Inaugural Post: disclaimer, purpose of this blog, my background

Disclaimer

I don't currently work for a game development company as a game designer in any capacity. I do have friends and contacts in the industry, but no close friends who are game designers, (yet). I am not privy to any unreleased information about any of the games I blog about. My thoughts on this blog are my own, composed from my own subjective experience combined with any publicly announced game design tidbits (for example, from This Week at Bungie articles). If my employment situation changes such that this is no longer true (and I hope it does!), I will make a very excited blog post about it, and from that point forward, I will have a different disclaimer apply.

Purpose

The purpose of this blog is, let's be honest, primarily for me to try and get a job/start my professional career as a game designer. It's a place to gather my game design thoughts, a way to practice game design, and a portfolio piece for recruiters and hiring managers and interviewers to take a look at how I think and how I design.

Some of the information will be stream-of-consciousness and some of it will be more formal/organized. I can't make any promises as to the consistency of tone or validity of the design analyses for games I am not/have not worked on.

My Background

I'm currently a software engineer working on not-games. It makes me a little sad. My full game development history is available on my resume, but I worked as a game designer on two games currently available on Steam:
I had a blast working on these games. It was while working on these games that I discovered that I really love designing games. I loved working with a team to make games, collaborating across the different game development disciplines, gathering feedback from players and analyzing it to its roots to refine game mechanics over and over until they felt really good, I loved all of it.

My hope with this blog is that I can end up doing all those things and more for 40 hours a week at a game studio, making games that I want to play and that I want others to play.

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