Things have definitely been fast and furiously paced in the last little while, a tempo I’m glad to find myself still very comfortable with. In addition to working intensely and enjoyably on the game, quite a few fun personal events have taken place.

Pikoti’s five-year-old son came to stay with us for a few days last week; what a strange and new experience. Although I was a little nervous about being a sorta-step-girlfriend-or-whatever for a while, it went very well. The big surprise wasn’t that having a kid around takes up every minute of your attention and every joule of energy; I was rather well-prepared for that. Rather, I was stunned by how much more time needs to be budgeted to get anything done with a kid. And after just a day or so, I found myself becoming one of those people who talk about the kid all the time.

After this momentous meeting, we went to Paris to stay with Pikoti’s parents, both of them shrinks. With regular business visits to HQ, Paris has somewhat become for me synonymous with a conference room in Montreuil (the Longueuil of Paris). I hadn’t really had time to build up too many expectations about this Easter weekend stay.

But Paris being what it is, I didn’t have to look for anything to be blown away. It was a gorgeous sunny 25C, we enjoyed incredible food and drink (ahhh, Conté), and I spent a fortune as Pikoti took me on a veritable tour of all the best shops. One nighttime dinner and walk in Montmartre particularly moved me; the place looked very much to me like Québec City, and after almost a year in northern England it was touching to be (sort of) in the homeland.

We’re now concluding two days in sunny London before returning to Newcastle tonight.

As for work, Driver San Francisco has come under media attention again, with positive cover stories in Joy-Pad and GamesMaster this week. Watch this space for links to those and other stories.

Been meaning to publish this guest post for about a month, but many things got in the way, including some sad news that needed blogging about. Now that the weather seems to be clearing, here goes…

It was a sunny Wednesday morning in June, in Newcastle. A producer from Montreal had just landed to give us a hand to close and ship Driver San Francisco for the holiday period of 2010. However…

Nine months later, things have evolved quite a bit. lightspeedchick is cooking dinner while I am checking her blog from the Gym/Gameroom of our tiny apartment in downtown Newcastle, hoping that she might have updated it during a fit of insomnia I would still be unaware of. But still no news since the last July post where she was mentioning the difficulties of settling in somewhere that is definitely not home. I have since been pushing her to start posting again, but it seems our relationship, Driver San Francisco and her life as an expat have sucked up any energy she could have used to write. She is busy slicing onions when I start to push her once again:

Quand est-ce que tu postes sur ton blog ?
Ché pas. Trop à raconter.
C’est le moment là, tout est en place.
Pourquoi tu le ferais pas toi ?
Moi ?
Oui, des fois j’ai des guests, ça s’fait.
Tu veux que moi je raconte ta vie ?
Ben oui !
Et parler du boulot, de nous, de nos conflits, du reste…
C’est ben correct.
T’es sérieuse là ? Parce que moi là écrire ça me démange.
Mets-en.

But who am I? I am pikoti, an arrogant little fucker from Paris. I have been designing games for quite a while now. Prior to that I was a film and game reporter and a wannabe screenwriter. I have a five-year-old son, living with his mother in the 15th arrondissement of Paris in an apartment I called home for seven years, before a very unlikely chain of events transported me to Newcastle a few weeks before Christmas 2009…

So, back to that sunny Wednesday in June when the producer from Montreal landed. She called a meeting at her desk to be updated on the recent design changes operated on Driver San Francisco. We spoke in Franglish as her French and mine were not really in synch. She referred to “chars” all the time and I soon realized that I didn’t follow. For me a “char” is a military tank or chariot like the one driven by Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur. For her, it is what I would call a “voiture”, an “automobile” or a “caisse”, a car in English. And during that meeting I had the feeling that she was checking me out. It was subtler than what I could express with my written English skills, but I think she was definitely checking me out.

Later during that day, some colleagues I was not really close to proposed to take her out for a welcome meal. I had been added to the mailing list as a French speaking expat who could help her blend in with the studio more quickly. Without consciously realizing it, I felt motivated to join in. It’s not exactly my kind of thing to join in a crowd that I hardly know. I prefer the tranquillity of my apartment and the company of movies and video games rather than superficial discussions that often end up in drunken nights, especially in Newcastle. But this time the Montreal producer was to attend, and some mysterious magnetism was pulling me toward her.

