… to be employee #4 of a mobile startup or not? I guess that’s not really a choice, because they haven’t offered yet and my alternative so far is unemployment. Plus, there’s no reason to not do something awesome.

They want me to come in and work for them on a two-day contract as a trial period. I love that — it’s something I’ve planned to do with employees since I read about it back in the day, I think in a /. comment multiple years ago. You get both get to see what the day-to-day is, more or less, before over committing.

My job search is going well — I have several more interviews lined up. It’s been a few days past three years since I’ve had a “normal”-ish job and it’s only slightly terrifying being back in the market. I have a small “how am I going to be abused this time?” feeling and a larger “money!” feeling.

Caveat: you must have experience in the games industry and live in Canada for this to work.

1. Go to GameCenus and find all the developers in your city.
2. Open all of those sites in tabs in a browser. You might want to put them all in a spreadsheet or database as well in order to track your communications, submissions, and follow-ups. I didn’t.
3. Quickly flick through the tabs and eliminate all companies with broken, or bad, websites. Also filter out ones with games you’d never play.
4. Pick one that doesn’t have a careers page. Write a friendly, informal inquiry: “Hi, I’m wondering if you guys are hiring? If so who should I send my resume to?” Remember that ALL game industry emails end with the salutation, “cheers!”
5. Send that to every company without a careers page.

You’ll start to get responses back quickly. If you’ve written a sufficiently-informal letter you’ll get into conversations, rejections, and solicitations. Turn the first two towards a discussion of who is hiring right now and send your resume to the third. You’ll probably meet some friends-of-friends because the Canadian industry is as small as any Canadian industry. I did.

The next step is to start working through the ones with careers pages, but I haven’t gotten that far yet. Before I got to the end of the last step, above, I was booking interviews and inside recommendations.

I am also broadening my approach to the industry and applying for design and production jobs as well as stuff on the engineering side. That’ll happen more as I churn the careers pages. I feel like it’d be harder to cold-call a career change than a simple coding job — could be wrong tho.

I should have started this process a long time ago, but I’m overcoming a lot of industry-fear-induced panic: I don’t want to death march anymore.

Oh, I’m also filtering (or at least moving to the end of the process) companies who post things like “must be willing to death march” in their job listings, and ones whose listings were obviously written by someone less intelligent than the person they’re trying to hire (“must be familiar with interface technologies like affine transformations and model view controller”).

Through the link is an HTML5/JS application that uses some high-performance calls to replicate something I once did and posted here in Flash (which might be dead). It loads some audio files and spins while detecting when the playing stops. It should work in all modern browsers on all modern platforms.

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I wrote a game to learn HTML5, CSS3, and the Javascript to manipulate them. Click through to play the embed.

It works best on Webkit (Chrome and Safari), and probably doesn’t work at all on anything else. It’s through a link so as to not throw a giant ball of Javascript at you without consent

It should be self-explanatory, but here’s a hint: you can use it to turn any image on the Internet into a simple puzzle (as long as it’s bigger than 500×500 — and actually the feature seems broken when it’s not local :S).

That feature won’t work because of the security model. I’m going to make some more puzzles for the next version (and maybe some gameplay and animation tweaks).

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The studio I applied to got back to me today with mixed results: they want me for the job, and the job no longer exists. I’ve been thinking of two readings for that:

1. We want you for the job, but miscalculated our budget.
2. We want you for the job, but we wanted someone else more and we’re hiring again later.

I’m inclined to believe the latter (or that there’s some other HR dynamic going on) because the studio just posted a record-setting quarter in their segment. If any of you are interested in reading my design critique let me know in the comments and I’ll post it in a non-googlable form. It’s a game design critique of two recent “hardcore”-segment games for Android.

They’ve left me with a “don’t call us, we’ll call you” send-off which was quite positive-sounding. In the mean time I am continuing to look for new media jobs (just got a contact at Teletoon as well, via Jill).

I’m also thinking of applying to a local “designed goods” store — one of those stores that just sells really nice products (in quotes because all goods are designed). This one is organization-themed (which is a laugh given my habits). As Jez said in Peep Show, I can’t believe I’m “getting a job not in the media,” but there you are. That’s more of a plan D anyway. I probably should stop typing. Now.

I’ve run into a couple of videos recently that were done in very poor taste. First was the 9/11 memorial at TIFF this year on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. It was about how no one could book flights home that day and so they all watched movies. Really, really, unthoughtful and bad.

Second is this:

I’m looking for good games journalism: avant garde journalism for avant garde games, like Ruins, which I played this morning. The best I can find (so far) is a pitch comparing the failure of a gaming blog to… The Challenger Disaster. Boo.

I was just thinking more about why exercise sucks and wanted to attach Zombies, Run! to that previous post. It has a better continuation of the idea: make the exercise itself into abstract gameplay.

It’s already over-funded. I’m unclear as to whether there’s a social aspect, but there clearly should be: if Jill’s base needs more medicine I should be able to run out and get some for her.

Today I’m starting my game design critiques in earnest. I must say: bitching about, and being amazed by, video games is something I feel very comfortable with. It’s one of the few things where I feel I really know what I’m talking about. Most of my opinions I’m open to disagreement on, but non-skippable cutscenes after a savepoint are the stuff of heresy, cancerous vomit, poor taste, and impoliteness.

The cardboard dinos can wait, I have games to play!

I bought a Kinect today. My 360 is out West somewhere and gaming, while still fun, is not something in which I am choosing to invest my time. However, the Kinect is, I think, a revolutionary device WITH WHICH I MUST PLAY.

Reproduced below are my step-by-step lab notes for getting it up and running on OS X. They’re pretty basic, and the documentation is pretty good, but still — I took notes and might as well publish.

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Via Mike, bitlish is back:

I <3 the “defeat the exes” metaphor in SP.