Sam and I have a thing for underwater creatures. First it was the Enterprise Octopus. Then it was Norman Naysayer. Now we unveil Mr. ROI himself, Ricky Revenue. Sam had this idea for a new character. Someone who’s eye is always on the numbers. He won’t approve something unless the ROI can be proven. To him it’s all about metrics and analytics. He loves Excel.

With that in mind and the undersea theme as my guide it wasn’t long before the good old angler fish came to mind. At first we we were thinking of someone with a sort of glazed, zombie like stare. All he can see is this glowing orb of money in front of his eyes. After some consideration it dawned on us that this person isn’t just a corporate zombie. He’s someone who legitimately has financial concerns about the business. You just have to get him on your side.

Drawing Ricky took about 2 hours in Photoshop once the initial sketch and direction had been decided on. This was my first time drawing at 300 dpi. The brushes are nowhere near as forgiving. You can see that it took me a while to get warmed up. Overall I’m pretty happy with how he turned out. I’m working on my line weights and smoothness. I like a bit of wave to my line but I’d like to be a lot smoother. I need to start forcing myself to use my whole arm for the movement rather than just my wrist.

Be sure to check the Vimeo page so you can see it in higher res, “HD”. Also be sure to check out Sam’s more in-depth explanation.

I think, maybe, if I am reading the subtext correctly, that this cartoon might, just possibly, have boobs in it. They should have stuck with Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money. Horrid character design and bad Flash animation does not a good show make. At least they refrained from calling it Space Balls Deep. Thanks to @tylersticka for the link.

Tonight we had our first Refresh Portland event. It’s a monthly meetup and presentation where we bring designers and others interested in design together. We hope to teach them something they didn’t know and give them something to use in the real world. We packed the house with somewhere between 50-60 people. We just barely had enough chairs for the space that Jive graciously lended to us.

First off, Tyler’s presentation was awesome. I hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting Tyler before and I was honestly a little nervous about someone I didn’t know doing the first presentation. Humongous props to Tyler for putting all my fears to ease and more. He kept things simple, relevant and to the point. The key message I brought home was to remember to, “Stop designing websites and start designing experiences.”

Of course we’re still working out the kinks. The elevator broke down. We almost didn’t get ustream working. I accidentally stole John’s Refresh introduction. In general I felt like we were running around like chickens with our heads cutoff. It was a great time and I look forward to improving it. Next time I hope to get free access to the elevator and side door for everyone during the Refresh time. I’ll also try and do a better job greeting people and making them feel welcome.

I’m really thankful for the support of everyone who came. I can’t wait to convert more visitors to presenters in the future. Someone in our audience has something really interesting to say that I know we’ll all want to hear.

You can catch the recording here. Ignore the first 4 minutes of my nervous rambling and just jump to Tyler being a badass.

I should also thank the team for helping set this all up. Thanks John, Carlos, Josh, and Bram!

Seriously awesome. I could easily bore you with a million tales of the awesomeness. I am still somewhat in shock. I feel as if I should still have a lanyard around my neck and a schedule of panels, demos and general game awesomeness to check out. Pictures coming soon. Definitely going again next year. If you don’t know what PAX or Penny Arcade is, check the links to have your mind blown.

If I have any criticism of PAX, it’s that the schedule was truly daunting. There was no way to see everything. A lot of what we wanted to see was on at the same time as other things we wanted to see. It was also a convention of lines. Glad they are splitting it up into a West Coast (Seattle) and East Cost (Boston) convention next year.

