by ·Comments Off on Oh look, it’s a blog

I’m sure a lot of you have been saying “gosh, you’ve been awfully quiet over there haven’t you?” and you’d be right, I have been quiet, at least on this particular digital outlet.

I have been writing on a very regular basis at my old haunt Bit-Tech. I write something news-like over there pretty much every morning and even have a regular column on their blog. You can click here to see  the David Hing Bit-Tech blog archives. Not only am I writing there which is of course a massive draw for anyone,  but the other guys writing for the site are uniformly excellent.

I’m also no longer working at M&M and am instead working in digital marketing for an insurance company. Although I was initially reluctant to cross over to the “dark side” that is marketing, the work’s pretty good, the company is Not Evil and they let me write crazy things like this from time to time.

I’ve got a couple of projects in the works once again, most of which gaming related, and I’m tempted to write a little bit about them although I find actually writing about a project is the fastest way to kill it off for good, so I’m a little reluctant to talk about the game that I am making and have got quite far with. All I shall say is that it is set in space and I no longer recognise half the code I’ve actually written.

Additional Notes:

Fun fact: It’s really rather difficult to post something on a blog that has been dormant for as long as this one has. If you go through my archives, you’ll find quite a few posts that basically make excuses as to why I haven’t posted for a while.

There’s even a sub-category of that type of post whereby I comment on the fact that there are a lot of posts where I apologise for not posting for a while.

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Any careful development or thoughtful planning on the part of anyone making games can be undone in one fell swoop from every game’s worst possible enemy.  Their nemesis.  Their one stumbling block on the way to greatness.

The player.

Any player has a unique ability to completely and utterly destroy any game.  There are several ways they can do this with some of the most popular methods being to play another game along the lines of making sure everyone else isn’t having fun, but the one that can scupper just about anything, online or offline, is where the player is given free reign to exercise their creativity.

Playing Space Marine at the preview event I went along to the other day (and look, here is my write up over at Bit-Tech), I started thinking about how the developers must dread players when we started playing the multiplayer part of the game.  Space Marine comes with the option to customize your power armoured super soldier down to the colours of individual parts of armour.  The intention here is that you can create unique designs or anything you might have painted if you happen to have been a fan of the miniatures.  The reality in most cases is however wildly different.

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by ·Comments Off on The Writer’s Quest Continues

When this blog goes for any length of time without an update it’s normally because I have succumbed to my tortoise-like nature and become incredibly lazy, but this time it’s mostly because I have been incredibly busy.

What follows after the jump is a brief summary of my last five months or so, what I have learnt about myself, what I have done and what I am doing.

I am earning money as a freelance writer

If you want to employ a freelance writer, please drop me a line on davidDOTofDOThingATgmailDOTcom, replacing the capitalised DOTs and ATs with their relevant symbols.

At the moment I’m probably not quite earning enough to give up the day job, which is a shame, because I gave up the day job, but that just means I need to find another day job in the near future.

I am now (results pending) a fully qualified NCTJ journalist.

I did a full time course set by the NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists:  An acronym that I still embarrassingly enough get muddled up whenever I say it) that finished a couple of weeks ago.  I met some fantastically talented people there, some of whom will undoubtedly be the next big thing in your favourite paper, on your favourite website or your favourite news broadcast programme.  The rest are probably sick of journalism right now and will need a break because the course is rather intense, unrelenting and tends to beat the journalism into you so hard that some of it will occasionally go right through and come out the other side.

Incidentally, if anyone reading this is interested in a career in journalism, do an NCTJ.  You won’t realise how little you know until you do.  I did mine at News Associates, who have centres in London and Manchester and although they are pricey by comparison, it is the first piece of education that I have paid for that I feel I not only got a good deal but probably didn’t pay them enough for all the work they put in.

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by ·Comments Off on Custom PC and Bit-Gamer Podcast

Busy busy.

This blog is fast becoming a neglected child, relegated to some kind of “look what I did somewhere else” channel.

The chaps at Bit-Tech had me on board for their gaming podcast last Friday and I made some comments about gaming things and showed of some partially known gaming trivia that loosely followed the format of “wasn’t that thing done by that guy?” without really knowing the thing or the guy other than a vague memory of something I read somewhere at some time.

We talked a bit about Crysis 2, Battlefield 3, Alice: Madness Returns and other things.  I am also discovering they don’t like Starcraft 2 as much as I do.

We also talked about QWOP which is hilarious and you should all go and have a look at it.