Joining Cryptic Studios

I work for them now. Imagine that!

This will be a short post, spoilers! As many people may know, I have been hired by Cryptic as a content designer for Star Trek Online. It's exciting for many reasons, least of all being that I get paid again and I have a job to do now! Joking aside, it is very cool to be at Cryptic, to see a lot of the folks that got the ball rolling on City of Heroes. I've already met a lot of great people - like the designer who originally wrote and designed the Radio and Television arcs!

It's also really interesting because it's unknown; in a way, the entire experience is like Star Trek, except I'm boldly going where many men and women have gone before. However, there's a sense of wonder, for me, regarding going towards something that is a (relative) unknown. Before, I was a figure of authority on the City of Heroes team (next to Black Scorpion, Andy Maurer, Rob Anderberg, Positron, War Witch, Second Measure, Protean ... OK, so maybe not a FULL authoritarian figure). Now, I go into the great unknown of Cryptic. How do they do things? What sort of ways can I make content? What will I learn? This last bit is the important part, and it's something that, during my search for a new job, a good friend/mentor of mine told me. He said never stop learning, and that there's always the possibility to learn something from even the smallest task. This, he said, was the sign of a great designer, and I think it's true. Now, the call is to actually live that in earnest.

I don't know what challenges and experiences await within Cryptic. Well, I do, but I can't legally talk about it, or else my next post will be, "What to do to get fired". I do know that I'm looking forward to the continued broadening of my skills and understanding of, well, everything that I do! I hope that all the people who are reading this will enjoy watching my progress in this new position. I can't guarantee that I'll do everything perfectly, but I can guarantee that you'll be watching me apply everything I learned from City of Heroes towards Star Trek Online, then learning all the new lessons, methodologies, etc. that come from, well, just continuing to be open and educate myself!

I promise my next blog post will be interesting. Well, that's a broad promise, because it'll be interesting for me to write, but not necessarily for someone else to read; after all, I wouldn't post it if I thought it was a dull. I hope.