense. "

-- Surlent, a totally heterosexual dude who is not even a little curious about why it felt good when he played center in football and the quarterback didn't go in shotgun formation and cupped his taint, the quarterback's muscular fingers lightly brushing the tight surface of Surlent's uniform around the ass, just before shouting, "Hike!", and now he pays women to put on football helmets so he can achieve an erection.

Fortunately, others responded appropriately. I added a brief, "Methinks the homophobe doth protest too much," and the mods noted that the user had received a warning. Sounds like your basic "One asshole who gets kicked in the shins by the rest of the group" situation.

And then we got this in response (emphasis mine):

"Why would you warn Surlent? He just stated an opinion. Unless you warned all of the gay approvers too. That would be okay, I guess. I mean if you're going to warn everyone who is heterosexual and dislikes homosexuality, you'll be warning half the male population of this website. To me, calling someone a homophobe is as demeaning as calling someone a faggot. Since you allowed homophobe then faggot/fags should be allowed as well. You can't pick which group to be intolerant to. Please let me know if RPGWatch is going to take a stance against people who dislike homosexuals, because I would have to leave too."

-- crpgnut, who puts a smiley after correcting "homophobe" by saying "homonauseated would be closer" to show that he's just joshing around, lol, I hate gay people, roflqueers.

To me, calling someone violent is as demeaning as punching someone in the face! To me, charging someone with manslaughter is as demeaning as committing a murder! To me, being called a racist is as demeaning as using the n-wo... Oh, wait, stupid straight white people whine about that, too.

Every time I wonder why it's so damn hard to get a gay-friendly plot or character into a game, I just have to look to the Internets for an answer.

I finished another Mass Effect 2 playthrough over the weekend. Every time I play this game, it's looking better. The endgame had me on the edge of my seat, which is absurd, since I KNOW WHAT HAPPENS.

I think that people are going to be really impressed by the combat. The overall balance has moved from wars of attrition (whittle an enemy down and hope that if you're on Hardcore, they don't spam Immunity) to fast nasty firefights. Even popcorn encounters can turn deadly if you're an idiot who doesn't use cover or pick the right tool for the job... but on the upside, you can really take down enemies fast and hard when you know what you're doing. Everybody, you and your enemies, is more dangerous.

Of course, half of the official forums are filled with people concerned that because our combat is better, we're less of an RPG. In Mass Effect 1, you were an impoverished vagabond pawing through crates for your next meal or a good set of Incendiary ammo mods until about level 20, at which point the balance of power shifted, ammo mods started rolling in, you ended up with more money than stores willing to accept it, and you got to purchase the Spectre Weapons and Auto-Win the Game.

I've been really impressed with how far we've come in Mass Effect 2. We haven't said much about it yet, and this post will not be the post that breaks out all kinds of exciting news on the subject, because, you know, not my system. I'll spoil journals instead. We still have them. An awesome person figured out a way to make them auto-pop on screen so that even those of you who never ever ever ever look at your journals (I'm looking at you; seriously, I had to write a lot of entries, but do I get a thank-you?) will see the occasional helpful hint pop up. It's a massive improvement (unless it turns out to break the game memorywise or something, in which case it will be cut and I will weep sad designer tears and then move on). On the upgrades and mods front, I dumped a bunch of money into it and really liked the results. And due to the awesome balance of our money system, I could not just buy everything and Auto-Win the Game. I had to, you know, think about the way that I played and what I wanted to emphasize.

Same deal with character advancement. It's less about "Hey, make sure not to take First Aid or the Persuade skills, since you get those for free! Max out everything else!", as the official walkthroughs would say, and much more about figuring out what you want your Shepard to be. It's been a long time since I agonized over spending my points quite this much... or grinned in triumph as a new or upgraded power completely changed the field of battle.

And all of that makes us good competition for Borderlands, except that we're single-player, which means we're toast unless there's a compelling story.

