roncli.com blog

I've come to realize that, even after ending Six Minutes To Release's raiding run, I still only have one night a week to myself. That night is tonight. Every other night, I've got something going on:

Monday - Mastering and editing of the Six Gaming Podcast
Tuesday & Thursday - World of Warcraft raiding with remaining Six Minutes To Release members
Friday - Wife night :)
Saturday - Six Gaming Podcast live stream
Sunday - Ron's Bronze Plays League of Legends gaming on Twitch

It's a pretty busy schedule, but I look forward to a lot of these things throughout the week as well. Things feel pretty balanced right now. I still long for 40 hours days, though.

Descent: Underground

This past week, though, things got a bit crazy, because I found out that one of my favorite games of all time is being rebooted.

Descent's fast-paced, six-degrees-of-freedom combat made addicts of us all! Descent's frenetic and pulse-pounding action were light-years ahead of its 1995 release date. Like us, many of you still share war stories of your epic network battles. You remember your heroic shots, your death-defying maneuvers, and matches ending with a narrow escape as the tunnel collapsed behind you.

Sadly, as consoles took over and PC games were pushed aside by publishers, great games like Descent were left to languish in obscurity. A whole generation of gamers grew up without Descent's heart-pounding, non-stop action, robbed of the true 6DoF space adventure that is their birthright!

The Drought Ends TODAY!

This is a quote from the Kickstarter for Descendent Studios' Descent: Underground. This is a brand new Descent title, setup as a prequel to the original Descent series.

On one hand, I can't contain my excitement. I backed this project early and big once I learned of the direction that former CIG developer Eric "Wingman" Peterson was taking it. To have another Descent game being made from a set of dedicated developers who are listening to the community to make the game the best Descent game ever made is like a dream come true.

On the other hand, the Descent community has had its share of disappointments.

The official Descent 4 game was cancelled. Numerous projects have been started to try to mimic the Descent experience. Many of them have been cancelled, and those that did make it to production had no community support and were simply not Descenty enough for the community to back. And others who have tried to bring Descent back have been issued cease & desist legal documents by Interplay.

So why now? More importantly, why Descendent Studios, a team that never found the Descent community until after they launched their Kickstarter? While I have faith in their ability to deliver on their project, my faith with Interplay is not there. I really have to question Interplay's motives. Do they plan on this being some kind of cash grab? Are they thinking of screwing over Descendent much the same way PTMC's Dravis screwed over the Material Defender at the start of Descent II? That would be ironic.

Six Gaming Podcast

So the podcast happened this past week, with Episode 5 and its highlights now available on YouTube.

I'll be blunt, it's not our best showing. News seemed to be disjointed, the hosts were distracted with Twitch chat trolls, and the Round Table section was rather, well, bland. Hopefully next week, we'll be a little more exciting. SGP always seems to be better with more hosts.

Ron's Bronze Plays

This week I played with Colzaratha's smurf. It didn't seem to help a whole lot.

The first game, he played Ahri while I played Morgana. He did not have a good game. Every lane lost, and we slowly bled out. The second game was much of the same. I was again on Morgana against a Graves/Annie combo in the bottom lane that our ADC fed substantially.

We got our first win in game 3 when I played Janna. I had some strong Janna play this weekend, and got some crucial knockups to force the win. I tried to make it two straight on Janna, but despite more strong play, the rest of the team didn't have it in them.

In the final game, Colz and I switched roles, with me going mid Lux and him on Morgana. I went off for a 12/2/21 carry, and Colz and I ended in style. Result of the 5 games was an increase in 11 LP to Bronze IV and 88 LP.

Website Update

Last night, I was able to finalize the data I'm putting in the game box on the website. My article about the sorry state of gaming APIs really came to mind. While the Blizzard API has come a long way and the League of Legends API is pretty good, the Steam API still sucks (it's still missing an achievement feed), and an official XBox API isn't even a thing yet.

Really. It's 2015 people. Let my data go! Let my data be free!

