Late May Post

Hey everyone,

I finally got the Game News section of the website working.  I can now start recruiting Community Managers / Social Media peeps to write news articles through the site and have them show up without me having to do a thing.  Once I got that working, adding an events list in the sidebar wasn't that much harder.  Drupal's been time consuming to learn, but I’m finally getting a handle on it.  There's still some parts of the site that bypass Drupal like the Jobs page, but I'm going to be fixing that soon.

Speaking of events, have I mentioned we have a booth at Sac Anime?  Two actually, side by side.  My goal is to turn our 10’ by 20’ booth space into a family room, though I've come across an unexpected snag.  Seems like furniture rental places won’t let you move furniture once it’s delivered, and they’ll only deliver to a residence--certainly not the Sacramento Convention Center.  I don’t want to outright buy two couches for Sac Anime.  I don’t have any room to put them at my place before / after the event.  What I might do is end up buying a bunch of cheap bean bags then stuffing them in my bedroom closet for next year.  But hopefully I can still pull off Plan A.

Speaking of conventions, Sac Arcade is coming along well.  I can’t make any announcements until I have more things confirmed.  But basically, people that run game related things for Sac Anime, I've recruited to do the same for Sac Arcade.  This isn't confirmed, but it’s likely I’ll also be bringing in a huge group that organizes events for PAX.  PAX, btw, huge game convention that draws 80,000 gamers in Seattle once a year--this year, all their tickets sold out in less than 5 minutes.  Sac Arcade might not be amazing the first year, but I see no reason why we can’t eventually rival PAX.

Duplicating PAX in Sacramento isn't going to be easy though.  It sounds like there’s a lot of money to be made, but that’s not really the case.  When you figure labor costs for security (you can’t rely on volunteers for everything--especially the safety of people that can sue you or expensive equipment that can be so easily stolen or broken), food and shirts for those that do volunteer, venue costs, insurance, and marketing, whatever profit I could have made for the amount of work I’m putting in, I could just have gotten a conventional job and made more money for less time.  That, and all the proceeds will get sunk right into making the next event bigger.  I think we’re going to sell out the Sheraton long before the event starts, and will likely be expanding into the Convention Center by 2016.  I've already gotten quotes from the Convention Center, and it’s really do-able.

What else?  I had a company contact us about making a game for them.  I’m on the fence about this.  Being able to finally meet a payroll would be fantastic. But as soon as we’re done with the game, we’re out of money again.  Then we go back to working on Stigma Games stuff right back where we started from: without any money to pay people and a huge chunk of time taken away.  I know some studios only exist to make games for other developers and own nothing.  That feels like it would defeat the purpose of working in the game industry.

Ok, this was a nice break, but time to get back to work.

Start of a Game Convention

Hey guys,

I have a little bit of time, so I thought I’d make another post.  I’m not generally a fan of birthdays anymore, but the last thing I want to have to do is decide where to go out for dinner with the family.  So my sister and my parents worked out some British Pub to go to called Sterling Bridges.  I’m used to Mexican, Chinese, Italian, and classic American food here.  But British food?  The items on the menu were totally foreign to me.

But I wanted to make the most of it.  I ordered my first Guinness, which wasn't terrible, and, what looked like the worst idea on the menu--an Irish pizza with cabbage, carrots, turkey, and potatoes.  Um, yeah, on a pizza.  I was a little surprised that it really wasn't too bad.  It tasted a little bit more like a spring roll.  Otherwise, a pretty uneventful birthday.

Ok, on to way more interesting stuff.  I mentioned in my last post how disappointed I was in the Indie Arcade thing.  I talked to Gabriel about what we could do to make things much, much better.  I don’t want to get into the details here, but let’s just say I want to do a big event, he wants to keep things small, and so we've parted ways on that.  That means, for this event I’m planning, I’m calling all the shots and he’s not involved.

