Real life has attacked! For the last week my day job has been requiring a great deal more time than normal (had a couple o’ different projects to work on, troubleshoot someone’s broken fiber optic cable, etc.) My evenings have also been shot too – right now I’m refubishing my kitchen (I have no kitchen cabnets now – they have all been torn down, and will start on new ones tonight) and starting a wedding business with two other ministers (yes, I’m actually a Reverend, I just don’t make much use of it at the moment.)
So, due to ever increasing demands on my time, I’ve finally decided to change how I do things. Currently, Midnight Ryder Technologies is a one-man company – I do everything from artwork to development to marketing. It works – not well, but it works. I get a check every month for the games I currently have out there, but it’s far from enough to quit my day job (which was expected – I don’t put a lot of effort into marketing) My first move is to ‘hire’ someone to do marketing. Now I’m seriously considering seeing if I can’t pick up a level designer and a modeler for Trajectory. Then I could make a little better use of my time, focusing almost exclusively on code and on project management.
Here’s where current projects stand:
Trajectory – needs levels and art resources. Programming is 90% done. I do keep having minor feature creep problems, but not that bad. Mostly features are minor tweaks that server administrators can setup (weapon bounce for increasing dificulty, weapon banning, and other strange little things that typically end up being modded in later by others with most games.) I’m about three weeks behind schedule as it stands now 😛
Gremlin Panic! – still workin’ on the title character. The big problem is that I was using Poser 4 to handle the gremlin – however, she’s very oddly proportioned, and any garment I throw on her tends to bunch up and look REALLY bad. So I’m having to resort to hand editing each frame to add her clothes. Sheesh. Considering the number of frames involved here, that’s A LOT of work!
Jumpman: 2049 – I haven’t much been working on it lately, but, I keep getting mentally drawn back to the project. While it’s the last of the batch that I plan on being completed before I go on my three month hiatis from game development (so I can focus on other topics, and get a chance to refresh my game dev. creativity – I’ve been working pretty much without a break for almost two years now.), I just keep getting excited about the idea of finishing the game and releasing it – however, before I do I think I’ll end up moving Jumpman into Poser 4 (right now all the frames were hand drawn from scratch) and redoing the title character. And of course, I’ve still got to integrate the VBA scripting engine into the game. (Jumpman: 2049 will be the first game to be a licensed Visual Basic for Applications game product. Kind of an odd deal really, but it works out pretty well for various reasons. So no bashing my choice of scripting engines here 😉 And point blank – Jumpman: 2049 is project I’ve ALWAYS been most excited about development and release wise!
Well, off to talk to a couple of the people who applied for the marketing position, and to post help wanted ads for the two positions I mentioned above.