Anyway, I still have to code out detailed pages for my WoW feed, get profile pages for my Diablo 3 characters, display detailed history of my ranked play in League of Legends, and at least show off the games I am playing on Steam, even if getting the achievements I have for them is rather archaic.

But honestly, this is the home stretch. After that is the life section, which really is just going to require me to set featured pages.

After that, I have a lot of content to update, which includes transferring my music collection to SoundCloud, updating all the tags on my Blogger and Tumblr sites, and recreate many of the pages from the existing site on the new one. That's not really a lot of stuff. Hopefully coding can be completed this weekend, and I can start on the content next week. I'm still committed to finishing by the end of the month.

Labels: Blogger, Coding, Descent: Underground, Diablo III, Gaming, League of Legends, Music, roncli.com, Six Gaming Podcast, Six Minutes To Release, SoundCloud, Steam, Tumblr, Twitch, World of Warcraft, XBox

Monday, April 07, 2014

All Good Things and Such
Posted: 10:18:00 AM 0 comments

It's been a long time since I've written anything of substance here, so let this post serve as a catch up to what's been going on.

Since April of 2012, I have had the pleasure of working on the iOS application known as Sift. The company developing Sift is a San Francisco Bay Area startup, of which I am a founder. Needless to say, I put in many hours of work into the product.

Sift was more than a job to me. It was an opportunity to do something big, and perhaps make a profound impact in the way people shop online. It's still in its infancy, but the product that we put out there is pretty awesome.

However, I decided to step away from the company in February after three months of consideration. It was a very difficult decision for me, as I truly believed in the product and the company. I was a remote worker in a high-impact position, and I found that it wasn't easy maintaining the visibility required of such a position in a remote location while still being able to get done the stuff that needed to get done. This became especially true as the company grew, both with more internal employees and having to work with multiple contractors outside of the company (and the country), which would have me going as early as 8 am and as late as 2 am. Combine that with the demanding travel schedule - I spent only 8 of the final 18 weeks of 2013 at home - and it's not hard for most people to see how stress levels were through the roof.

Extreme stress levels aren't something I'm particularly fond of, which led to my decision to move on. I did spend a good deal of time with the company, accomplishing and learning plenty along the way. I learned much about the open source world, and found that I very much enjoyed working with Node JS. I met a lot of awesome people as well, and I can only wish for their further success as Sift continues to grow.

While leaving was certainly not a decision I came to lightly, I'm quite happy that I was able to leave my second startup on my own terms after being able to accomplish so much for them. My first startup, Trax in Space, ended in financial disaster, and I wasn't ready to step away when it all fell apart. This time, I look back fondly on the experience, knowing that I was a major contributor, and that the company is still growing upon the foundation that I helped to build.

So what's next for me? Well, back to the Monday through Friday, 8-hour a day grind, resharpening and honing my .NET skills while bringing my schedule back to a sense of normalcy that I have found was very much missed. What else?

Music. I'm slowly getting back into my music, and as always have several songs floating around. I want to get myself a new electric guitar next, as my last one bit the dust some years ago. In the meantime, I post things I'm working on to my creative blog as I work on them.

Coding. I'm in the process of upgrading all of my .NET projects to 2013, will be updating LibWowAPI, and plan on slowly transitioning my websites over to Windows Azure. I plan on learning Rendr and incorporating it into my personal website, roncli.com, as a way of learning and showing off my node.js skill. And I am wanting to figure out Xamarain so that I may be able to write mobile games.

Gaming. And of course, I spent a ton of time between jobs gaming. I'm big time into Diablo 3 these days, have gotten into streaming my gaming experiences, and am a regular host on the Six Gaming Podcast where we talk all about gaming.

Seems like I'm getting back to my roots these days. That could be a sign of some wonderful times to come.

Labels: Azure, Coding, Diablo III, Editorials, Gaming, LibWowAPI, Life, Node, Rendr, roncli.com, Sift, Six Gaming Podcast, Stress, Tumblr, Twitch, Xamarian