The Sheraton people are really excited about this convention I’m starting.  We've set a date a little over a year from now, though I’m still keeping things open in case we need to move it up or down a week or so.  Basically, just because it’s currently set on Memorial Day Weekend 2015, that doesn't mean it’s set in stone.  There’s good and bad about this date.  The biggest of the bad is that it’s in competition with Fanamie, which, I still think there are a whole lot of gamers that love games but don’t care about anime.  So despite this being a huge even a few hours drive away, I don’t think this will hurt our pull too much.  And second, it’s a little too close to E3.  Generally speaking, if a big company is showing off their game at E3, they don’t want to spill the beans early at a small convention a couple weeks earlier.  This is the worst of two worlds--the game gets way less press and journalists don’t want to cover old news two weeks later.  This could be a more excellent convention for Indies who can’t afford E3, but still want press on their game around that time frame.

The good news is that it’s fairly far apart from other, related events in town.  Aside from the Jazz Festival in Old Town Sacramento, not much is going on Memorial weekend.  I’m guessing there aren’t a lot of gamers into Dixieland Jazz anyways.  Sacramento gets a lot of traffic from lobbyists and political types, being the capitol of California and where the state legislature meets.  The law makers leaving town to go home for the holiday weekend really empties out downtown in general.  That means a lot less traffic.  Also, there are some streets that offer free parking in an effort to get people to come spend their holiday weekend downtown.  So this might be a great window.

Before I settled on the Sheraton, I went to 4 different hotels to get bids.  In each one, the sales people gave me a tour of the facility.  Each were very familiar with Sac Anime and saw a game convention as something they didn't want to pass up.  It was pretty fun to have sales people treat me like I was important and to try and convince me to go with them.  One lady even promised to beat whatever the Sheraton quoted me by 25%.

There are a few reasons why I will likely settle with the Sheraton, but the biggest is their vast experience with Sac Anime and how aggressively their sales people have worked to bring me in.  We've so far had brain storming meetings where their staff have shared tips on organization and marketing.  The good news here is that the more successful this event is, the more money they make.  So they’ll do what they can to try and make this happen.  And the experience, as I mentioned, plus their networks with potential sponsors and local businesses… you can’t put a price on that.  Being right next to the Convention Center where I’d love to see this expand to one year, that’s a compelling reason as well.

Now, I used to be a concert promoter years ago.  I used to be the booker at a pretty big night club in town as well.  I know something about this, but music and bands are a lot different from game conventions.  The best thing I can do right now is find alliances and partnerships with people in the gamer community that know a lot more about organizing conventions than I do.  I’m going to try and get those alliances in place now by the end of May.  Once that’s in place, we’ll spend the next month laying out the organization: chain of command, staff requirements, physical equipment needed, and other budgeting concerns.  Then starting in July, I’ll be contacting press and potential sponsors.  I've already heard from people interested in sponsoring, so that’s a good sign.  Although we’ll start some level of marketing in July, we won’t likely start physical marketing distribution such as flyers and posters until January (five and a half months before the event).

I have no illusions that I’ll do a lot of dumb things and screw up a lot in organizing this.  Being my first time organizing such an event, of course I’ll have a ton of misconceptions.  Planning early and aggressively with people that have been involved in big conventions--like Sac Anime, Fanime, and the Nor Cal Fighting Championships, will be really helpful so we can knock out potential problems early.  There are many things you can have in a game convention.  I know what I’m trying to make happen, but I don’t want to say anything yet that I’m still working on.  I can probably say for sure that there will be booths for game developers to rent out and show off their games to fans.  There will likely be a fighting game tournament on some level--hopefully a big level.  There will likely be a table top game room.  There’s at least one other big thing I’m trying to get, but it will be tough to get.

Speakers, voice over actors, panel discussions, live performances--these are really common in conventions.  That’s all a possibility, but that might be a difficult thing to organize the first year.  Plus, there may or may not be room for it.  Keep in mind, if I dedicate an entire room to a theater layout, I pretty much have to either fill the whole rest of the convention with speakers and performers in that room for the duration, or it becomes wasted space.

