Attending WordCamp seems like as good a time as any to start posting here again. I fell off the wagon a bit recently — new jobs tend to have that effect — but I hope to get back in the habit of musing about game design. Starting… later.

I’m still publishing over at the Escapist. This past month’s game is Turfy, a Risk/DiceWars-inspired game about jungle gym warfare. It’s not the game I originally intended on publishing. I’m hoping to polish that one and get it up end of this month. It’s called “omg hire me,” and it’s semi-autobiographical.

On the topic of WordCamp, it’s always nice working in an environment of like-minded individuals. Yes, I came to a conference to get work done. I’m weird like that.

I’ve been super-negligent with this blog, but I’m hoping that’ll change starting now. I just made the difficult move to our lovely French apartment, and I’m currently trying to get back on a normal schedule of blogging, working, designing, etcetera.

I’ve very nearly caught up with everything, so hopefully things will get back to normal soon (well, normal in the sense that I’m living in France, but posting here regularly like a good little blogger).

In Scott news, both Officeball and Arrowgamé have been published at the Escapist. Check them out. What’s coming out at the end of this month? I’m not telling (because I’m not sure yet, but I’m also not telling).

Maybe that’s an obvious statement, or maybe not. I get the impression from the Joystiq readership that they feel being a professional blogger is easy as pie.

Truth is, even I’m a little surprised as to how hard it is to do the full-time blogging thing. For anyone out of the loop, I started as a full-time blogger for Joystiq a few weeks ago, and it’s been, well, hard! I’ll get into the swing of it soon, I’m sure. But it’s no cakewalk, I’ll tell you that.

On top of all my new coverage, I’m still doing the Off the Grid thing. This past week was Diceland, a very clever strategy game from James Ernest which uses paper dice. I like it, but even after reviewing it I know I need to go back and play more of it to build a solid, game-design-y opinion. We’ll have to revisit it later.

Scottypedia is going well so far. I’m not ready to hand out the link (although you can probably guess the URL); I’m still trying to get a certain number of starter articles set up before going public. In the longer term, I’d love to get random article excerpts appearing in the sidebar here. As if I’m starved for things to do.

Here’s something I’d like to add to this site, once my Bard senior project is good and done: The Scottypedia.

What is the Scottypedia? Well, to explain it best, here’s a quote from me:

The Scottypedia is a MediaWiki encyclopedic website, in the style of Wikipedia, and editable only by me, Scott Jon Siegel. Rather than articles being objective, they will instead be entirely subjective, based solely on my opinion of various topics, such as games, music, television, technology, and family and friends.

There you have it. On a more intellectual level, the project would an undertaking in a personalized encyclopedia, a unique method of recording and presenting biographical information about me on the internet. On a less intellectual level, it’s a totally self-important, egotistical endeavor, which will likely never get off the ground due to (oh, I don’t know…) minor technical issues with getting MediaWiki to run on the server.

Has this been done before? Probably. Will I do it this time? Maybe. Either way, I’ll keep you posted. Back to sproj I go.

In lieu of working on my senior project, I gave numberless a new look, taking inspiration from Daring Fireball and (picnic, LIGHTNING). James tells me that John Gruber gets angry at people who steal his design, so let me emphasize that this site is inspired by his site, and is not necessarily copying its format. I admit I worry about such trivial things as angering Mr. Gruber, but I suppose it’s difficult to offend people when you have no readership. So I’m safe for now.

I’m still not 100% in love with the look. It’s less conventional, but still blog-like; the large logo is at times eye-catching, and at times an eyesore; the background color looks better on some screens than others; and the content looks pinched to me, compressed into the space between the sidebar and the main section, leaving the rest of the site seeming bare.

On the plus side, I managed to make a table-less page design that looks identical in IE, Firefox, and Safari. And on my first try, too! Regardless, I still might end up tweaking a few things, namely the color scheme and size of the header.