Most of you who read this blog who know me already know, but for those who don't, I changed jobs recently. I started my new job one week ago today. So far there have been some hard things about changing, but hopefully overall the change will be for the better. For those who don't know, my old job was teaching computer science at a local university and my new job is as a senior software engineer for a company that does mainly government management software. The main reasons for the change are that it's much closer (10-15 minute commute instead of a 45-60 minute one) and that it will hopefully give me more time. When I was teaching I'd spend a lot of time preparing materials and even more time grading. Those two things combined took a terrible toll on my nights and weekends. I did have to give up my three week, work from home breaks between quarters, but I get every other Friday off and have four weeks of vacation. So hopefully that will even out. Combine all of that with a bit more money, a spiffy title and promise of a lot of coding (a good thing I think), and it seemed like I should make the change. There are some things that I'll miss though. I'm getting the feeling that I won't have a lot of opportunity to work ultra-retro, ASCII games into my current job. But like I said, hopefully overall the change will be for the better.
So why am I going on and on about all of this you ask? Why should you care? You came here to read about (and more importantly download and play) game, right? All excellent questions. The reason you should care about all of this is that I should have more free time now. And the amount of free time I have is directly proportionate to the amount of time I have to write to games. So, assuming that my master plan works out, from now on I should have more time to write games. Rebecca and I have been talking about some game ideas that we want to get started on after we finish up Mario TD.
In conclusion, I plan on having more frequent updates, better content, etc. You know, all those things that blog posters always promise and rarely provide.