What could happen, is such events could be planned for after parties at local clubs in the area within walking distance.  Get in free with your game convention badge at Bob’s Bar and Grill and listen to Joe the Game Developer talk about the making of Popular Classic Game III.  That could work.

Really tired.  Need sleep.

April Post

Anyone else watch the Blood Moon last night?  I’d never seen one before.  I think I probably watched it for an hour or so.  Basically, the moon kept getting darker until it looked just like a huge beach ball a couple hundred feet, frozen in the middle of the sky with only the pale lights form the strip mall across the street to light it.  I kept thinking that it looked more gray with a slight brownish tone.  Then it started getting lighter again and more and more red in color.  Odd and surreal to look at.

That aside, so Indie Arcade happened.  There were a lot more people there than I anticipated.  Which was good.  There were a lot of things that I wasn't really happy with.  For one, I built a booth from black curtains and pvc pipes.  And despite the fact that I had a whole booth to construct, they weren't letting developers in early to set up.  Everyone got in the same time, meaning I got to haul armfuls of pvc pipe through the crowd.  As we were setting up, another developer set up on our table.  We were like, “Um, hello?  McFly?”  But they just ignored us.  So we got to be further back on the side, with another developer in front of us, blocking us.  We were also ready to put our games Raygun Rocketship and Granny Wars on the arcade machines.  Um, where were they?  I asked Gabe and he told me that he decided that morning not to bring them.  Yeah, that would have been nice to have some warning on.  So one of the programmers brought his computer.  I don’t know why he did, but it gave us something to show off one of the games on--Raygun.  All the tables were gone other than some tiny two foot wide wire patio table that I think someone grabbed from outside.  Since you can’t really play Raygun without a controller, we had someone on the team go out to Gamestop and buy one.  Three hours later, we were finally able to show off the game, but most the crowd was gone by then.

We did get some feedback from people that stopped by and played it.  That was cool.  We get “This totally reminds me of the Roadrunner cartoon,” comment about every time we show off the game, followed by suggestions to put the Roadrunner characters in the game.

Towards the end of the day, I had several people I didn't know, that wanted to talk to me.  There are no pics of me on our website (at least not right now), so I asked this one guy how he knew I was the owner of Stigma Games.  He said he’d done research on us and felt like I just had an aura of leadership.  Quite a few other people wanted to talk to me--one guy bought me a beer in exchange for being able to pick my brain.  Two others offered to buy me dinner for the same reason.  It’s pretty flattering that people think I’m important enough for that kind of attention, though another guy I don’t know who meets me at a bar and wants to take me out to dinner makes me a little uncomfortable.  I was a little close to saying, “Sure, but I have to warn you.  I don’t put out on a first date,” just to see what he’d say, but decided to pass.  I mean, I was flattered he asked so I didn't want to make it potentially more awkward, even if it sort of took me by surprise at first.  If anyone has questions about the game industry at all, I’m happy to help with what little experience I have.

But yeah, an aura of leadership?  Man, that so wasn't me two and a half years ago before Stigma Games started.  It’s a position I had to morph into.  I've always been able to make people laugh and perform in front of a crowd, but I guess I just get more and more confident.  That comes from failing and getting back up.  The more things you survive, the less things scare you.

Let’s see, what else?  The next day, I bought enough food, soda, and beer for about 40 people for the first Stigma Games Company BBQ.  You know, I’d never bought beer in a store before that day?  About 10 people actually showed, but it’s always good to have too much food than too little.  I’m going to be eating hamburgers, hotdogs, and jalapeno poppers for the next couple months though.  About half the group left, so by 5pm, we started playing drinking games.  Renee mentioned that she was really competitive.  We played about 6 games, and she won every one of them.  Like, every single one.  When I pointed it out, she was all, “Did I?” all innocently.  Anyways, it was a fun weekend.