I will preface this by saying that I'm a wuss who tears up at least once per Pixar movie (yes, even Cars, why does everybody sneer at Cars, did you not all see the part where McQueen goes back to push the King through the finish line, what the hell, people?), and accept that this is just going to sound like another dev shilling his game, because... well... I'm a dev, shilling my game... but it's pretty awesome.

Key moments, key choices. Written, then looked at critically, then rewritten and edited to be stronger and better and sharper and then stripped down to do just what they need. Give that to VO teams who do the impossible on every project (imagine doing 10 to 20 CG movies in terms of length, and also, by the way, branching dialog that makes it much harder for an actor or director to intuitively get the sense of how the scene is playing, and oh, the main character was written by seven different writers with a pair of editors pulling hard to keep the voice consistent). To directors who have to know the game inside and out to provide crucial context, to actors who are willing to throw themselves into a role and trust that we're going to do them justice. To audio folks who do a great number of things I don't understand, the audio equivalent of Photoshopping, to make things perfect. Bring that back to the Cinematic Animators and Cinematic Designers who turn it into movie-quality scenes, again with the added player-control factor. And the art teams that make the characters, the levels, the audio folks who actually make the lines have consistent volume and the background music fire correctly and... and all of it.

And yeah, rah rah team, I know, but damn. I walked through the beginning of a romance with a character, and watching Shepard and the character banter back and forth, the body language, the lighting, the dialog, the acting... it was the first time I think I've looked at one of our dialogs and thought, "Wow, that's sexy." Not boobs-and-pistols Bayonetta sexy, but "two characters obviously interested in each other and testing the waters" sexy. (Caveat: not written by me. Written with significantly more skill than I'd have had.)

I saw a squad member drop to their knees crying, and it worked. I felt bad and wanted to help. At some point -- and it ain't writing, or at least it ain't just writing, it's the VO team and the voice actors and the artists and the cinematics folks all pulling together with programming support that gives us more animations and higher quality than we've ever had before -- at some point, we passed through pixel-town and made characters that people are going to feel an investment in.

Also, one time I biotically knocked an explosive crate into a bunch of husks, at which point it exploded and blew them off a ledge, and that was pretty cool, too.

In summary, I am very happy and feeling really good about going back to the >100 bugs I have waiting for me, because I know that this game is worth fixing at least 60 of those and dumping the rest on my wife, the editor. (Love you, sweetie!) And also, when your biggest regret in terms of cut content is that you had to remove something the generic krogan shouted during combat because it violated German laws regarding mistreatment of corpses, you know the game is in pretty good shape.

I realized not too long ago that I really like ambients. Not, in this case, the combat barks, but the little "people talking as you go by" conversations that you put in to fill out the world and make the place feel like something that doesn't disappear as soon as you get into the elevator to head to the next level.

They're one of the few bits that doesn't involve the player. They're tiny, they're incredibly limited because you can't really have many animations or even hand-gestures without pulling in CineDesign (and CineDesign is busting butt to make the big important conversations), and they're just kind of... there. These little dialog snippets, a chance for you to tell a tiny short story. It's like conversation-based flash fiction. Can you make somebody care about someone in just a hundred words of dialog?

Sometimes you put them there so that an area with no quests still has some noise as the player walks through. Sometimes you put them in because none of the focus testers could find the healer's tent, and you need a few people going, "Wow, that healer over there sure is great!" to give the player a clue. Sometimes it's a reaction to something cool the player did, and sometimes it's just a slice of life that feeds into the illusion that these pixels and polygons are real people.

I wrote something yesterday that made both of the editors tear up when they edited it today -- and another bit that had them laughing out loud. Moments like those are what you live for. There are players who fell in love with people we at the company never even bothered to name, demanding the return of Refund Guy (a guy who had a very long conversation about trying and failing to get a refund for his purchase). I don't know if it's because he was funny or because he was angry or because he helped give more life to the setting or if it was just because he seemed like an ordinary guy, someone the player could identify with. But it's a tiny clue into what makes people like our characters, and what we can do to make them like them more.

