This Photo

This photo.

Amanda Rose Smith is one of my good friends. Someone I trust and care about more than most, and do a lot for. Amanda is a part of wonderful memories from my time in New England and though the years continues to be a trusted friend. I joke sometimes that I’m her agent as I’ve got her a few gigs though the years. Which is to say, I make sure the right people know about her. What Amanda is doesn’t need interpretation.

In Jan 2015, Amanda posted photos from wedding dress shopping and did not have a happy face. Just as I was about to message her, Amanda messaged me saying she was considering a corset for her dress. I booked the appointment with Dark Garden Unique Corsetry for the day after GDC.

Autumn (owner of Dark Garden) came into the shop early for the appointment. I know it’s her job, but I thanked her anyway for doing a wonderful job. She make sure Amanda was going to get the outfit she wanted. As her agent, I requested that I lace her on her wedding day. As many of you know, I am trained in these sorts of things and I sure as hell wanted it done right.

On the day of the wedding, I came early to help prepare. I’m important enough to care and not important enough to be in the ‘official’ wedding photos. I helped prepare the space, but I had one job: Lacing Amanda. Beforehand, I got dressed with the rest of the groomsmen when I realized something. I walked over to her husband Patrick and said “This is a bit strange, but trust me”. I unbuttoned one shirt button, then buttoned it back on. “There, now say I dressed both the bride and groom” and walked out.

I waited next to the brides’ room for when Amanda was ready to get laced. Needless to say, Amanda was starting to get into panic mode as they were behind schedule. Switching to my customer service voice, I gathered the dress and asked for some help from the bridesmaids. With two bridesmaids at each side holding a ribbon, I went to work in getting my friend ready for her wedding day. Making sure there was enough give for the rest of the afternoon and evening, but will still stay on. When I was done tightening, I dismissed the bridesmaids and finished the knot.

When it’s done right, wearing a corset is having a hug travel with you. Sometimes I’ll signal I’m done lacing by giving a hug. This time that hug meant more. I was preparing my dear friend for a wonderful day, proud of everything that this woman is. Imprinting that hug with the friendship of all these years we’ve been in our lives.

This photo means everything to me.

This photo.

Seg finshing Amanda Rose's lacing.

Photo by Lesley Arak Photography.

My story of The Latitude Society

I was on board very early in the appointment. Crawling down a pitch dark tunnel, feeling my way through a winding path, a light source finally revealed a library. One very similar to the Myst library, albeit smaller. I knew I was in for something special. What I soon gained was a community of wonderful people and a part of myself I had lost: My desire to create.

This is my story of Nonchalance’s The Latitude Society.

Latitude Society: Invite Hand off
Continue reading My story of The Latitude Society

The Quick Indie Guide to Protecting Your Accounts

Hello! If a friend linked you here, it’s because they care about your online accounts from getting seriously steamrolled. While there’s always a degree of risk, these steps will cut that risk significantly. Where at worse, if one account becomes compromised, it doesn’t give the keys to everything else you have.

Update: Crash Override Network’s tool C.O.A.C.H. is a great step-by-step guide you can also use.

There are two parts to how I protect my online accounts. One is free but available for a few services. The other is buying a piece of software. Together they do change the philosophy of how you create and manage online accounts, but you’ll be much more secure by doing it.

Continue reading The Quick Indie Guide to Protecting Your Accounts

Good Old Games & Dominique Pamplemousse

As the producer for Dominique Pamplemousse (or ‘Professional Extrovert’ as Squinky calls me), I have to get the game in front of as many people as possible. With the IGF Grand Prize & other nominations, there’s a lot of opportunities presented to the game and it’s my roll to capture them. Course, we’re limited by budget (there is none) and time (I have little of).

Our sales are particularly high in Europe and Russia. Shocking as the game is English only and no advertising to speak of. Steam is a good partner and everyone at Humble is wonderful! I figured adding Good Old Games would compliment the Eurozone in coverage. The only contact I had was a Submit Your Game link. I gave a little bit of info in the form, and named drop our festival destinations along with the fact the game is already released.

I wasn’t expecting this kind of response:

Continue reading Good Old Games & Dominique Pamplemousse

“Shipping the Empty Box” Confirmed for PAX Dev!

I will be presenting a lecture at PAX Dev!

