// caseydunham.net

It is almost August. Between my full time job, my side job, family, personal pursuits and trying to work on getting my business off the ground, I am barely able to keep up. Actually I can’t keep up.  I new the time would come when I would have to start making hard decisions about where I am going to be spending my time and the time is now.  I’m going to be busy still until probably end of August, but after that I should be back onto a somewhat sane schedule.

By this time next week I will be in Las Vegas for Defcon 18 for just under a week and than spending a few days with my family after that.  The weekend of August 20 is Ludum Dare 18 and myself and Dave from Hybrid Mind Studios are trying to get a small group of people to meet up in the Portsmouth, NH area for the weekend.

In other news Game Developers have there own Stack Exchange site now! It’s still in Beta, but head on over to http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/ and sign up!

I’m also thinking about a site redesign for the website and for the new company…

I have never been someone to set New Year’s resolutions or to really write down my goals. For the last few years, the only goals on my mind have been to finish school, get rent paid and try to have some fun. That isn’t to say that I haven’t had any long term plans, but that my priorities were different. One thing that has always remained constant however, is my love for games and the technical challenges that they present.

Now that school is behind me and I’ve been working steadily since graduating, I’ve started to think again about my short term and long term plans. A friend of mine that I graduated with, (and who were also laid off just before graduating), decided to form an LLC just before Christmas with the intent of creating games and hopefully starting a profitable company. So, in order to keep on track, I am setting the following goals for 2010 for myself:

• Spend more time with my family
• Get a game accepted to XBox Live Community Games
• Participate in every Ludum Dare 48 Hour competition
• Start keeping a Design / Idea journal
• Play more games
• Post at least one blog entry a week

Nothing on this list is insurmountable or too difficult too acomplish over the course of the year. The most difficult part will be balancing my work schedule, since I do mostly contract work and work from home quite a bit, I often work too many hours. Over the next couple of months I am going to have to readjust this schedule and make sure that I am leaving enough time to put into the company and not go insane.

Don't go insane.

I graduated about two weeks ago from the University of Southern Maine with my Bachelor’s in Comptuer Science. My last semester was very busy so all of my projects were put on hold. I also spent the semester unemployed which is why I let this website lapse. Well I started a new job as a Java Developer here in Portland Maine and my family and I are starting to get back on our feet. Things have yet to calm down completely as we are staying with some good friends until we find a new place to live. Our plans to move to Florida fell through after the fact so it left us pretty broke and we had already given up our apartment.  So yeah…things are still mixed up but it is definitely a lot better than it was. I feel a lot better as well, not being so stressed out and am anxious to get back to some of my projects.

I lost count of the number of blogs, journals or whatever public medium of discourse I have started, and let lapse. There have been many reasons, most of them excuses, but enough is enough. I am tired of not having a single place to refer people to. The times that I have kept up with them has also been a great motivator for me. It is great to see people become interested in what I am doing, and to get feedback from them.

So, here we go again. I spent Sunday, cleaning out my webspace at Dreamhost, getting WordPress reinstalled and fiddling with the theme. Got a few pages up, to give the site a bit more depth, and have other things that I am both working on, and have finished but need to package up, that I plan on adding to the Games section in the next few days.

This is my challenge to myself to keep on target, and to get things done.

Thanks to everyone who is revisiting this site from last time!