The new ambients should be in the game soon, and the voices will come in before too long. We'll see how it goes.

After seeing people all over the forums making their Dragon Age characters, my wife insisted that we download the character creator, despite the fact that as EA employees we could probably, you know, get our hands on the actual game. (Through the miracle of this blog, this will appear to be my wife's pushy demand, to which I grudgingly agreed, and not any geekery on my part. Whee!)

My first attempt is a auburn-haired elven woman with a future in magery:


I don't usually put makeup on my female characters, but in this case I was trying to get as close as I could to an existing character:



(Actress Amanda Righetti in her role as Grace Van Pelt on The Mentalist.)

Given that I didn't have a picture of Van Pelt at the time and was working from memory (and also given that I'm a terrible artist and not even very good at describing how people look in my writing), I'm not unhappy with how it turned out. I shouldn't have selected the smiling face for the character's portrait, but really, even if Van Pelt mostly looks pensive, I'm not going to stare at a non-smiling portrait for the next 80 hours.

People with an interest in CRPGs should definitely check out the Dragon Age character editor. I've been in the dark about Dragon Age while running hard on Mass Effect, and I'm really impressed by how much customization they have for the face. (The character stuff is not as customizable, but most of that is just to give you a picture of what the real game will be like, as I understand it.)

See you all online!

The Design Stand-Up Meeting on Tuesday:

Me: So, uh, (Mission Name)... TWO heavy mechs?

Designer on that Level: I didn't die.
(Note from my wife: the level designer in question is a girl, just in case one thought BioWare didn't have any.)

Me: I died a few times.

Boss: Yeah, over the weekend, I noticed that this game has been getting kind of hard. Maybe it's AI improvement, or just enemy scaling, but yeah, some of these levels have become a bit unchristian.

Me: I died maybe more than a few times. Now I'm on (other mission).

Boss: That one has also gotten a bit more lethal.

Me: Yeah, also, I'm testing the Persuade system, so I'm playing as somebody who only puts ranks into Charm and Intimidate until I max them out.

Boss: So you don't have...

Me: All I've got are a Pistol and Starting-Level Biotic Throw.

Moment of silence descends over the room.

Boss: Well, good luck with that.

Me: I am charming the living crap out of those geth.

Okay, after taking a week off for quiet time, I am in a better place.

You want to tell people things. Not things that are confidential, but things that will give them faith that the game you're making is the game they want. You want to show them that something they don't initially love is actually a good thing for your game. And so you...

Well, you take a week off. And you get much more careful about writing things that are significantly harder to take out of context.

On said work front, this has been a very very busy but very very good week. I'm closing bugs -- under 50, and almost under 40 for a brief moment! I got something that we're referring (not canonically) as Galactic Network News properly organized for tech people to hook up. (Different areas already have their own local news, but we wanted to give something that was more universal -- like if you're in an airport bar, you might have the local CBS affiliate on one TV, but you'll have CNN on another screen?) Sadly, it turns out that the news file is monstrous and huge, and it may actually not make it into the game -- what I did was a bit like walking up to a packed elevator and then throwing a buffalo in as the doors were closing. We will see if tech dudes can work their tech-dude magic and make the file smaller. We all agree that it SHOULDN'T be as freaking huge as it is, and it might just be that even though it's just a voice reading the news, it's storing all the data that it would use to tell the game how an actor should move his or her mouth for lip-sync purposes. It's almost never the sound part of dialog that makes our files so big, but the cinematics. Anyway. If the game ships without this extra news stuff, we'll still have the awesome area news that people wrote, with the fun flavor stuff that makes different areas seem unique. If it ships with the galactic news bits, that's icing on the cake.