March Post

Hey guys,

There will come a day when we’ll make an announcement about a game we've been working on and the crowd will go wild.  Until that time, there’s no real reason to keep our projects a secret.  As such, we let it slip on Facebook that we’re working on a fighting game called “Granny Wars” with, you guessed it, all grandma characters.

We first started work on the project almost a year ago.  We've gone back and forth about making it 3d, but ultimately opted for the hand drawn, 2d style.  3d certainly would have gone much faster, but I feel hand drawn was the right decision.  We've already faced the pain of that decision.  After about 6 months of full production, it was clear that the direction we were going down wasn't working out.

I know I've mentioned before that it’s a very common thing for young studios to make the mistake of thinking, “We’re too small to try a lot of different methods, so we have to get it right the first time.”  I didn't really understand how flawed that logic was until we were deep in production down the wrong path.  You can’t get it right the first time.  You’re going to screw up and you absolutely cannot be afraid to throw out work, no matter how small a studio you are.   So, we bit the bullet, and threw out a whole lot of work.

I transferred an artist from our casual game project to Granny Wars and she did a re-imagining of the characters, all with a consistent look.  I was very happy with what she came up with.  She asked to be made the Art Director for the project, and I felt that would be a good decision.  As such, she’s organized the artists in a way I would never have been able to.  The team got shook up a little, but, by the end of last year, was finally a solid unit and of high morale.  Since then, we've been in solid production again since the beginning of the year.  I hope to have some really basic game play footage to show off in a month or so.  I hope y’all like watching the sausage being made, because we’re going to try out showing off the game while it’s really, really rough.  You can see the process starting as we’re testing the waters through our social media channels.  Thanks to everyone that’s been sharing our posts and inviting their friends to Like us on FB.  We were at 90+ Likes last week, and we’re almost at 150 now.  A +50% jump in one week isn't too bad.

So I've mentioned Indie Arcade.  Link:  http://www.indiearcade.org/  It’s not going to be at the Sheraton.  The original sponsor pulled out and a replacement wasn't found.  As such, the location will be at a nightclub formerly called “Bows and Arrows” and recently renamed the “Witch Room.”  That’s a pretty confusing name for a club.  Imagine the following:

Dude 1: Hey, what’s the name of the club we’re going out tonight?

Dude 2: Witch Room.

Dude 1: The one we’re going out to.

Anyways, I’ll admit, I’m pretty disappointed that we’re going from the 5,000 person capacity Sheraton to the 100 person, +49 for the back patio, capacity Witch Room--and that the cover is still a whopping $15 bucks at the door.  We had a gathering of game developers at Capsity a month ago and it had about two dozen people with no cover.  Same event with no cover draws 24 people.  What will we draw with a $15 dollar cover?  At this point, I don’t care.  I see it as a dress rehearsal.  Being a game developer means going to conventions and showing off your game to people in person.  We’d better get used to doing this.

I recently got another job.  Now I do Stigma Games(on Sundays and evenings), work as an artist / designer for my father’s architectural company(on Saturdays), and, in addition, started a 9-5 office job.  That’s basically three jobs, but it means I can start pumping some much needed funds into Stigma.  That includes having the funds to do marketing, rent booths at conventions, and put together other type events.

What else am I up to?  I’m still teaching myself Drupal.  It’s actually really easy if you understand basic object oriented concepts and know css and php.  What makes it hard to learn is that there are thousands of different modules and, as a beginner, you have no idea which modules do what and which ones you need.  I’ve found that Views is a must have.  Basically the deal is you create object types to organize your data, fill those data types with content, then use Views to display that content.  You can write templates in php to override parts of modules if you need to.  Most modules will let you change their look through your css page as well.  So again, not really that hard.  It’s just time consuming to go through learning it all.

When will I have the site up?  I dunno.  A couple weeks maybe.  I’m really happy with how it’s coming along.  It likely won’t look terribly different, though it will be set up in a way that there will be a ton more content to sort through as I’ll be adding a news section.  I know these blogs I write are pretty long, and not always interesting to read through for most people.  But the news pieces will be short and better focused on what Stigma followers will care about--our games.

