Greetings and salutations. After nearly a month since my last real column, I'm back and primed to do this job like it's meant to be done. My Christmas break was a nice change of pace from my hectic last semester, but it went by far too quickly. Like many of you readers, I'd imagine, I'll have officially begun my new semester of classes by the time most of you read this. This semester looks pretty decent as far as classes go, but I anticipate being quite busy, and not just because of school.

As I went over in-depth in a previous column, I plan to score a game programming internship at this year's Game Developers Conference job fair. In order to help persuade my would-be employers, I plan to program a demo game and development tools (like a map editor) to show that I've got the right stuff. I mentioned in that previous column that I had planned to do multiple games. With just a little over two months to go, that goal is most likely out of the question.

However, since the RPG is the one game I'm keeping, and since you're reading an RPG website, I figure that it's my moral duty to show you readers the behind-the-scenes of RPG development. So, in short, over the next two months I'm going to let you all see first-hand how I'm progressing in creating a fully-functional, 20-30 minute RPG.

As of right now, I have enlisted the services of composer Chad Seiter and artist Mike Perez. Characters and monsters have already been designed, the script is nearly finished, and the basic area map has been drawn. Before next Monday, I plan to finish the script, area maps, and battle system concept -- in other words, completely finish designing the game. I intend to have started programming by that point as well.

Those of you interested in this can look forward to seeing all my design documents next Monday, but until then, feast your ears on the game's town music (in midi or mp3 format), copyright 2002 Chad Seiter.

And for those of you who don't really care, and those that do, too, I suppose, today's letters exist below. Enjoy!


Oh, also, from way back on December 17, some guy named Frank was the first to tell me that "I wanted to be with you alone and talk about the weather" was from the Tears for Fears song "Head Over Heels." His email had no real content, though, so I'm putting this here instead of where I normally would.