I'm also doing a Paragon / Renegade pass, which is great for plots I wrote and painful for plots I didn't write. I am hell-bent on making sure that we don't have another Lorik Qui'in incident, where someone can infinitely loop a section of dialog that gives P/R points in order to max out their score. Going by bugs, I've already botched it once. I can only hope the excellent folks in QA can catch my screwups, just like they caught all the places where I botched the journals and would have helpfully sent people looking for directions off to the wrong end of the galaxy:

"Subject Zero wants help clearing out a base full of krogan over on (Wrong Planet), in the (Wrong Star System) of the (Wrong Part of the Galaxy Entirely)."

In many ways, this is like getting directions from me in real life.

After a couple of bad and out-of-context quotes of things I've said, I'm going dark, workwise, until further notice. So, all of you who read for the BioWare stuff, feel free to unfriend. No hard feelings. I know I don't have much else going on right now.

I started a new playthrough of Mass Effect 1 at home this weekend, with the blatantly metagamey plan of hammering AI Hacking with an engineer until it got unlocked as a bonus skill due to the achievement, and then starting an Infiltrator with AI Hacking. It's the first time in quite awhile that I've played the original Mass Effect, and it is fascinating.

The official forums are populated by people with concerns that the folks who made the game they love are going to screw up the sequel. This post? Not for them. I've made a few passionate and honest posts about how I think we're improving the gameplay by cutting what didn't work before, and some people are reassured, and others accuse me of being arrogant, selling out, or lying. At this point, I'll be on the official forums to answer questions, and I will get my general Mass Effect chat fix elsewhere. There's an awesome LJ community, and I've always enjoyed the Penny Arcade forums.

But anyway, I was talking about the original Mass Effect:

Holy sweet mother of heaven, that first couple of hours has too much talking. Great on the first playthrough, invulnerable to the magic X-X-X-X skip buttons on the seventh or eighth. I'm fully aware that as the guy who had to play this when there was no sound and only placeholder animation, I am a bit jaded when it comes to these groundbreaking cutscenes and dialogs. That said, I'm only on my second real playthrough, and I can only imagine what people on the tenth playthrough are doing. In Mass Effect 2, we can skip cutscenes, and there are far fewer non-skippable conversation lines, at least right now, and I hope we manage to keep that when we ship. Our big plot dialog is also a whole lot shorter, at least if you want it to be shorter. So there: win.

And then there's the loading. How many times have I run into a weird pause while we loaded a new area? How many elevators did I ride even on my quick-and-dirty playthrough to unlock and hammer AI Hacking as quickly as possible? It was a massive improvement on the clunks and crashes before we released ME1, as I remember, and still... I look at it now and can't imagine how we thought it was okay. What we have now, the clever layout of loading tunnels and carefully checked art and conversation assets -- it works. You run around seamlessly. People are going to pick up ME2 and, well, ideally, not even notice this, because what this is is the absence of something bad.

Much has been made of the removal of crouching in ME2. Right now, the removal of crouching is a big bonus. "Hey, there's some cover! Wait, why am I not going into the cover? Oh, I have to crouch?" Are these truly valuable things to think to oneself? In ME2, I run around, I hit cover, I hit "A", and then I move into a cover position appropriate to the height of whatever I'm next to. I think that people hearing about the loss of cover think that Shepard will be moving through the entire game standing fully erect (but enough about the romances), but in fact, ME2 Shepard is ducking and weaving and generally behaving intelligently because we built the game from the ground up with the new cover scheme in mind instead of moving through two or three different schemes before settling on what we shipped with last time.

I do not miss the reticle. I like it being assumed that my Shepard has maxed out the skill of whatever weapons I'm trained with, and letting me spend my points on something else. Like, ideally, AI Hacking.

I do not miss the health bar. I know that it seems less realistic to people, but I think that those people are doing a bit of a 3rd Edition D&D denial thing. Is it really more realistic to have non-regenerating health? To have those injuries be real injuries that are then magically instantaneously healed by medi-goop? In the new format, at least I can assume that an injury is just a momentary state of windedness, the result of shots knocking the wind out of me as they penetrate my armor, and that if a follower goes down, that's a "real" injury. (And then, slapping medigel on them is just pumping them full of drugs and giving them some quick synthetic skin, something that will just get them back to the ship so that they can get real medical treatment.) I don't see any real "this is less realistic" thing here, and the health bar is just one more thing to juggle.

