Ramblings

On Writing…

Or, really, the lack thereof.

I started jotting down what I wanted to accomplish each week, broken out by day. I’ll sit down on Monday and make a fairly spontaneous plan in my notebook, lightly filling out each day and then adding or moving or changing or scribbling things out as I go and the week progresses. It’s obviously not a revolutionary concept or anything but it’s helped me a…

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NeoTales: The Faeries’ Ruin Characters

Development tidbits and concept art for the main TFR characters.

PRAISE FYORA! It’s an actual TFR post. Folks had requested (eons ago) that I give character tidbits and development info in addition to showing the concept art itself, so okie dokie. Here’s me trying my best to do the equivalent of TFR characters DVD commentary, Creative Director-flavoured. So… Character Development? This is one of my favourite parts of the process. (I say that about every…

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NeoTales: Plotting a Plot – Part 2

How to tell stories to millions of your closest friends.

Hey, kids! It’s Neopets story time! Finally! What have I been doing all this time? It’s a mystery. Last time we talked about what a Plot actually was fundamentally because I like to be thorough, you know? So go check that out first if you haven’t! This round, we’ll talk about the Plot-making process, step by step. A big caveat here is that each Plot…

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NeoTales: Plotting a Plot – Part 1

What were they, when were they, and why weren't there more of them, you jerks?

Hey, kids! It’s Neopets story time! I mentioned we’re starting off these NeoTales with general info on how a Plot came together Back in My DayTM. Plots had already begun evolving by the time I started working at Neopets and they continued to change over my 12 years there (Y4/2002 – Y16/2014). So, seeing as how we spent over a decade learning lessons through live-fire…

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AMA: Neopets Staff Count

This was asked in a comment on my Neopets On-the-Go write-up. I actually hear it quite a bit so I thought I’d give it its own post for other folks who are interested. And I also edited it slightly from the response over there to help a bit with clarity, shhh. Interesting question! People’s definition of “prime Neopets” differs, so I’m just going to try…

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NeoTales

Stories, insights, and questionable decisions from my time at Neopets

I find lots of interesting stuff in my old Neopets archives—design documents, old code, presentations, concept art, the occasional shirtless Dr. Sloth drawing from Shoomlah—and when I posted some tidbits on Twitter a while ago, I got requests to write more about my experiences working at the home of the only thing on the Internet you don’t have. (+100 internet points if you remember this, true Neopets fans.)…

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TBT: Obelisk War Faction Descriptions

Taken from the original design document...

I know it’s not actually Thursday but since I just found these and I’m laughing at my own dumb jokes, I thought I’d share them here. Maybe you’ll laugh, too, or at least find them interesting. I originally wrote these quick descriptions because wanted to give everyone on the team an early feel of what each faction represented — who they were, what they wanted,…

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Like Fyora OMG!

A semi-serious post about creative iteration.

I was cleaning out my old Neopets backup drive (which is a thousand-year project, I’m discovering) and I found an old set of Faerie Quest marketing images hanging out next to KikoOfDoom.jpg. (Don’t ask.) While the subject matter is kind of boring, I think this set of images is a pretty good example of both why people used to call our creative process a bit…

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