And so we found ourselves side-by-side at Wagamama on Eldon Square, chatting politely about our respective careers and the games we worked on previously. Then the meal was over and the group split. I was surprisingly disappointed by the lack of final drinks during which I could have talked to her a little more…

At the end of the week, the two workaholics that we are found ourselves together at the office on Sunday, while the rest of Newcastle watched England be booted out of the World Cup. Late in the afternoon, I offered her to go on the quayside for a pint… There, we chatted for hours about movies, religion, video games, books, politics and evoked the complicated relationships we were both in. I think she had me when she said that she loved The Untouchables and had done a thesis on James Cameron focused on Aliens.

The rest would be some very good material for a Franco-Canadian romcom, where a Montreal girl and a Parisian boy, both tangled in some serious shit back home, find themselves working together in Newcastle - the British capital of Stag Nights - and fall for each other…

When I went to Indonesia in 1996, I remember seeing an ornate “window” in a hostel, which was essentially a nicely-shaped hole right in the concrete wall, with no glass or screen. I saw this and had the thought, “but what do they do in wint-? oh… right”. It’s those little things that make you realize that a lot of what we take for granted are really special features of Canada.

I was in Scotland over the holidays and I made a lot of fun of the country for being paralyzed by so little snow. Snow that grass poked through created enough havoc to cancel some of the family’s holiday festivities, including a dinner. But although it was a wuss of a winter (-8C at worst I saw there), it was definitely harder to live with than here. I remember feeling and hearing drafts in every pub and house I entered, and in most places the heating couldn’t cope well enough to warm the interior completely. Ever since I’ve been back, I’ve been appreciating the simple fact of being able to actually be toasty when inside, or walk confidently on the sidewalk (on which abrasives are used). If Britain is so unused to what little winter I saw there, I’m not shocked that the prolonged frost they’ve been getting is screwing them up completely, and I feel for them.

My friend Charles, on a sabbatical in New Zealand, has noticed that the doors there are often left wide open, leading to birds often being seen in cafés. He adds, “nobody seems to consider this a public health hazard”. That fear that beasties, including domestic ones, are unsanitary, seems typically North American. Everywhere I’ve gone (including Europe), I’ve seen owners bring well-behaved dogs to restaurants, and on trains. There were at least 5 dogs (leashed, not caged) in our one crowded compartment on the train to Glasgow. In Indonesia I dined in a restaurant where I could see a rat walking on the awning of the bar. My hotel in Venezuela, the same one where the UN Secretary General had recently stayed, had cockroaches. Sure, I wouldn’t like to eat next to rats and dead birds, but I think we’re a little overcareful when it comes to dogs, cats, birds, squirrels, geckos, and the like. People aren’t that afraid everywhere. They really are especially afraid here.

I was recently talking to my friend Thierry, who moved to L.A. last year, about the American healthcare reform. He felt that a key difference between American and Canadian attitudes with respect to this was that in America, it’s accepted as common sense that a public figure or richer person should get better and faster treatment than the rest of the population, in all things. Conversely in Canada, according to my friend, we expect all to be equal, for better or worse. This is definitely supported by the indignation we saw when Claude Dubois jumped the H1N1 vaccination line this fall, and last week when Halle Berry skipped the queue at Trudeau airport. One commenter said that the outrage over this is strictly Canadian, as in most places people expect stars to get VIP treatment everywhere, including at security checks.

This is how travelling makes you know your own country better. Some things others may soon have to learn from us, while for some other things… I wish we’d learn from them.

I was motivated to write something about Halle Berry skipping the airport line in Montreal, but it seemed inappropriate for the first post of the year.

A lot of links and articles are going around these days about how to keep one’s resolutions, with most advising to make your objectives specific, and share them. As with any resolution, New Year’s or otherwise, I’m always reluctant to share because it seems to give the ol’ entourage licence to nag, but I guess that’s kind of the point.

Well, licence or no, here are mine:

1 - Hit a BMI of 22 (that’s about 10 pounds away)
2 - Take piano lessons and practice (my least likely to be observed)
3 - Do something social once at week at least (must observe, as I think it’ll be hard to do this in 2011 when the new game is due)
4 - Read at least one book a month
5 - Find real ways of worrying less, other than waiting for the wisdom of old age to set in
6 - Make that cool website idea of mine a reality (another long shot)

Yours?

