Hey all, been a while. I don’t have any singular big topic to talk about, but I have a bunch of little things that’ve been happening in my life that I wanna get out, so this is gonna be a shotgun-style post with a bunch of different sections. Feel free to skip any that you’re less interested in.

My Academic Paper!

…got rejected! Yep it uh- it got rejected for a few reasons, including not being in the correct format (I thought I followed it correctly but hey, first time, bound to happen) and it being underdeveloped (their words, not mine). More specifically, the issues were that it lacked a method section and that it doesn’t address recent advances in the field I was discussing. Fair honestly.

I talked to other people who’re in academia and they said this is actually fairly expected (one of them told me he rewrote his first paper 12 times before it got published), but I’m unsure whether I want to put that much more effort into this endeavor. When I did this paper for a course, I was trying to avoid getting too deep into discussions of definitions and such and to focus on game mechanics in practice, but seems that that’s what is being asked of me.

I still do want to have a published paper, and I think I brought up some interesting points, but we’ll see if I get the urge to sink my teeth into it again.

I’ll probably do it to procrastinate on schoolwork.

I Moved!

As I wrote a month ago, I moved out of the hellhole that is Tel Aviv and now live in my own flat! It’s in a very nice neighborhood, got a decent grocery store a walk away, it’s pretty nice. I got myself a fridge, a washing machine, gonna get all the nails out of the walls in a few days, get a TV… It feels really nice to have this space to myself.

My bank account is giving me the death stare, though; my current job pays me crap so my balance was going down a little bit every month anyways, and having to spend thousands on all of this moving-related ordeal is not helping at all. I still have enough to make it for a few more months, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t getting nervous.

I’ll probably ask my parents for some money if it gets too bad, but I’d rather avoid that.

I’m Going to GDC Again!

Well, to the festival of gaming now that they’ve rebranded, but everyone’s still gonna be calling it GDC so I’m sticking to it.

Despite my aformentioned monetary worries, I am planning to go to GDC 2026 in San Francisco! It’s still 5 months out, but the price of everything goes up exponentially the closer the date arrives (learnt that the hard way with Gamescom in germany and gave up on going), so better get everything done with now and be secure in the knowledge that I’ll be there. I’m going with an american friend who wanted to come with me the last time I went but couldn’t, which is gonna be fun. I never met up with them in person before but we’ve known eachother… I wanna say the better part of 5~6 years now? They’re cool. And we get to split the cost of lodging which is helpful.

The plane ticket alone is going to cost me more than a month’s salary (again - my pay is crap. I should probably ask for a raise; my job scope tripled since I started) but… well, it’s the biggest event of game developers. It’s my dream.

Also I might be able to find a remote gig there who knows.

Rewriting my Website!

Not this one, a different one I run for an RP project.

For the past few months, I’ve been kinda passively moving it from being a Static Site to a proper site written in Rust, now that I’ve crossed the several thousand page threshold and about 5.6GB of image and video files in the git Large File Storage. I’ve been working on it slowly but surely (need to learn several frameworks, S3, and postgresql), but maybe a little… too slowly. A few days ago I decided I’ll try to work on it at least for an hour and a half a day, and I’m hoping I manage to work on it consistently and bang it out by the end of next month.

Still, there’s a lot of work to do (setting up a user system, deciding on who’ll host it (probably digitalocean), removing all those unwrap()s I have lying around and handling errors properly). I’m motivated but possibly a little delusional.

Writing a Portfolio!

Talking to someone else about my idea to go to GDC and hopefully find a remote gig at a decent company, they recommended I make myself a portfolio. I’m not a very visual person as you can tell, (this website only looks decent because I badgered a friend of mine to design it,) and I’m unsure what I could showcase without it being a little weird.

Do I show off a board game I made when I was 17? I’m still proud of it, I was the lead game designer and project manager so it probably shows initiative, but there is so much I could have done better and it has some major flaws in game design I look back in with regret. Do I show off any of my other board game projects? They’re newer, but smaller, and I don’t think they look as impressive. I’ll probably include my current work and a few hobby games I made which I think are slick, but how low should the bar of inclusion go? Do I include prototype without a win condition? Do I include a game jam game with only one level? I assume including too much will make me seem desperate, but will including too little make me seem out of my depth?

I don’t know.

Either way I should probaby register a domain name that’s more professional than “box of cox.”