Soon I will begin my journey as a Game Designer on Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. I am immensely excited and can’t wait to create enjoyable experiences for all of you in Azeroth! After the 38 Studios turmoil and uncertainty of the past several months, I couldn’t imagine a more positive scenario for my family and career. As you might expect, ye olde Nerfbat is going to suffer and revert to ghost town status while I work hard at making great games again. Thank you for all of your well-wishes and support, and I hope to see you beyond the Mists of Pandaria!

Chapter 2 of my game development career begins. Perhaps it’s more like Chapter 3 or 4… no matter. I can now accurately claim that I am “between jobs.” I am very excited to begin my journey with the best game development company out there! Learn more ambiguous information in Chapter 2 of my not-really-ongoing series of text adventures. If you can’t figure out where I’m headed after playing the game, I would advise you not to admit it if you don’t like being criticized.

I made myself a new business card. I printed them out and brought them along with me to parts undisclosed and completely forgot to hand them out to anyone. I thought I’d share my card with someone. That someone is you. Yes, I know the phone number is smudged out.

Spoiler Alert: For those of you who can’t decode QR Codes by hand, it leads you here.

While I haven’t completely abandoned this blog, I have obviously not been posting to it lately. Whether this is because I have nothing to say, I’m too busy at work, or I’ve become more interested in other hobbies that don’t have to do with blogging, I can’t really be sure. I just wanted to drop a note here that if I have anything particularly interesting to say, I’ll still post it here. If I don’t, I probably won’t.

I toyed with posting frequently enough just to keep the blog alive, but it would be a disservice to you to continue to repost other news just to retain readership, so I’ll refrain from the quantity and focus only on the quality (assuming I ever have anything particularly interesting I want to post about). Thanks for reading Nerfbat, and I’m sure it will ramp up again at some point, I just don’t when that time will come.

5 years ago, I converted a crappy phpBB-based commentary website into a sexier (but still crappy) blog! Way back when, it was all blue. Then, I updated the theme when I turned it into a true blog and gave it a nice scholarly look. Finally, I created a two part theme (one light and dark) which you can see here now. Soon, however, I will be updating the theme once again! Every time I do, it reinvigorates my drive to post useful articles, so you’ll benefit more than just visually. Thanks for visiting Nerfbat, and I’ll see you much more in the future.

If you come here frequently, you’ve certainly noticed a dearth of posts. But, you can help me remedy that! Reply to this post with a topic (or question), and I might run with it in a future post (note: Don’t ask about 38 Studios or Copernicus… I won’t/can’t talk about that stuff). Anything (else) goes, including things I’ve talked about in the past if you want to hear more of my thoughts on the subject.

Around. I’ve been focusing a lot on getting in-shape, which has been taking the bulk of my energy (not to mention the new puppy, who takes a ton of energy as well). I have a pretty large Aion first impressions post that I’ve been meaning to finish for a while, but we’ll see how long it actually takes me to finish writing that. For now, I’ll keep working on the in-shape thing until that becomes a habit and I don’t have to actively focus on it, then you’ll see more posts on Nerfbat.

Working on a couple things for Nerfbat somewhat passively. First of all, the Nerfbat Forums are taking their sweet time updating to the latest version, so they won’t be accessible for a bit. Secondly, I added several developer feeds to Bloginati recently, so you’ll get a more comprehensive list of recent dev blogs (assuming their feed isn’t malformed). I’ll let you know when the forums are back.

Update: The Nerfbat Forums are back with the latest version of the forum software.

Welcome to the new face of Nerfbat! I’ve sold ownership of the Nerfbat.com domain and its contents to a new management team with a vision for the future of this website. I will continue to post at least once a week, but you will also see two new faces from the game industry on this blog. That’s right, Nerfbat has gone from all Ryan Shwayder all the time to include two new notable industry figures, who will introduce themselves shortly. I hope you enjoy the new, more prolific Nerfbat conglomerate! More about the acquisition after the break. Continue Reading »

I’m going to be playing in the Novice League at Navin Skating Rink in Marlborough, MA starting next month. The games start at 10:00PM on Fridays from February 13th on. You can sign up for the season or per game. I’ll also be at the Advanced Intro Clinics on Tuesdays. They’re trying to expand from 4 to 6 teams, which is why I’m fishing for more people. Would like to see someone sign up!