Careers, Shanghai, Playas

My co-worker Brandon pointed out that I hadn't updated the main ffwd blog for frickin' ages, and lo and behold, he was right - and since my 'closed Sega World' picture from Shanghai got this page linked from UK Resistance, and literally _several_ crazed old Sega fans are wandering over to check out the site, time for some updates! This time, it's in a handy bullet-point stylee:

- The Game Developer Career Guide, which is a news-stand only product in North America (though you can also buy a digital version online!) has now shipped, yay - lots of good content in here, from 'A Day In The Life' for Neversoft and Ubisoft developers through student postmortems and lots of frequently-asked questions for those wanting to get into the game biz - and a massive game school directory.

- Most recently, as FFWD linklog, GameSetWatch, or Gamasutra readers may have spotted, I spent a week in Shanghai to meet with prominent Chinese game developers and attend the ChinaJoy game show. You can see a bunch of my pics from the show and China itself at my Flickr account - including the World Of Warcraft/Coca-Cola show hall pics showcased on GameSetWatch, and there's a big compilation of all my China pieces up at Gamasutra. Also got some good biz dev work done there, hopefully!

- Otherwise, a whirlwind trip through other things: GameSetWatch is going great guns, though I decided to change the site up to simply run linklog-style posts from me alongside everyone's columns (for which we are getting even more, like Michael Zenke's new 'MMOG Nation' write-ups) - works MUCH better. Also, over at Legaltorrents, we added the awesome 'Done The Impossible' Firefly/Serenity documentary, alongside CC-licensed animation assets for the 'Odd Job Jack' cartoon.

- Also, I started YMU Playa, a playlist blog for those subscribed to the Yahoo! Music Unlimited service, and showcasing some fun label-based and genre-based playlists I can share with anyone who gets the service. Elsewhere, my my Monotonik net.label is still going great guns, with some really neat releases recently - gonna try to set up a podcast-style feed so that iTunes folks can easily subscribe to get the latest releases, too.

So, time to actually wander off and enjoy the weekend, right? More updates soon - we actually just got back the latest August issue of Game Developer, with a postmortem of Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider: Legend on the cover, and the September issue, with a certain bearded Russian mathematician on the cover, is going to press soon - I'll cover those when there's more info about them online!