Hi again,

After trying my hand at freelancing, I found that while it was a successful endeavor, it wasn’t really an enjoyable one. Although I saw people every day, they were never the same ones and I missed being part of a team and creating the bonds one does through repeated exposure. So after getting the freelancing curiosity out of my system, I became an employee of Ubisoft this year, and after helping complete and ship James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game, I’m now producing my own project again.

I’d like to become more blog-active (ie. writing, but also reading and commenting) in the next year. My reasons for neglecting by blog all this time had mainly to do with the fact that readers increasingly call you on every half-baked opinion, requiring in-depth support for seemingly everything you say, and there’s always the possibility that some client or upper manager will find your half-baked opinions online. All this can be quite castrating. But what the hell. This space is mine, and after all, it’s opt-in for everyone else.

Here’s hoping you find it worth opting in.

- I signed up to give some money monthly to the AIDS foundation and they gave me a bag of goodies. Inside, among other things, was a condom with word AIDS printed all over the wrapper. I think that would kinda kill the mood… but I guess abstinence is good prevention too.

- This week I’m finishing a game project I’ve been producing for the Ubisoft Campus for the past little while. I find I’ve been rebitten by the game production bug. I’ll definitely be looking for a game to produce as soon as I get back from…

- Rome. On Sunday I’m leaving for a short solo romp in the Italian capital. Will eat gelato and prosciutto, visit Roman stuff, draw, do yoga and take a side trip to Pompeii.

Silly (and now sixty) lightspeedmom on our trip to NYC last year. Bonne fête Mom!

Since leaving A2M last year, I’ve been searching for the same level of joy I found in my first years as a game producer (especially on Happy Feet). Unfortunately, by the end of the Iron Man project, that joy had been replaced by throwing up into office garbage cans and on one memorable occasion, losing vision from the stress. Although in hindsight it seems that leaving was the sensible thing to do, it was an excrutiating decision to make at the time without feeling like a failure. I know that the more driven parts of me will always feel like it was.

Anyway, at the time I tried my hand at freelancing and was successful at it, but I missed seeing the same people every day and being part of a team. Slowly I dropped each client in favor of my favorite one, Ubisoft, where I worked in the training department. At Christmas Ubi presented me with a full-time job, saying I’d get paid holiday vacation if I signed right away. I did it for the vacation, unsure of what the job would be.

A couple of weeks ago I landed ass-backwards into Ubisoft’s campus, where 100 soon-to-be graduates are working together to make a game over one semester, and I’m acting producer on this project. The campus gig ends in May, and I finally - happily - have an idea of what I want to do next. And I’m excited about it. I’ll be able to talk about it by the end of this month.

I absolutely adore this birthday card I received from a colleague yesterday. In case you’re wondering about the pegleg, Comet’s leg got hurt last week (but she’s ok). Merci JF!

When I was a kid, my grandmother Laurette and my grandfather Yvon lived in the apartment above ours. Every day I came home from school and went right upstairs to play cards with him as she made me a grilled cheese sandwich. Although the whole family is made up of rather direct, no-nonsense people, my grandmother was by far the most direct person I’ve ever met.

She wasn’t a sentimental woman either. When I got hurt she didn’t take me in her arms; she would swiftly disinfect the wound and put a band-aid on it, later admonishing my father for moving into a place with stairs. At Bingo, when she got close to winning but lost, she’d never fail to colorfully rip into the person who had won, even if the winner was our priest. Still, because she wanted to be polite, she’d say “Allez donc pisser, vous”. When my cousin, aged only 4, loudly complained on a bus that the lady sitting next to her didn’t smell good, and my aunt tried unsuccessfully to keep her quiet, Laurette said “Ben c’est vrai qu’à pue!”

Yet for all her down-to-earth realism, every Christmas she built a virtual Disneyland in her living room for me and my cousin, filling us with wonder like a pragmatic fairy. When I last saw her in the hospital over the holidays, she didn’t recognize me but kept talking about Andy’s daughter’s recent achievements. She told me about my new job. My new house.

Laurette would have been 93 on Sunday, but she passed away last weekend, after a few months of illness.

Since then, I’ve received a lot of messages from surprising places, and I’ve learned that Laurette was neighborhood grandmother to many who weren’t related to her. Although I never heard her spontaneously tell anyone that she loved them, this week I’m happy to know that many hearts were touched by her uncompromising tough love.

Bye Mémé, tu vas me manquer.