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.

AppNation 5

I’m back from AppNation. Luckily I didn't go in with high hopes, because it ended up not being worth the trip.  The last couple times I went to GDC in San Francisco, the hotels I stayed at had free parking.  I was a little surprised that this, a hotel that cost double a night from what I was used to would charge $45 dollars a day extra for parking.  And the room was tiny.  It was barely big enough to fit a bed that wasn't even built for a full sized human.  The bathroom was even too small to have a sink in it.  Rather the sink was next to the bed.  But ok.  The only reason why I picked that hotel was because it was a block from the Mascone.  And with my bad back, a short walking distance is a good thing.

So I go to the convention on the second floor of the Mascone West building.  There was a 3’ foot diameter, circular table set up for Stigma Games.  I got there early, so I had to wait a couple hours before there were people milling about to check out the booths.  Unfortunately, I was dressed up and wearing my dress shoes, which I swear have soles made of iron, my back still really starts to ache if I stand for more than 20 minutes, though going through physical therapy appointments for the last month has been helping, and on top of that, I still have a really bad cold with my throat pretty swollen.  So yeah, I ended up leaning on the table a few times to help alleviate the pain in my back and feet.  I found out later that we could have chairs, but they cost $55 dollars a day to rent. And at that point, I was feeling tapped out.  I know I sound cheap, but keep in mind, I practically live off of Top Ramin, so I normally have to be very careful about my expenses.

I’m really good at taking negative criticism.  And it was nice to actually have feedback from people now that we were finally starting to show off one of our games to the public.  This one guy, however, was just a moron.  I’d bought a Samsung Galaxy Note a couple days before to show off Raygun Rocketship on and let people try it out.  This guy kind of flicked his finger around, not really playing it, but rather made a minimal effort.  Finally, he said, “It needs to be a skateboard.”  Our 1950s sci fi inspired space combat game needs to be a skateboard instead.  That was his feedback.  It got worse.  With slurred speech, he told me that he worked with the biggest names in the business like Snoop Dog, JayZ, and Justin Bieber and that our game needed to be more like that.  Yes, Raygun Rocketship needed to be more like Justin Bieber.  Sorry, but that was the most idiotic thing I’d heard in a while.  The good news is the comments from people after him would get a lot less stupid after that guy.  How could they not?

In fact, feedback after that was pretty positive.  Everyone seemed to really like the game and the artwork.  Though I’m a little suspect of that.  The reason why is because, other than that one idiot, everyone else would basically say, “Wow, this game is really cool.  It would be even more cool if…” and then go into a spiel about what their company provided.  It reminded me about how I keep getting emails from people trying to get money from me.  Emails like: “Need help with coding or art?  We've been hired by thousands of big name studios and indies all over the world which is why we have to resort to spamming people to try and get work!”  Now instead of getting tons of spam emails, I had people come up to me in person trying to sell me stuff.

Some of the people I met might be good connections.  I talked to a lady whose company did localizations in 30 different languages.  That’s certainly a useful service.  I was just hoping it would have been more of a fan centered event.  I guess when you’re charging $500 bucks a ticket, that’s not going to happen.

I left early and went back to my hotel room and fell asleep on the tiny bed with my legs hanging over the bottom edge from just below my knees.  I’m only 6’ 4”.  That’s a little taller than normal, but come on.  I felt like somewhere during the booking through hotels.com, I forgot to uncheck the “Hobbit sized room” box.  I got woken up at midnight by an Indian couple down the hall yelling at each other.  The woman screamed a few times like she was being stabbed then went right back to yelling.  It was clear I wasn't going to go back to sleep.  I don’t speak Hindi, but that’s how loud they were, that I could clearly pick out what language they were yelling in.

Finally at 2am, I still couldn't fall back asleep so I decided to pack up.  By this time, the couple was out in the hallway yelling at each other with the man banging on walls and yelling.  How do people yell at each other for hours on end?  No matter how mad I was at someone, I’d eventually get tired.  I checked out at 2:30am.  The security guard at the bottom floor told me people had called to complain about the screaming couple, but there wasn't much they could do.  Oh well.  It was the perfect end to an ill fated trip. 

This sounds like a failure.  But one, I like San Francisco in general.  It’s just an amazing city to look at and drive around in, so I was actually in a good mood most of the trip.  But two, this was useful in that it helped me better focus on the type of booth presence we need and what type of conventions we need to be focusing on.  Now, most of this stuff sounds like common sense--show off a game to gamers and have a booth that attracts people to you.  Sure.  But there are a lot of little things.  And I’m just one of those people that needs to screw up something first before I understand it.  I need to see failure first hand before I can understand how to improve.

Raygun Rocketship is officially out of the bag.  So I’ll be talking a lot more about it soon.

