This year (2007)

You mean I get PAID to do this????!!!!!!!

Its been a pretty interesting year for me.  At the beginning of the year I was taking some classes at the local community college, De Anza.  My favorite one was Comprehensive Musicianship, which was mostly a music theory class, but also had some keyboarding, sight singing and rhythmic training.  In May, I got a job doing Quality Assurance game testing at Electronic Arts. EA is the biggest video game publisher in the world.  They make games for PC and all the next-gen consoles (PlayStation 3, Xbox360, Wii). The title I was working on was a game called Hellgate:London, which was developed by a lot of the same people who made the popular Diablo series of games.  My job was to play through the game, find bugs and defects in the software, and report them in the database.  It’s a pretty sweet job, since I get paid to play video games all day, but it can be very frustrating, because the games are very, very broken.  Also, it was up in Redwood City, so it took an hour in stop-and-go traffic to get there in the morning.  I continued taking some classes, but since my job takes up 40-60 hours a week, I’ve only been able to take online classes.  Tester jobs tend to be temporary full time, with a 6 month contract, so at the end of October, I had to find a new job.  Holiday season does not tend to be a big hiring season in the games industry, since most of the holiday release titles are already staffed and the big titles for next year are still in development.  However, I got lucky and found another testing job, this time with Namco-Bandai Games.  Namco is a big producer of console and arcade games, such as Tekken, Ace Combat, Time Crisis, and Pac-Man.  As of this letter, I have just completed the first training week, and I don’t know what title I’ll be working on.

In October Dad and I went down to Fresno to visit the helicopter school I hope to begin attending in the upcoming year.  We went and toured the training and aircraft maintenance facilities, and then I went on a 45 minute ride in an R22, which is a very small, 2 person helicopter.  The CFI (Certified Flight Instructor) that I went up with was named Darren, and he was actually from Ireland.  We got along pretty well, and during the flight he even let me try flying a little.  It was pretty awesome.  The main drawback to helicopter school is the price tag, which is fairly sizeable.  I’ll need to take a large loan to pay for it, but the payments are doable if I cosign with 2 people with good credit.

Also, a group of my friends and I have been working on an indie game, with a minimal budget and mostly amateurs working on it.  It’s a lot of fun, but there is so much to do.  I’m mostly acting as a producer, and I have been concentrating on trying to coordinate the team and keep track of the finances.  At this point we have a basic engine, and a lot of design documents and concept art, but the team currently has only 2 programmers and both have either school or work full-time, so it’s been slow going.