Personal highlights

1. Met tons of cool people. Using twitter on my iPhone and searching for every tweet in a small radius helped us track down fun stuff to do, shorter lines and people to hang out with. Ate breakfast with a group of twitterers. Talked to many people in lines and while watching game dmeos. Met many cool people all because of technology.
2. Met Jeremy (beard and pony tail) from Rainy Day Games at the D&D booth.
3. While at the concert, randomly talked to some strangers. Turns out they live or lived very close to us. One of them houses the game night for the owners of Rainy Day. Small world x10.
4. Talked for over an hour with WotC_DM (Didier, Lead Developer) about the D&D Tools. I’ll write up a proper synopsis on Dragon Avenue. He was very cool and knew of my redesign.
5. Watching Joleine sing in front of a gimongous crowd on Guitar Hero 4.Could actually hear her and she sounded great. She got many claps and even
   some cheers. Go, Joleine!
6. Beyond D&D Panel: A great panel by the guys who do the Geek Nights podcast. It was a really awesome talk about D&D, the niche it plays in the RPG genre, things it does poorly and well and what other games there are out there. I am very interested in some of the games, like Burning Wheel, Inspectres, Dogs in the Vineyard and more. I just searched for info on the panel and found a random picture of my arm while I waited in line for it. Randall is the guy smirking. Talked to him a lot about RPGs and DMing. Cool guy from Sacramento.
   
   

   After the panel, everyone was so into the discussion that we moved to the annex to watch some demos of actual gameplay. I barely missed out on getting into one of the demos but it was cool seeing it in action, from the mouth of the creator.

   Pic of me, really exhausted, at the post-panel gathering. Random photos of yourself are...strange.

   The Geek Nights guys playing Left-Right to narrow down the crowd.

7. Got to talk to Felicia Day. I think we convinced her to beg Joss for a role as a Zombie version of herself in the next Sing-a-long Blog. She seemed genuinely interested in the idea. That, or to wear a goatee and be an evil version of herself. She definitely implied #2 is on the way. Also got pics with her and a signed copy of The Guild.
8. Ate dinner next to Wil Wheaton. We were cool though and followed his rule “Whil says, ‘Don’t be a dick!’” Should have sent a drink to his table but didn’t think of it until after dinner.
9. Met Mike Krahulik, the artist of Penny Arcade while getting coffee early in the morning at my hotel. He seemed exhausted. I wasn’t 100% it was actually him until we saw him again at the Make a Strip panel.
10. Asked a stupid question at the Make a Strip panel. Felt like a total idiot when a cameraman got in my face. Perhaps I will be on the DVD.
11. Got to play with / see Warhammer Online, Dragon Age, Champions Online, Aeion, Gears of War 2, Left for Dead, Fallout 3, LotR Online: Mines of Moria, Rockband 2, Guitar Hero 4, Buzz, Singstar, Iron Chef, Maw, Starcraft 2, WoW: Wrath of the Liche King, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Rayman Ravig Rabbids TV something or other, Lord of the Rings something or other Xbox action game, Spore, and really just too much to remember it all.
12. Barely losing out on a competition to win a copy of the PS3 game, Buzz. It makes Scene It look like a piece of crap. I got all the questions right in 2 rounds. So did the girl I ended up going against. We had an identical score until the very, very end. The final game was a hot potato sort of thing with a bomb. Basically you answer a question and toss it to the next person. Fortunately she wasn’t a douche and didn’t hold it extra long to send to me at the last second. Alas, the bomb asploded like the 10th time a question came to me. Didn’t even get to see the question. :( Oh well. Was a ton of fun and did it in front of a ton of people. Got to show off my comic, video game and sci-fi knowledge and not get anything wrong.
13. Hanging out with Buck, Rachel and of course Joleine. We had a grand time together. Many people were jealous that I had a hot chick on my arm who was interested in the stuff at PAX.

Some video highlights:
Some of this stuff we didn’t see as there was too much awesome going on for anyone to take it all in.

1. Bad Horse Chorus snipes Felicia Day
2. Johnathan Coulton and Felicia Day sing Still Alive
3. Omegathon Final Battle - Vs. Excitebike
4. Warhammer Online: The game looks amazingly awesome for an MMO.
5. Magic the Gathering - Xbox Live Arcade: Sound sucks but you can see it.
6. Whil Wheaton making fun of Star Trek TNG
7. Dragon Age from Bioware
8. Spore
9. Starcraft 2

While disappointed that Photosynth won’t work with my system, this certainly wasn’t the message I expected to see. Colloquialisms, personality and self degrading humor. Almost human. Bravo Microsoft. Now can we talk about how Outlook 2007 and Entourage handle CSS in email?

They do lose points for not having a conversion point here. That’s just begging for a field asking for your email address so they could send an update when the Mac version is out.