I am sorry. I have falied in the area of good second impressions by committing to a weekly blog and immediately disappearing after the first post. My wife and I have been struggling with depression silently for years and have just recently managed to work our way beyond that through lifestyle changes and support from friends and family. That depression was a huge strain on our marriage and our situation to where I ended up losing sight of my goals in life and runnning on autopilot.
The past year and a half has been eventful and stressful, and I want to give a brief overview of that period of silence. Our son Hezekiah was born in September last year. I was selected to serve in Korea for a year without my family. Soon after getting stable in Korea I was sent on a no-notice three-week training exercise where it was very difficult to communicate with anyone. Just after that exercise I was sponsored to have my family with me in Korea, and had to move out of the dorm, fly back to the states, move the family out of the house we had lived in for four years, and return to Korea within the span of three weeks. My wife and son returned to the States for a first birthday visit with family, and during that time some friends gave birth to their daughter. We have had a whirlwind of changes happen over the past two years and, looking back at it all now, we are able to see that it has been a positive outcome.
The future for our family is wide open. As it stands now, I will be looking to go into independent game development once I separate from the military in a few years. Over the past two months my focus has been on learning as much as I can about game design and the business of the gaming industry. I have started using GameMaker: Studio as my primary development platform to build up a portfolio of small complete games to gain experience. To accomplish this long term goal, I am committing to the OneGameAMonth challenge and recommitting to this weekly (at minimum) blog to remain accountable and get in touch with the community of gamers.
Who I am hasn’t changed at the core and I still want to bring joy through games to those that I can. I am looking forward to what the future holds. See you next Saturday!
Musings of Renaud D Marshall 