Good news, bad news
The good news is, suddenly I got a whole lot more free time for game development.
The bad news is, I don't have a job anymore (yay for the economic situation).
I didn't just freeze and panic though; instead, I called a friend at a game company I was applying to for the summer, and told I might be available for work a bit earlier after all... I hope to hear more from them next week, so wish me luck!
As for other news, I have been working on Artillery Brawl a lot, though still no particle effects... I think they might be cursed, since every time I get close to implementing them, I run into problems or some other thing I just have to fix. Anyway, the good thing about this is that the entity system and a lot of the code in general is starting to look really good and reusable. This is how I should have approached building a reusable codebase to begin with; writing a game, then generalizing the solutions that work.

March 2nd, 2009 - 12:27
Bad luck on the job front, and I hope you find a new position soon!
Additional time for personal game development is good, but so is eating every day.
I agree on the development approach too. If you’re not actually solving real problems with the code, it’s easy to make something incredibly generic and utterly useless, or spend too long abstracting things that only ever get used in a one or two places.