PAX Dev Logo

Shipping the Empty Box
Releasing [string:titleOfGame] on [array:platforms]

Working on [string:titleOfGame], you need to release it on [array:platforms-0] and perhaps on [array:platforms-1] in the future. You have [int:NULL] time till release. Build engineer and programmer John “Seg” Seggerson (Telltale Games, John McNeil Studio, Dominique Pamplemousse) will help smooth the multi-platform release by outlining build engineering tips for platforms on desktop, mobile, console, and beyond. Increase artist, writer, and programmer efficiency with a set of core specifications and planning applied to existing platforms and future platforms. Skills and knowledge that will reduce release headaches for your [int:sizeOfTeam] team!

This is the build engineering panel I’ve always wanted to do and finally getting to do it. My experience with Dominique Pamplemousse was releasing a game without having to worry about making the game. I needed to create the empty box to ship to Steam & Humble. This clean-room process made me think about the build process in this perspective, and finally got me to apply for this lecture.

Talking with my game industry friends, we couldn’t think of ever seeing a build engineering panel offered. Not just PAX Dev, but GDC as well. My hope was to get accepted to PAX Dev to focus getting the content together in time to apply for GDC. I got my wish!

The lecture will be in two acts. The first act will be guidelines for a build system from my experience. Going into specifics isn’t helpful because game engines are too different for me to cover. Instead I’ll be going to broad guidelines. The second act will be releasing my master asset list, a core asset list, and the philosophy behind it. This list will contain all assets for every platform I can talk about. Then another core assets needed to convert over to these targets. If I have time, I may make a NPM/Bower app to do these conversations.

Over the summer I’ll be working on the details of the lecture and have everything ready for submitting for GDC 2015. I’m super excited to work on this and get to attend PAX Dev & PAX Prime!

Auto-complete Insensitively

For years I’ve been meaning to look this up. Finally did this morning.

When working in CLI (Terminal.app on Mac), you can hit tab to auto-complete a path. However, it’s case sensitive unless you set this up:

echo "set completion-ignore-case On" >> ~/.inputrc
The More You Know!

Making games is easy. Belonging is hard. #1ReasonToBe

The past few weeks I have been honored to be producer and ‘professional extrovert’ to my good friend, Deirdra “Squinky” Kiai’s IGF nominated work “Dominique Pamplemousse“.

There’s a lot I have to process in the experience which I will share later. But now I need to point the microphone to Squinky on a very important speech. The following link is the transcript to their talk at the #1ReasonToBe panel. Sitting in the audience, I cried as my dear friend had the courage to publicly share such a raw experience. I am extremely proud of them and honored to work alongside them.

Making games is easy. Belonging is hard. #1ReasonToBe

Making an API: The Steam WebAPI Proposal

Steam WebAPI Proposal by Seg

Developing my updated portfolio, I realized I had a lot of API development experience that was internal and can’t be disclosed in the public. While I’m accomplished in interactive narratives, I needed to supplement my portfolio with my technical design aspect background.

I decided to make a proposal to extend the Steam WebAPI with information missing from the current offerings. I’ve worked with WebAPI and Steamworks with Telltale Games; Particularly the global statistical displays for Jurassic Park and Puzzle Agent 2. Recently I started contributing to Steam Condenser and discovered the Groups info was still in an XML format announced as deprecated by Valve. Yet there was no WebAPI method to fill the gap. I decided to dust off my API design skills and get to work!

I’ll go though some of the more detailed background of certain decisions, but do take a look at the docs!

Continue reading Making an API: The Steam WebAPI Proposal

New Resume & Portfolio

I created a new website featuring myself!

Seg's Resume Website
https://theseg.github.io/

I needed a home to showcase myself professionally, so I started working on this site. While this blog fits to my occasional musing of writing, this is a more professional site highlighting my career of the past few years.

It gave me a chance to play around with Twitter Bootstrap and Font Awesome, which are now my new BFFs. Not only do they make development easier, it also scales very well for smaller screen devices like mobile phones. It’s also hosted on GitHub Pages. I wanted to stick to basic HTML this time around since it’s been such a long time. I also used LESS for CSS. While I’ve used SASS before for Umloud.org, Bootstrap uses LESS which made the workflow smoother. Finally, I used CodeKit to compile LESS and minify JavaScripts. Such a wonderful tool that I even paid money for it!

This isn’t the only website I released over the weekend, but it’s certainly the most important! A special thanks goes out to the number of people who’ve gave a lot of feedback during my process. Thank you all so much!