The soundsets I am still enthusiastically kicking in the shins for ME2 are already worlds beyond what we had in ME1.

The faces on the NPCs are better in ME2 -- I see how much handwaving the CineDesigners had to do in ME1 now to fake the things that the system couldn't do, and those are things we can actually do for realsies now.

And the story? The story for ME1 is great... and I think what we're doing is a fantastic next chapter. Our ME2 dialog is a bit tighter, a bit more conversational, but for all the "It's darker" mentality, it's clearly the same world, with the same people. We're a little less shiny than ME1, which means that there's a bit less sense of wonder -- and I miss that, yeah. We make up for it with, I think, more humanity, more of a sense that these people you're clicking and talking to and killing are real people, and that's a combination of writing and CineDesign and Art and even the Level Designers giving us levels that support what we need to do to make that happen.

I loved ME1. I was proud of ME1. And we are going to make ME1 look ugly and clunky and dated when we throw ME2 out for public consumption.

My wife, badass Dragon-Boat paddler, helped paddle the BioWare Dragon Boat team to victory this year in the Edmonton Dragon Boat Festival! They brought home a gold medal, a silver medal, and a sweet jade dragon statue with little ruby bits for the eyes.

Go BioWarriors! You all spent a lot of cold, wet, mosquito-filled nights paddling on the river, and your reward was having a bunch of people look at you in surprise and say, "Wait, you guys make video games? Really? And you're here? I mean, we could see the breast cancer survivor team and the LGBT team and all that, but a video-game-company team? Really?"

If you're breaking down stereotypes, you might as well do it someplace with a dedicated beer tent.

( Long work blather. )

Some days, I have kind of an awesome job.

My testing playthrough of Mass Effect 2 was evidently more badass than I had previously believed:

Me: So I finished my lunchtime playthrough today. It's really awesome!

Combat Designer: Great!

Me: Some of those last fights are brutal, though.

Combat Designer: Well, we're still tweaking balance.

Me: It was kind of weird that none of (THE END BAD GUYS) had shields, though.

Combat Designer: Oh, yeah, that's a bug. Neither the player nor any of the enemies have had any shields in the past few builds.

Me: Wait. I didn't have shields?

Combat Designer: Yeah, I know. They're tweaking the GUI, too, so it's easy to miss the fact that you didn't have them.

Me: ...Man, I thought I was a bit squishier than usual...

Damsel: So I saw your post about Cookie and I helping dress up (FOLLOWER NAME) for the romance.

Me: Oh, good.

Damsel: And... well, I was so excited that I started to post a reply, and I wrote, "Squeee! Yaaaaay (FOLLOWER NAME)!"

Me: Uh... NDA?

Damsel: And then before I hit "post", I went, crap, he didn't actually say the name, did he? And I went and erased it and got so embarrassed that I didn't post at all.

Me: See, this is why we can't have nice things.

Damsel: Okay, I know! I didn't actually do it!

Me: You know I have to blog this.

Damsel: For fuck's sake...

- - - - - -

ETA: And then she called me from work today while I was driving over to pick up the kids, just so that she could hold the phone up to the speakers and I could hear a follower's awesome voice say, "I have a shotgun." To be clear, this totally made up for everything.

Some poor person posted that they'd like to hear my ramblings on general CRPG theory. So, briefly, I hope, one thing that has jumped out at me lately is this:

You get one special thing per level.

One of the biggest hassles on ME2 has been us trying to shoehorn way too much awesome special stuff into a single mission or level. Which, yeah, it's great that we want that, but when wanting that means we end up having to redo the level because we broke it, not so awesome.

