My personal soundtrack...

From a post to faecat's LJ...

Olivia Newton John - "Magic"
Heart - "Love Me Like Music"
Tori Amos - "Icicle"
Dido - "My Life"
Indigo Girls - "Prince of Darkness"
Melissa Ethereidge - "Chrome Plated Heart"
Til Tuesday - "Coming Up Close"
Fiona Apple - "Never is a Promise"
Alanis Morisette - "Not The Doctor"
Joan Armatrading - "The Weakness in Me"
Bonnie Rait - "I Can't Make You Love Me"
Sarah McLachlan - "I Will Remember You"
Ani Difranco - "Grey"
Paula Cole - "Me"
Ani Difranco - "Swan Dive"

(arranged roughly chronologically... I figure as with any soundtrack, you can only have a given artist once unless the whole thing is done by them... and just saying the first three MLE albums is too easy...)

Good news, bad news

The good news is it looks like Voodoo Vince will actually be advertised in some magazines *not* owned by Microsoft--where they can do it for free. Of course, it is still entirely hard-core gamer mags even though our game is clearly not intended for the hard-core audience, but it beats them only doing stuff in XBox mag and on MSN on the cheap. It really needs mainstream advertising including TV commercials to be as successful as it has the potential to be, but that's not going to happen.

The bad news is everyone is laid off in 2 weeks except the owners, so I'm officially out of work as of August 1. We did a great job, and our developer contacts at M$ agree... So as a reward, we get no contract and have to fire the entire team that built a top-notch AAA original-IP title for the XBox on budget and on time.

The founder is doing a press tour next week, so it should be fun to hear what he comes up with when they ask the question "What are you guys working on next?"

At least we have the rest of the day off...

Job Search

As sort of a ritual activity, I brought all my books home from work to remind myself that I seriously need to do a job search and find a new gig.

Since my last job search took 3 months in Austin and 3 months in Seattle, I have a rather extensive list of game dev companies and their websites, so I just spent the last hour perusing them--and a couple of them are of course gone now. I had already applied to 3 local game dev companies, 2 of which have fallen through for sure. So I submitted to another half-dozen companies and we'll see what happens from there. Come August, I'll start a non-game industry/relocation-required job search if none of these pan out...