I have to get ready for work in 7 hours, so should say I’m going to get some sleep, but will likely do more Drupal tutorials instead.

February Post

Hey guys,

Tons to talk about.  We are showing off Raygun Rocketship this Wednesday at Capsity for “Feedback Night.”  Other than my ill-fated AppNation trip, this will be the first time anyone outside of Stigma Games (and my relatives) have seen it.

The last “Feedback Night” at the offices of Capsity drew about 25 people(though Stigma Games didn't show off anything that night), so that’s a fair amount of people that will see it and give us an idea of what they think.

Speaking of that, I’ll officially announce beta testing positions soon.  I know a lot of people ask us about that.  Ryan, the programmer for Raygun Rocketship has told me he needs help tracking down bugs.

The other thing to talk about coming up is the Indie Arcade.  It’s weird for me to talk about because it’s hard getting a sense on how it will all pan out.  It’s all going down on April 12th.  Yes, I know I should be telling everyone how amazing it’s going to be.  How no one should miss it.  I hope it turns out awesome, but my expectations are pretty low.  It’s the first event of its kind, so who knows how that will go.  I’m hoping at least 100 people show--besides other game devs in the area that I already know.

So a few weeks ago marks the first time in Stigma Games’ history that I ever fired people from the team.  The people in question are really nice people, and I really, really hated doing it, though it was the right decision.  The problem was they need a lot of guidance.  Cool.  But we’re just not in a position to be able to sit down and teach people how to do stuff unless they’re self motivated.  Plus, as we near getting close to releasing some games, I have to realistically think about who I would hire and who is a benefit.

I think I've mentioned before that attrition can be a good thing.  You lose the less dedicated people, up your recruiting standards, and hopefully continue to increase the talent level of the team.  It doesn't always work out that nicely.  Sometimes talented people get impatient.  Sometimes you just can’t fill the positions you need with the right people.  Sometimes people just don’t work out, but you don’t have anywhere else to put them.  Sometimes, you don’t realize someone can’t do a task until months have passed by and they either didn't tell you because they thought they could handle it and couldn't, or they realized they didn't want to do it and didn't want to admit it.  And sometimes they don’t do anything because they think they had to wait for something else, and obviously don’t care enough to push the issue on their own.  These are the people that make me say, “I really need to get better at recruiting.”  Our recruiting methods genuinely are getting a lot tougher now, which is good.  Now we just need to get more people applying.

When I started Stigma Games, I still had this romantic idea that I would take a chance on the people that other companies turned down.  Give me your tempest tossed, and I would teach them to long for the sea.  Butchered mixed metaphors aside, this isn't reality.  People are often talented because they want to be.  People are often untalented because they don’t really care.  Everyone wants to work at a game studio, but not everyone is driven to.  Telling the difference between the two, as a recruiter, is pretty hard--especially in Sacramento where there isn't exactly a pool of experienced, available people.  Otherwise, I’d just say, “Must have 2+ years industry experience” like every other studio on the planet does.  I mean, there’s a reason why studios are willing to spend astronomical amounts of money on rent in LA and the bay area--that’s where the talent is.  There’s a reason why there are so few studios in this town.

You've probably heard talk about how important company culture is.  Working without an office, this isn't always easy to shape, but I do what I can at our meetings, through Skype, and on the forums.  When it’s a group of guys and one makes a sexist joke, I frown my disapproval and it doesn't happen again.  When artists fight, and they do, I try and listen to both sides and validate how they feel even if the issue isn't resolvable.  When people make poor suggestions, I try and facilitate a healthy, supportive environment where we can offer ideas without feeling embarrassed or intimidated.  That doesn't mean I’m able to accomplish this 100% of the time.  And sometimes, I’m the unintended cause of the drama--like when I mention one of our games is a better candidate for Kickstarter due to its genre, and those working on the other games think I’m saying the game they’re working on isn't as good or as likely to ever go anywhere and so their morale plummets--something they told me almost a year after I said it and two of them had quit.