At its base, here is what you can do in Mass Effect:

• Walk around
• Shoot stuff
• Open containers and do the hacking minigame
• Talk

Everything else is a Special Thing, which means that you should lock that crap down.

( Mass Effect 1 Spoilers )
The best thing I've been able to do on Mass Effect 2 is cut extra Special Things from levels early in the game. A timed section or an escort fight or a "shoot the generators" puzzle or a "gain X points through a combination of persuades and quest completions" bit.

And still, there are levels with multiple Special Things. And in the spirit of blatant hypocrisy, there are times when I'm the one saying, "Okay, sure, we can cut it if need be, but it's mostly working, right?" and trying to keep it, while also acknowledging that the other Special Thing in the level isn't getting the attention it needs.

But there are also levels that are now very very simple, because the tech designer and cinedesigner and I were all on the same page about what the big Special Thing was -- the drama of a fantastic-looking scene that tugs at the player's heartstrings, an awesome fight that you really need to think to finish successfully.

A lot of people want to do something new. We get a lot of submissions from people who will never become employees because they want to show us they can do BioWare plots by submitting something that would never appear in a BioWare game, counterintuitive as that may seem. And yeah, I love the trick fights and the fun puzzles and all that. But there's a lot of mileage to be gained from the core things we do well: walking, shooting stuff, clicking on placeables, and talking to folks. You can make a memorable level with those four things, no gimmicks, no Special things. You can save your fellow designers headaches and give them more time to spend on the Special Things that really are worth doing. You can spend your ammo wisely.

Early next year, we'll see how we did with that.

There are so many things that I can't talk about right now, workwise, which is frustrating. I could talk about general CRPG theory some more, but any topic related to my current work would boil down to "Try to have fewer bugs on your list at the end of the day than you had at the beginning."

One of the few things I can mention is that my lovely editors, one of whom I am married to and the other of whom midwifed when the Damsel gave birth to the Bud, spent about half an afternoon a few days back squeeing because they'd gotten to pick a romanceable character's outfit -- like, what he was wearing in the final scene when he came up to get jiggy witchoo. The sheer amount of Girl being exuded down the hallway caused programmers and tech designers to poke their heads out of their offices in suspicion. So, when you get to the culmination of the romance with a guy who shows up with a bottle of wine and a nice outfit, you have the Damsel and Cookie to thank for it.

Meanwhile, I've got a submission back out to an agent. After years and years, I may finally be figuring out how to write a good novel outline -- or at least, I'm sucking less. Every agent and editor seems to have different preferences, and there doesn't seem to be a formalized process, like there is for Standard Manuscript Format (where even if everyone agrees that Courier 12 looks stupid and most agents are reading on their Kindles or Sony Readers anyway, you still submit it thatway). One editor wants a one-page summary -- and if you say "one page", I will give you something that does not go over one page, because even if you don't care, there's another editor out there who writes long blog entries about how failure to adhere to their simple rules means an automatic rejection, so I'm going to play it safe. Another editor wants a short synopsis, which kind of means anything. Another editor asks for a detailed outline.

At a novel workshop, the teacher suggested that an outline should be one fifth the length of the book. That would mean that for Palace Job, I'm writing a 20,000-word outline. No. It's... if I have somebody reading 20,000 words, I want them reading the first three chapters plus a two-page synopsis.

I ended up going with a four-pager this time -- one page per major story section for the novel. Palace Job is also, I'm realizing, a pain to outline because, as a heist caper, it's more plot driven than a normal fantasy novel. I found myself wanting to go into the details of each con or heist setup, and then I had to step back and just show that yes, there were cons, so that the agent knew that I had written something with cons in it, and hopefully the writing sample I included will show that those cons may, if the agent requests more, prove to be quite good. Who knows?

