| 05 • December • 2009
|| Gaming's Renaissance Man |
This has been a fairly intense week of "ego news" for (or about) me. Allen Varney, a regular contributor to the Escapist (a regular online-magazine devoted to populr media, and in particular role play games) did an interview with me for his "High Adventure" column. Find it on the Escapist's website at Gaming's Renaissance Man
| 03 • December • 2009
|| Paul Jaquays has a Wikipedia page! |
As of December 2nd, 2009, I have a wikipedia page! About as close to immortality as one gets these days. It was put together by harami2000, a collector of adventure gaming history (including my work). Find it at Paul Jaquays wikipedia page
| 01 • October • 2009
|| Employed Again! ... or ... Hello CCP! |
| Ensemble Studios, my previous employer, closed its doors to employees on the 31st of January in 2009 (see below). Microsoft lumped the Ensemble crew into their first ever layoff, which, combined with our "plant closing" meant that Microsoft had to keep us on staff for another 2 months. After a particularly disheartening interview in February, I called up the transition counselers (Drake Beam & Morin) that Microsoft had provided for us as a severance benefit and went through their training seminars. It took about two months of attending seminars and meeting with my personal consultant to get myself back in the right mindset, have the proper interviewing skills, and best of all, get my resume in a form that really sold me and my abilities.
After interviewing with several companies in rapid succession this past summer, I accepted an offer to join CCP North America in the Stone Mountain, Georgia office as a Senior Level Designer. CCP is known for their MMO EVE Online, a very popular science fiction game (with over 300,000 active players all sharing the same "world" space). CCP North America was formed by the Merger of CCP (based in the small island nation of Iceland) and White Wolf publishing, a venerable role playing game publisher. My job started in early August and after a very stressfull month of packing, prepping the house for sale, and moving cross country, I hit the ground running developing content for my new project.
There are not many places (outside of Iceland itself), where one can be working at one's desk, and hear coworkers walking down the hall discussing something in Icelandic. It's just a part of the work day here in Atlanta.
It's a great team and the company is growing to support several game projects. To learn more about CCP and its studios in Iceland, North America, the UK, and Shanghai go here.
And a special shout out of thanks to Stephen Franks, my counselor at DBM, to all the recruiters I worked with over the months, and in particular to Maria Barton and Matthew Hakaim of Game Recruiter and Alan of Studio Search, to the companies who were willing to bring me in for interviews, to the companies who were interested to at least talk on the phone, and finally to the folks at Recruiter Relocation who helped arrange the move from Dallas to Atlanta.
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| 01 • October • 2009
|| Halo Wars Map Development Retrospectives |
About a month ago, the community manager for Robot Entertainment (a company started by some of the Ensemble Studios founders and staff) asked if I would like to help them out. They asked me to write up some developer notes for any of the Halo Wars skirmish (player vs. player) maps that I worked on for the on the Halo Wars official web site. Of the eight maps that I could reasonably call mine, four remained without commentary.
I wrote a small essay for each map focusing on both my contribution to map and some insight into the design and development philosphies and practices behind decisions made on those maps. For each of them, I was able to provide the concept art that I created to start development and in some cases, early screenshots of the map in development. You can find the write-ups at Pirth Outskits, Terminal Moraine, Repository, and Crevice at the Halo Wars website.
Crevice
Terminal Moraine
Repository
Pirth Outskirts
If you're interested, you can also check out the other maps at Halo Wars Skirmish Maps. I did some work on nearly every skirmish map that shipped with the game and one of the maps in the Historic Battles downloadable content pack. But the eight maps I consider "mine" due to either being a part of the original development on the map or having primary responsibility for it during development are: Beasley's Plateau, Crevice, Labyrinth, Repository, Terminal Moraine, Pirth Outskirts, Release, and Barrens.
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| 01 • October • 2009
|| Zach Jaquays Gallery Site is Coming Down |
My son Zach asked that I take his site down. The contact info has long been out of date and he plans to launch his own personal site with a somewhat different focus in the near future. If you have a need to contact him, send me a message and I'll pass it along.
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| 16 • September • 2009
|| A Little Humor for Teachers |
| Teachers having open houses may find this bit of audio both ironic and funny.
Stream me!
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| 03 • March • 2009
|| Halo Wars in Stores in USA |
If you pre-ordered Halo Wars from a
retailer known to have first day release copies of games, then you should have
your copy today! If not go out and get one!!
| 31 • January • 2009
|| Ensemble Studios Closes its Doors
Forever |
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On January 30th, at 5:00 PM CST,
Microsoft Games Studios closed the doors of Ensemble Studios, the creators and
developers of the successful Age of Empires series of real time strategy (RTS)
games for computers and the highly anticipated Halo Wars RTS for the Xbox 360.
The closure, which has been public news for several months, ended the studio's
14 year run of successful titles. Originally simply a studio closing, it was
later rolled into the larger, recently announced first-time-ever layoff of
Microsoft employees. All positions at the studio, more than 80 developers and
staff, both full time and contract were eliminated.
Needless to say, yesterday was not a happy day. But it was best summed up at
day's end by the words of Graeme Devine, lead writer on the Halo Wars project
when he wrote:
"I will not remember today. Today we are no longer
Ensemble. I will remember the past 5 years as Ensemble was, the greatest
assembly of passionate individuals I’ve ever been lucky enough to work with.
Good bye, good luck, and congratulations to everyone on Halo Wars."
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| 14 • January • 2009
|| News Clean Up |
Decided it was time to update this
page, and clean out stories older than say, a year or so ... which means nearly
all of them.
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| 9 • September • 2008
|| "You're Fired" |
| Microsoft Games Studios, having previously determined that the headcount in Ensemble Studios could be better applied to cutting edge projects like LIPS and You're in the Movies, brings a few general managers down to Dallas to tell the developers busting their butts to finish Halo Wars, that they are all fired. "K, Thanx, Bai!".
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