Yup. Still working. Slightly buzzed at the moment from sitting on the back porch, sipping a bit of Captain Morgan and Coke. So, no, not really working right now. But I have been. Busy. Doing stuff.
My little game project is moving along, though a bit slower because of the summer heat (and pleasant summer days) and encroaching responsibilities.
I’m writing again. I have a novel out in the mail to a handful of publishers (2 rejections so far; they came back really fast; modern technology has really stepped up the speed of rejection). I have another novel that I’m planning to self-publish as an ebook. I contracted out the cover art and I’m looking forward to seeing how that comes out. And how the experiment in “indie fiction” goes.
Earlier this year I decided to sell Artifact (and Samu Games with it).
As of 1 June 2010, the new owner took control. So, no, I’m not looking for offers.
I expect this will actually help the longevity of Artifact (10 years and counting!), since it will now be run and managed by someone who is still enthusiastic about it. Instead of someone who burned out on the game about … oh … 2004.
But, no, I know what you’re thinking, and this wasn’t a celebratory selling out, like an IPO or a buyout by Google. Don’t I wish! No, it was more of a rummage sale, where you apply prices that are only a fraction of what you remember paying and try not to think about it too hard.
Despite not being an overjoyous good thing, though, it’s not a bad thing, this rummage sale.
It’s more like closing a chapter, mixed with a bit of overdue moving on.
No drama (or at least none is planned), and only this small announcement.
Best of luck to the new owner!
-David
PS My Samu Games email address still works, BTW. And if you have a Samu Games email address, yours still works too. I stipulated that in the sale contract.
As in, I am once again a victim of my own optimism.
I had hoped to be finished with my silly little game project by the end of May. It’s not going to happen. There was a mild hiccup with the art in the middle of April, a need to build some tools, and a big family event … but none of those are to blame. At least, no more than the normal amount of blame life must always take for slowing down projects.
But I’m not put out, upset or anything negative. Just acknowledging a simple fact: I won’t be done by the end of May.
Maybe by the end of June. (Optimism? Of course.)
Every project has good days, where you think you’re almost done (very common near the start), and bad days, where the end feels a century or more away (ugh).
Despite realizing I won’t hit my end-of-May target, today is a good day. I’m very pleased with how the project is progressing and look forward to being able to show it off soon.
Last week, most all work was suspended in the run up to my folks’s 50th wedding anniversary. Which turned into something of a family reunion with 2 folks, 1 folks sibling plus spouse, 7 children plus 4 spouses, 14 grandchildren plus 1 spouse and 1 boyfriend, and 4 great-grandchildren (not all listed are in the picture below, but most are; I’m in there; so is Dug).
So, yeah. Not a lot of work got done.
Despite that, though, my tools are good to go. And the artwork is beginning to arrive. I even (with my wife’s help) came up with a new “company” name to release the game under.
This week, as I started getting usable graphics for my project, I realized that I was going to have to pause actual game development and build some simple tools.
By a pleasant happenstance, one of the tools I need (take a collection of individual images and arrange them in a “texture atlas” or “sprite sheet”) I’ve already written. I built it last year while working on The Journal 5 (to manage my new set of toolbar icons and calendar charms). I had forgotten how much functionality I had put in that tool (cleverly titled “ImgArranger”). I don’t think that I even need to tweak it. Woot!
The other tool (take one or more sprite sheets, identify frames, arrange animation sequences, spew data out in a game-usable form), unfortunately, I’m going to have to build from scratch.
Hopefully it won’t take more than a few days to whip up something useful with Delphi 2007. Since I have no plans to *market* the tools, I can make them as slap-dash as seems safe and entertaining. Then I can get back to working on the game itself. I’ll probably have even more artwork stacked up and waiting for me by then.
About the same time I was contemplating my current indie game project, it turns out my brother, Dug, also decided it was time to try out the whole “video game thing” again. His new game, WordDrain, is now available for Droid, Windows Mobile, and iPhone. (I’d link his Web page, but it’s rather primitive right now. Just look up “WordDrain” in the various “app stores”.)
Dug & I partnered under the banner of Samu Games from 1996 through 2005, and created the original Paintball Net and Artifact games. Dug bowed out of Samu Games at the end of 2005, though, and hadn’t done anything game-related since then. Now he’s back.
Didn’t see that coming. Maybe I should talk to my family more often … ?
On the other hand, I didn’t see my current project coming either, back at the beginning of the year. Maybe I should talk to … uh … myself? … more often … ?
I haven’t had to build this many FSM’s in years. All for one very small, rather silly single-player game (or hot-seat two-player; or, as of today, a no-player game where you can watch the AI play with itself; <ahem>).
The overall game application needs an FSM.
The game itself needs an FSM.
The bunnies need an FSM (and its getting more and more complex).
The flowers need an FSM.
The dog will be getting an FSM very soon now.
There are features still to be implemented that will required FSM’s.
Here an FSM, there an FSM, everywhere an FSM.
Too bad FSM’s are too simple, and yet too case-specific, to really generalize in code. I’d love an elegant, drop-in solution. But most of the attempts I’ve seen make FSM’s even harder to read than long vertical switch-case configurations. “Elegant” always seems to be far, far away.
A couple weeks ago I was interviewed by Mike Taber of The Micropreneur Academy. The focus of the interview was on The Journal, but Mike had done his homework and so we talked about Samu Games, as well.
So now I’m a case study in longevity, or “How To Not Give Up”.
I think I sound a bit … odd (and I seem to be talking fast). But I guess that’s normal. I’ve never interviewed myself.
The interview isn’t publicly available. You have to be a member of Micropreneur Academy…and they aren’t accepting new members right now. So…if you’re already a member there: Enjoy! It’s Case Study #16. If not…I guess…wait? It’ll probably still be there.
If you haven’t done so in a while, take a few minutes this week and go over your various monthly and quarterly fees and expenses. And don’t just eyeball the list, try to remember *why* each item is there and then consider *if* you still need it.
Yesterday I realized I was paying $10/month for an alternate download site that I no longer needed. It made sense at the time I first set it up–but the rationale for it is long gone. Time to pull that plug and pocket the extra money myself.
And I’ll try not to beat myself up over a few hundred dollars lost to just paying the bill each month by habit…
With 25 years of programming under my belt, I’ve become pretty good at predicting where I’ll screw up.
I’m a sucker for what I call “automatic behavior”, what could also be called “functions with side effects”.
It’s a progression I go through on almost every project. I start out with a function A() that, of course, calls another function B(). Because any time I call A(), I always call B(), so, sure, save a line of code (sorta) and do ‘em both at once.
Inevitably, though, I’ll have a case where I need A() without B()–or, perhaps more often, I’ll discover that a bug I’ve been hunting is because A() calls B() every time. The really fun times are when calling A() sets in motion a recursive loop as it calls B(), and B() ends up, through fair means or foul, calling A(), which calls B(), and so on.
Because, oh yeah: Recursion is another bit of kryptonite for me.