I also took an evening to browse through the big fat fantasy novel that I was supposed to start rewriting before crunching work and crunching arm combined to push me back a few months. The passage of time has been good. I can approach things with a lot less ego and a lot less proximity, which means that I'm more likely to go, "What the hell does this mean?" about an obtuse passage than to know it inside and out and assume the reader will also go to that special Patrick Place with me mentally. I read a version with a friend's comments, which was awesome, because said friend enjoyed the book and had many comments along the lines of "Woooo!" when something blew up.

So I'll start rewrites at some point here, and I will, as always, wait and see with the agent.

Back on work for one final thought: the biggest issue I've run into as a BioWare writer, and felt good when I've gotten past, is trust. When you're staring at red and blue text in the toolset, it's tough to remember that a Cinematic Designer who cares just as much as you do about this plot is going to be having people move around, changing camera positions and such, and that a VO team who live and die by their ability to get good dialog out of voice actors is down in Los Angeles busting their butts, and that the actors themselves very rarely actually want to phone in a role and would really like to have whatever they record be cool and memorable provided that they get the information they need to deliver the lines properly. I've written, and subsequently cut, a lot of dialog in which people spend too much time explaining what they feel, or doing old Knights of the Old Republic-style declarations of frustration when I should have trusted a CineDesigner to have the character turn around and walk away with an angry expression.

I wrote some dialog today. It's first-pass (well, second-pass, but first-pass really, because the old first-pass wasn't right, and I can say that, because it was my old first pass), and who knows if it will bear any resemblance to what ends up in the game. It's for Miranda, one of the two people in the background of our box cover, and as I tossed out most of what I'd written before, I realized that what I needed to do, counterintuitively, was write what someone doing what she was doing would actually say, you know, as though the Cinematic Designer dude would take the baton I passed his way and run with it to put in the turns, the walking, the stares, the shoulder-holding, the headshakes, and all of it. I put in a ton of comments, probably more comments than dialog, and talked with him a few times to get a sense of what would work.

And it still might not make it. Tomorrow I might wake up and see that my old nemesis, the Crap Fairy, turned my brilliant dialog into stupid stilted piles of cliche during the evening build.

But it's a step.

Today's doctor's appointment went well, and I've been cleared for limited typing. So, novels, no, but occasional short two-handed blog posts, yes. :)

Doc said that the X-ray was good, and I was right where I was supposed to be in terms of recovery. So there we go.

No other news. Work is crunchy. Home is stressful as a combined result of work-crunch and Damsel going from "wife in relatively equal relationship" to "single parent who also serves as caregiver for disabled husband while simultaneously working until midnight". So, you know, baby steps.

someone on the me boards is asking an interesting question. shepard finds imprisoned queen insect alien, her people thought extinct. player frees her or kills her (last time her race invaded galaxy, but this was thousand years ago, and cause of war unclear).

on boards, poster is asking whether you killed her or freed her... and how old you are.

i think it's cool to have been part of a game that raises questions like these.

This phase of the VO process is, I believe, like running from the boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark. You run. You run fast. The boulder moves behind you at a steady rate, and as long as you keep running, you are good. Sometimes you pick up a little speed, and you gain some ground on the boulder, and you think, "Hey, sweet, this is fine!"

And then you see a rock in the path. Today, the rock was our designer toolset crapping out because the sheer size of this game is doing things to the database that no database should have to put up with. So hey, no saving for an hour while everyone scrambles to put that out. (The tools guys were excellent. Again, this is not "Oh, sucky tools." This is tools built for text games that are now handling text and VO and cinematic animation instructions and all kinds of fun stuff.)

Or another rock, a critical "Hey, take a look at this," problem that eats a key couple of hours. And you stumble, and right yourself, and keep running.

And the boulder? The boulder does not slow down.

Someone asked me today if I'd listened to some of the stuff that's gone off to be recorded. I hadn't, because really, once it's off to VO, it is officially behind the boulder. I am not concerned with "behind the boulder". I am concerned with the boulder, and what it will do if I do not keep running at a speed equal to that of the boulder, on average. Later, when everything is recorded, at least first pass-wise, I will come back to the temple and look through the hallways and see what the boulder has left behind.