Halloween Post

Hey guys,

Right now, I’m taking a break from massively overhauling the website.  In fact, this might be the last blog post I make on Blogspot, and will otherwise be moving all previous blogs over the last two years to the new site.  The new site is going to be created through Drupal.  And though I've used Drupal briefly before, it’s a lot to learn.  I’m pretty comfortable with php and MySQL, css, and object oriented principles in general, so I think I’ll pick it up pretty fast, but it’s still going to be a colossal amount of work.  So what’s the point?

Up until now, I've modeled the public image of Stigma Games after a big time game publishing company.  We’re working on multiple titles at once right now.  And though we’re not funded, the idea is when we’re close to releasing, we’ll announce our games, have tons of stuff to show off, send press releases about it to game journalists, get exposure, and hopefully things take off.  But I've been wondering if that’s not the way to go.

I recently read an article about Chris Roberts and how he recently broke the crowd funding World Record.  He’s at $25 million.  Most of that is through PayPal donations.  Now, Chris Roberts is obviously famous.  Just about every PC gamer I know about my age has played the Wing Commander series, so if he asks for money to make a space sim, people will pay attention.  But putting that aside, he said in the article that Notch was his inspiration.

Now, no one really knew who Markus “Notch” Persson was as he was building Minecraft.  But instead of building up content and unleashing it upon the world, he invited people to come in so he could bounce ideas off them and ask them what they wanted to see in the game.  In that regard, gamers became part of the creation.  And because of that, 3 million of them bought Minecraft while it was still in beta for $20 bucks a pop.

Ok, so what does all this mean for Stigma Games?  We have boatloads of content to show off and talk about.  With the new site, we would be able to start showing it off while it’s still unpolished in an effort to get feedback from other gamers outside Stigma Games.  Anyone would be able to log in and post their feedback in certain sections.  We’ll have alpha builds of our games available to be played directly through our website.  I’ll be building a public forum as well once we have enough users signed up.  I hate seeing dead forums.  But otherwise, the point of the site would be to engage people.

I've mentioned what’s good about letting people in, but there’s danger here.  Just ask Richard Garriott how great an idea it was to let people in early for Tabala Rasa.  Or the lottery winner who hit Kickstarter to pitch his MMORPG idea using his 2nd grade reading and writing skills who then insulted the many people that pointed out how terrible his ideas were by telling them how they were just jealous of his money.

Aside from being obnoxious and insulting fans, the more realistic danger for us is to make promises, have to back track or completely abandon things.  We could also have fans that make suggestions that are either unrealistic, bad, or won’t work with our overall theme.  Such fans could feel like we’re not listening to them when we don’t implement those ideas.

Also, we might be long term gamers, but having great ideas for games and knowing how to make them are about as different as knowing how to drive a car and how to build one.  We make mistakes, have to pivot, and change.  I’m not as excited about the idea of letting people in and watch us first hand as we screw up and have to make radical changes.

All that aside, where we’re currently at:  Raygun Rocketship is now playable on the Ouya.  Once the Drupal site is up and running, I might start holding events at various pizza places around town to get random gamers to check it out and give us instant feedback--hopefully convincing them to go to our website and get involved there.  I mean, I could essentially do this every night.  I've already talked to a Round Table in the area about it, and they like the idea.

Our casual game is playable.  I might have mentioned, I don’t remember, that we parted ways with the programmer on that project and threw out all the code he did and started over.  Well, it’s playable (again) and completely in HTML5 like I wanted it done in the first place.  We’re planning on following a Candy Crush Saga model with it--Facebook and Mobile platforms where you solve puzzles as you move along a board.  If you beat a level on your phone, you can pick up where you left off on the Facebook version.  It’s pretty rough right now and just got basic functionality, so still a long ways to go.

Our fighting game hit a big snag.  We have a theme song for it, which is good.  But art wise is not coming together how we’d like.  We made this mistake before--spent way too little time in pre-production, jumped into production, and things fell apart.  This is a really common mistake that new developers make--have a cool sounding idea, jump into making it, realize they’re making a design or art style mistake, but feeling like they’re locked into it since they’re so far into production.  Rather than feeling locked in, we’re starting over and throwing out most of what we have so far--about 6 months of work.  This fighting game has changed radically from a simple and funny fighting game you could play on your phone to a complex game for the console (starting with Ouya).  Why are we mostly walking away from the massive mobile game market to move to the tiny Ouya market?  Maybe I’ll explain why in another post.

As for Dawnshine, we’re close to finalizing some game play mechanics.  The next step is to make a prototype out of index cards and see how the game plays.  It’s good to know that there’s a local community of table top game designers who get together though a Meetup group to test out their prototypes.  We’ll see.  Ok, back to Drupal.