Sunday, November 28, 2010

... on hold, on pause, on ice

I hope all of you that had been following/reading this blog have been keeping your eye on my other blog, Just Five Words of Wisdom. Otherwise you may just have wondered what became of me. I suspect most of you have also noticed the de-Thiefing of this writing blog. Well, it's not just your imagination. I'm moving away from Thief writing and, for the time being, writing in general.  It's bad news, but for good reasons.

My job at Arkane Studios as a level designer has been fantastic.  But things as fantastic as these come at a price, and right now that price is I had no desire to write.  Beyond that, my contract with Arkane's parent company would limit my ability to distribute anything I do write to purely unofficial channels, such as posting them on my blog or some other website or forum.  Let's not get into an argument here over if this is fair or not.  It's a standard for many types of jobs in many industries that when you hire a full time designer you get dibs on all of his or her creativity and you don't like them throwing said creativity around willy-nilly.  You also don't like them doing things that could wind up getting everyone sued.  So, my distancing myself from the intellectual property owned by Square Enix Corporation should start to make sense now.   

As it stands now, the print edition of COT-R is effectively canceled.  COT2 is also canceled, though my plan is to somehow use the characters and plot at some point in the future for some non-Thief based work.  My storybook projects with my sister can proceed, but will have to be done totally in her name.  (I'm fine with this.)  My other writing projects such as a continuation of the characters/plot introduced in Morden Wakes up are all going on the backburner with the speculative COT2 "reboot". 

I'm going to be keeping this blog up (and semi-active) because I would like to see the work my sister and I did on the fairy-tale storybook "The Adventures of Clifton Thrift" come to something, though it will be a slow process. 

So, that's that.  As I mentioned before, my other blog is pretty active and I usually update it on the weekends with either a week-in-review style post or something bigger, like I did this weekend with the pro game design Q&A.  Thanks for reading.  I'll be around.