That all sounds negative. It's not. Somebody played a line I'd written today that had one of our most jaded and cynical people laughing hysterically. Another bit, which I wrote at least half on a dare from my wife, is actually getting into the game, and the people who find it are going to squee like nobody's business.

I think we're near the top of the hill, for reals this time. All but one of my big major plots are out of my hands, and all but two of the characters with whom I was lucky enough to have a hand. (One of the two is just getting a final editing pass. Getting the other is next week's big task, and wow, it's going to sting, but I had the one-sentence revelation that told me what I needed to do to make the character work.*

And there are some tiny small bits, the equivalents of the people arguing in ambients as you walk by or the tiny little roleplaying plots that break up the action here or there. But I've signed off on those, so they are mostly, as far as I am concerned, behind the boulder.

This is going to be a fantastic game. And with antibiotics kicking in and an actual weekend off last week, I'm actually feeling it again.

Until the next rock pops up in my way, anyway.

* Tangential, but I describe most of my character writing the way I describe my attempts to sing: I can't actually do it. I just impersonate people who can. I can only sort of carry a tune on my own, but I can nail the high notes in the Les Miz song "Bring Him Home" provided I'm doing my impersonation of Colm Wilkinson. With characters, I need an easy "Oh, it's like this." A broad stroke, an "Oh, it's Kaylee from Firefly" or "Denzel Washington in Training Day, as played by a small white woman." An impersonation. By the time I'm finished with the character, it's not an impersonation any longer, but the broad initial stroke gives me a set of parameters within which I can work and flesh out who this person is and what they would say or do in a given situation. It's what I do with most of my characters in my own writing, and it's worked well so far for me at BioWare.

Hello. My name is Patrick Weekes, and once upon a time, I had a blog.

That was before life came in and kicked the crap out of it.

Work... continues. Mass Effect 2 has won a crapload of E3 awards, as have other BioWare games. I am intensely proud of that, despite having little to no participation in anything related to that demo. I am also really hoping that we're near the top of the hill, because neither I nor the Damsel can take much more. We're very close to burn-out.

Every human in the family has been sick twice in the past two weeks, which seems a bit unfair for one of the four months of decent weather Edmonton has. The new cats are settling in nicely and have a generally good relationship with everyone except Avelie, who is a butt. And a couple of days ago, we took in a foster dog that someone had been mistreating. He's sweet and nice and very very very very skittish. He dug a small hole for himself in the backyard, and whenever anything scares him -- the screen door, a passing car, me blowing my nose -- he goes over and lies down in his hole, which is kind of the saddest thing ever.

He's underfed, too -- the way he walks reminds me of a horse, because you can see his shoulderblades as he lopes along, and he's got these long skinny legs and long thin body despite being at least mostly beagle. (We're thinking an underfed teenage beagle/retriever mix, maybe.)

So yeah, sad, but very friendly, and incredibly good with the boys. (Who were also incredibly good with him. Slow movement, soft voices, hugs, all very nice.)

The Dude's love affair with secrets and surprises continues:

Dude: Daddy, you're home! We got you a surprise at the store!

Me: Great!

Mom: Don't tell him what it is!

Dude: Okay! We hid it in Gavin's room!

Me: Don't tell me what it is!

Dude: Okay! ... Daddy, come with me. I need to show you something.

Mom: You're not going to show him the surprise, are you?

Dude: (whispers) Daddy, come with me.

Ah, secrets.

ETA: Okay, I wrote most of that a few days ago. Then I got a nasty headache. And it stayed. And yesterday, I finally went to the doctor and got medicine for a sinus infection. This one snuck up on me -- usually, I'm snotting all over the place, but I was just kind of congested, and I didn't notice it until it was so bad that I was lying down moaning because of the pressure on my eyeballs. The Damsel gave me a ride home yesterday, because I wasn't in driving shape.

So yes, hopefully work getting close to end of craziness, because my body is getting close to end of functionality.