// 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…

This Summer has flown by a bit faster than usual for me this year as I have been working quite a bit and spending as much time as possible with my wife and son. We recently moved as I noted in my last post and it can be hard on kids to readjust. I moved a lot when I was younger so I have a decent idea of how he feels. Due to this I haven’t had too much of an opportunity to work on any of my own projects. As usual, without being checked the amount of work and other activities more than often grows to fill the available time. This week in particular has brought it to my attention that since graduating, I have been neglecting being mindful of this. Before I could always blame my lack of time on going to school and working, but now that I have only work, I need to reclaim the rest of the time.

For the past year I have been looking to start my own game development company and give it a shot going solo. I’m not going to be quitting my day job to do this, but this goal will never be realized without restructuring what I am currently doing and making a little time each day to spend on prototyping and developing.  I also need to make sure that I spend time away from the computer exercising and pursuing my spiritual path. It’s the trinity of mind, body and spirit making itself known. I know from past experience that if I don’t keep this triangle of activities in check I will not make progress as burnout will surely set in one or all of the areas.

I am going to use this upcoming week to start incorporating some changes to my routine. I went for a long walk/run today and forgot how much fun it can be. I am going to start running at least every other day for half an hour and bring back a few meditation techniques.  I am also going to set a goal to have a small game done by two weeks from tonight to ease myself back into things. I will also be time tracking how long the development of the game actually takes as a starting point for better time estimations.

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.