It's Been a Weird Week

Hello and welcome to the inaugural post of my own little slice of the blogosphere. If you're here, that most likely means you already know who I am, otherwise you probably wouldn't have found me. But if that's not the case, allow me to introduce myself: my name's Devin Larson, and I'm an artist. I work in video games, creating 3d artwork for environments. Or at least I did until a week ago.

I'm based out of San Diego, CA. The first thing you need to know about the development community in San Diego is that this whole recession thing pretty much killed off a lot of the diversity that used to exist here. Concrete Games shut down a while back, High Moon Studios lost about half its staff during the Activision/Vivendi merger last year (including my roommate, who is still looking for work), and a number of smaller studios had to close as well. I worked for BottleRocket Entertainment, which lost its one and only project last Friday when our publisher, Namco Bandai, pulled Splatterhouse from us. It seemed to come out of nowhere, although there were very clear issues on our end from a number of standpoints, none of which I think it politic to get into here. But suffice it to say, everyone knew something was going to happen, just not necessarily that the project was getting pulled at this late date.

So I'm out of a job at the moment. I've spent the last week gathering some assets from the project and taking screenshots, and I've followed up on a couple of job opportunities. This will be an ongoing process in the weeks ahead, which is one of the reasons I've finally caved and created this blog to post work on. However I think it should be said up front that I've never really embraced the "connected" lifestyle, so the likelihood is high that posting will be pretty infrequent. The plan is for this blog to be semi-professional in nature, so some of my day-to-day discoveries and personal obsessions will leak in as well. But all of that is forthcoming... I just wanted to get this introductory post out there.