(Edit: Hey, somebody Dugg me! Go Digg it up! Hooray internet!)

This man wants to become the best game designer ever.

As such, he’s making a game. He is also homeless, buried in credit card debt with nearly no money to his name, and living out of a shelter, equipped with nothing but a computer and a copy of Game Maker 7.0. As he states in his blog profile, “I hate working!”

At first, it is difficult to know whether to believe his claims, this being the internet. A bit of investigation reveals that he asked on the GameDev forums, “Is it possible to design and/or program games, while being homeless?” In that post, dated September 5, he noted he was “losing my place of residence soon.” Two days later, he created his blog. In the inaugural post, he says, “I’m broke, homeless, and I don’t have a job,” and lays out his plan to develop his own game, without necessarily getting a job dedicated to “making someone else rich.”

He also welcomes monetary donations, explaining, “I’m broke niggas. I’m broke.”

Early on, I fluctuated between being belief and skepticism. These days, the default reaction to this sort of thing is that viral marketing is afoot, but it seems too self-contained to be that. His GameDev posts don’t promote or link to his blog in any way, not even subtly, nor do the scant few other posts I was able to dig up elsewhere, all of which seem to be earnest game development inquiries.

The game was originally a platformer entitled The NeoVerse, and included moving platforms, the ability to swim “exactly like it is in Super Mario,” and a rocket launcher. This game seems intertwined with another idea, “a blend of old school Castlevania 2D type of game with Super Mario RPG,” which eventually became more focused on the platforming elements and was redubbed Me Vs. My Robots. (more…)

Someone told me about FeedBurner today, and it sounded like a useful thing to use for tracking purposes, so I went ahead and routed my blog’s RSS feed through that. If you subscribe to my RSS feed, it would be appreciated if you’d switch to this new feed, so instead of assuming my readership numbers are astonishingly low, I can be empirically confident they are astonishingly low. If you don’t subscribe to my RSS feed, why not take this opportunity to do so? It’s win-win!

The old URL will still work, but it’s old. The new one is new. Isn’t that exciting? I’m excited.

Not surprisingly, my tiny blog’s traffic has skyrocketed in the last eight hours. While I was sleeping a lot of comments came in for moderation (I use manual moderation because of ridiculous amounts of spam, not for censorship purposes). I’ll get around to approving it soon; I don’t plan to disallow negative posts.

I realize some of my comments are somewhat inflammatory. Let me say I’m not a fan of DRM. Obviously as a PC gamer it would be nice not to ever have to deal with it, hence the shoutout to Stardock at the end of my PA post. But I do think the backlash has to a degree overshadowed everything else, and I do sort of worry about the perpetuation of an increasingly combative scene (on both sides, not just—or even mainly—the players here) that makes PC seem even more unfriendly than its reputation already makes it seem.

The irony of this for me is that this issue isn’t even generally a big talking point of mine. But Tycho liked my blog post about it, and now it looks like it’s what I’ll be known for on the internet, at least for a while. That’s life! Anyway, hopefully we can keep the DRM-related comments to my piracy post (one of my more reactionary posts, I’ll admit), and maybe a few of you will also see fit to check out some of the other stuff on this blog. Welcome to it!

I’m a prominent veteran!

Also, I may begin referring to myself as “TV’s Chris Remo.”