This morning I read that my friend Steve Stamatiadis’s game studio, Krome, is closing.<\/p>\n
I met Steve through Livejournal back in maybe 2000. We finally got to meet and hang out A-Kon in Dallas. We immediately shunned everyone else (including my wife) to talk about video games for 3 days straight. Him, the working professional and me, the eager guy who had no idea what he was doing. I had made a couple simple Flash games but I really wanted to go farther in the game industry. He patiently listened to me spew out all the stupid things eager, inexperienced developers say ( “I want to make a video game out of my D&D campaign!”) and encouraged my undirected enthusiasm.<\/p>\n
He later came and stayed at my house (keep in mind, he lives in Australia) where he showed me directions I could go in the industry. He showed the basic of box modeling in 3Ds Max and scripting in Blitz Basic. He encouraged and shaped my enthusiasm into something directed.<\/p>\n
As a result I was spent each day on the train, on the way to my crappy web design job, doing tutorials in 3dS Max or writing game code. When the opportunity arose for a game programmer position at Cartoon Network, I was prepared with a portfolio of games and code. I got the job and have now been with Cartoon Network for 7 years, pretty much the best job a Flash game developer could hope for.<\/p>\n
Not only is Steve an inspiration for you<\/em> to do your best, but he includes those around him in the cool work he is doing. He drew awesome art for me and my wife (even for my D&D campaign), I got to make the website for TY: The Tazmanian Tiger and my wife made a Blade Kitten costume (I helped). I finally got to travel down to Australia and stay with Steve for a couple weeks, which one the best experiences of my life.<\/p>\n Krome is closing and I am very sad for Steve and the other employees of Krome. But I know that if the people working with Steve were half as inspired and enriched by working with him as I was, they were very, very lucky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This morning I read that my friend Steve Stamatiadis’s game studio, Krome, is closing. I met Steve through Livejournal back in maybe 2000. We finally got to meet and hang out A-Kon in Dallas. We immediately shunned everyone else (including my wife) to talk about video games for 3 days straight. Him, the working professional […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.bulletpattern.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.bulletpattern.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.bulletpattern.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.bulletpattern.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.bulletpattern.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.bulletpattern.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87,"href":"http:\/\/blog.bulletpattern.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions\/87"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.bulletpattern.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.bulletpattern.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.bulletpattern.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}