A company should be a mix of the experienced and non.  Our artists are talented, but lack professional experience which can make issues of insecurity pop out.  This is a problem when artists are still trying to prove themselves to each other and things can sometimes, even slightly, turn to bringing each other down.  This happened a lot in the early days, but I've only recently noticed this happen again, and I wonder if it has to do with the artists being afraid they might be next on the firing list.  I hope not.  I made it really clear that wasn't the case and that no one else would be getting fired.

Otherwise, things are better now that I finally have some artists that can take lead positions.  I’m really glad I haven’t had to deal with any, “How come she’s in charge?” issues.  But every now and then a passive aggressive remark like, “I thought we were doing it this way, but whatever,” slips by and I’m not able to make attitude adjustments.  I can’t wait until we have a studio and a revenue stream to hire everyone.  Then we can hangout outside of work, do some movie night bonding, etc.  That would solve so many of our problems right there.

I've said in the past I was glad we didn't have funding because we’d blow through a lot of money, still making mistakes.  I feel as though we’re finally at the point where we’re made all the reasonable mistakes.  Now it’s time for us to make the transition to being a fully funded studio.  We’re just lacking the revenue.

4th Studio for 5th Planet

I just recently started listening to the internet radio Pandora.  I’m a big fan of Tool, Deftones, and Korn but not when listening to those same bands over and over on the “Industrial” station.  Come on, guys.  Is there a “This song is nice and all, but doesn't fit the genre you think it does” and I just don’t see it?

So last night I went to an event at 5th Planet to see their new studio.  There were about a hundred people there with tons of food and a keg(which I later found out was full of root beer--and it was good).  The CEO came by, saw me checking out the scene and asked me how Stigma Games was doing.  We talked production methods for a while.  I still can’t believe what a nice guy he is.

I’d say about a third of the people there were people I knew, but I was so engrossed in checking out the studio, I didn't even want to talk to people yet.  That place is massive.  There was an 8-10 foot tall dragon in the reception area.  Past that, you walk into the studio and it’s maybe 10k square feet with dozens of work stations.  No cubicles.  Everyone can see everyone else.  The kitchen was about the size of a Starbucks.  The break room was about the size of a tennis court.  No, bigger.  There was another large empty area where I was told later that they race go-carts in.  There were also half a dozen “chill out” rooms with couches and tvs in them.  The game room was straight out of a mega corporation meeting room only with tons of popular board games, consoles, a giant projector screen, and nerf darts and guns all over the place.  Even the office buildings were loaded with gamer related stuff.  In one business office I saw a replica of Frost Mourne, a sword from one of the Final Fantasy games, and the Portal gun.  I just thought, “This looks like Disney Land.”  I looked around again and thought, “If anyone is wondering what I’m trying to do with Stigma Games, this here, is it.”

After that, I did a fair amount of socializing.  There were people from KlickNation there.  One of their artists that got laid off used to be in a writer’s group with me and I talked to her about seeing if she’d like to join my current group.  I met another woman from KlickNation (which EA has since renamed “Capitol Games”) and she saw the “Stigma Games” title on my shirt and told me how cute it was to see young, unheard of studios in the area trying to make it.  Nice, huh?  All that really does is push me to want to build up Stigma Games more.  And once we’re a big studio and I meet someone trying to get their game studio off the ground, instead of being condescending to them, I’ll encourage them.  I believe the best revenge is to do on to others what should have been done to you.

I made another post recently, so this might be strange so close to that one.  But I wanted to talk about the various stages Stigma and I have gone through.  I remember when I first started this, anytime someone would answer a Craigslist add, I’d meet with them and tell them how awesome Dawnshine was going to be and why they should want to join.  No need to send me a resume.  If you were a gamer and knew anything about code or art, I’d talk to you.  Eventually, it turned into, “Well, do you have a portfolio?” first.  And then I started giving tests.  And now it’s gotten to the point where people need to demonstrate to me that they have a proven history of doing the role they’re applying for and the drive to push it further.  I've now seen the life cycle of the “I've never tried to make a game before, but I’m a big time gamer and I just want to be part of this” type applicant who ends up taking up space and slowing the morale of the team.  I have to stop seeing them as people that just want a chance that they haven’t otherwise worked for and see them instead as anchors that make it more difficult to reach our goals.  From now on, I’m only recruiting people that have the same drive I do.  We’re starting to attract applicants like that now.

It’s time to raise the bar.

Starting 2014

Hey everyone.  A lot has been going on.  We've had some crew shake ups over the Holidays.  It happened last year as well.  People on the team take some time off and reflect if they really want to be part of what we’re doing or not.  It’s a hard thing being in a start up.  No money coming in and still a lot more work to do... it’s certainly not for everyone.

I feel as though the team has gotten just a little too big to manage, so I've decided to downsize the team just a little.  That means, I won’t be seeking replacements for those we lost.  There are still a couple positions we still need to fill and I’ll continue to look for the right candidates for those.  Otherwise, I think we're going to shrink down to a 15-20 person team size, at least for now.

So let’s get to some progress:

Not a lot of Raygun Rocketship news.  I’m hoping we can finalize concepts for the remaining, unfinished levels in the game.  We had to switch lead artists on the team, which I’m hoping doesn't slow us down too much.  I've been working more on story lines.  The marketing team has been talking about putting together a Kickstarter campaign for it.  I've been on the fence with that for a while.  Other KS campaigns for games in the same SHMUP genre are pretty dismal (nearly all successfully funded are less than $10 grand), certainly not enough money to make it worth it for paying the team of 6-7 people who've put nearly a year into it so far, but possibly enough to fund a decent marketing campaign.  We’ll see.  I know there are a few members on the team that are in financial trouble, but are so committed to this that they’re pushing forward.  It really sucks that there’s not much I can do about that right now.  A big KS funding round would be amazingly helpful.

Very little news on our casual game other than we have a basic story arc done.  Now we just need to storyboard it out in combination with the levels.  We only have a programmer and a story designer working on it right now, both of which are hard pressed for free time to devote to it.  But I’m thinking we’ll probably announce it soon.

I think I mentioned our parody fighting game hit a snag a couple months ago and we decided to start over.  We didn't get a whole lot done over the break on that in terms of asset competition, but we’re on a good path now.  I think I mentioned I screwed up and added too many artists to the project and turned it into a cluster mess.  I've re-assigned artists and one artist left the team entirely.  Now we’re settled with everyone having a specific job they need to take care of.  One of our artists has stepped up to be the Art Director on the project and I’m really happy with how she’s doing so far.  This game will be entirely hand drawn.  We've thought about going 3d since the very beginning.  Recently, I even considered modeling, rigging, and animating 3d characters then rendering them to 2d sprites, so it would technically still be a 2d game.  That would make things faster.  But a hand drawn game should look better and, hopefully, generate the buzz we really need.  I don’t want to quickly put out a game no one will care about, so it might be the better decision to take the long way.

Lastly, the Dawnshine table top project has been through a lot.  I was taking a backseat role, letting the rest of the team do the designs while I just worked on lore, theme, and flavoring.  I wasn't really happy with how the design was going, so when the design team fell apart and people left the team over the Christmas break, I knew it was time for me to step in, throw out everything that had been done so far, and start over.

I've decided to take the game in a deck building direction as the mechanic for an empire building game--thus merging two genres.  Though I have the finished idea in my head, it will be important to play test and keep researching other similar games to see if there’s more elegant ways of doing things or if my brilliant ideas have been done to death in other games.

Aside from that, there’s a few cool things on the horizon that I hope to be able to post more about soon.