Little Puzzle Blocks

RAID raided by demons

2008-03-13T17:48:00.000-07:00

So I had the new server set up, and all seemed happy in Skill City.. until weird things started to happen.

I have never in my life, ever, had a drive go bad in a RAID array. I know... wtf?! I must be born under good stars.

However since starting work at my new day job I have never seen so many drives go bad at random before. Granted we have a lot of them here, so the odds are good that at some point one will fail.

But seriously I think my office is haunted by some kind of evil magnetic demon presence that just annihilates hard drives during it's poltergeist rages.

I logged on to Skill City and noticed that it was being cranky. Games wouldn't start, things seemed slow, but clicking on a game numerous times would eventually get it running.

"Are you having these issues?" I asked to Drew, who is currently fitting the software for the company who bought it. Oh didn't I mention that? We sold the code to a game company for a piece of cash. More on that later.

"No everything is fine here" Drew responds.

Indeed it was fine, for I discover today that my RAID 0 has a bad drive, it was going nutty, and today it finally ate itself. For those not technically inclined, a RAID 0 is the one where the R in RAID is pretend, because nothing about a RAID 0 is actually redundant. It just spews your data all over two drives or 100 drives and if one goes out, they all go out. Somebody was fond of Christmas Tree Light strings and followed the same basic principle I guess.

That means I have to re-initialize the array, then run disk checks to find out which hardware is bad (the controller, or the hard drive) and then probably toss both in the trash and build a new server with new drives and this time make it RAID 1 like I should have to begin with.

As if my new job wasn't already sucking out my every waking moment, it is nearly triathlon season and so I am starting to train more at the gym. I walk out the door to go to work at 8am. I usually walk from work at 9 or 10. I sleep at 10:30 so... I have about 30 minutes a day to devote to extra stuff like getting Skill City working.

Weekends you say? Piffle! Weekends are for mountain biking and binge eating girl scout cookies in front of Anime while I ponder a new game mechanic with my yellow legal pad and this little clicky pencil. This has done a lot to reinforce the fact that I can't draw, at all.

Remember me?

2008-02-27T16:42:00.000-08:00

Hi there.

Remember me? If not let me introduce myself.

I'm the guy who gave up on this place... went and did something else, and then discovered to his horror that you can't actually turn your back on a dream.

They tend to keep begging you for your attention.

I know. "How cheesy. This guy just dreams about running a puzzle game community? Lame."

Well you dream about having sex with dolphins. So shut up.

I put the game servers back up, this time on a much better connection to the internet and with much better hardware than they ever had.

Step 3: Profit

I'll post more. I promise.

He's dead Jim.

2007-12-18T15:17:00.000-08:00

Here lies the Skill City blog. It's creator attempted to start a game company and nearly grasped it, but things were set against him and his dream now lies mashed to bits on the jagged rocks.

Good thing about dreams though... you only need to fall asleep to get a new one.

Sorry I just can't do this anymore.

I have tried to make time for it but I'm so over the video game thing I think I'm just gonna focus on something else for a while and let this blog die. My mind wanders to new and more attractive shores.

I'm sure I'll be back eventually. Until then, so long, and thanks for all the fish. Keep those indie games coming, you gotta start somewhere.

She'll blow apart!

2007-12-07T17:05:00.000-08:00

Ok I really would like to post more than once a week here but I honestly don't think I will be able to.

My new day job is with a company that is in a sorry state, and as the new golden child of the IT department (that means I have the Scotty Syndrome) I find it hard to write in my blog after working 12 hours a day on Linux administration and other arcane hardware stuff.

Wait wait... you don't know what Scotty Syndrome is? Ever watched Star Trek? The old ones with the campy pained ladies and the stupid styrofoam bad guys... yeah that one. Scotty would never tell the captain or crew what was really going on, instead he would just say "It will take more time than we have." or "I don't have the power." but in the end he would do it anyway. Eventually he told LaForge "How do you expect people to think you are a miracle worker if you tell them how long it will really take?"

I haven't had to lie about timelines to anybody yet, at this job or at any other game development task in the past. I just get things done that fast... and with the glut of slow untalented morons on the market it is easy to appear to be amazing.

Perhaps my musing on that subject has indeed turned in to some more sound advice for game developers, and many other people in many industries too.

You see, people are in a rush. The game biz is very much similar to movies and film of all kinds. Once you get that big idea, you have to sprint to the market because the odds are good that somebody else has the same idea and they are working on the same product.

Didn't you ever wonder why the movies Comet, Meteor, and Armageddon all came out the same month? Most of it is called "me too!" by those of us who took marketing 101 back in college and learned that term. They try to ride off the hype and buzz created by one, but they are also often similar ideas that blooming in different minds at the same time.

Maybe the universe shoots ideas out in a linear fashion and while your head may get in the way and thus receive this celestial knowledge, like a gamma ray the idea beam continues onward and strikes some other guy's head too. This explains why people with good ideas often go insane, or are awkward at parties.

The game business is young, it has that youthful energy and hyperactive exuberance that screams to get everything done now in a rage worthy of Veruca Salt. I'm often amazed at how long it can take somebody to cement a deal when all around people are trading signatures on contracts using a chair as their table. This really actually happened to me TWICE at Casual Connect.

I eavesdropped too, hey it was my booth space they were encroaching on I had a right. The game design was awful. It made the guy a few grand. Kudos to him!

Why?

Probably because he had a reputation already as being a guy who says "It will be done in 3 months" and then delivers in 2. I bet he also delivers stuff that is solid and works.

This is a statement on how to succeed. The market loves a superstar, but most often is easy to impress just by being slightly better than mediocre because of the huge amount of talentless hacks that everybody considers "normal". Check out coding horror someday and read their article on how many people fail a fizz-buzz test that call themselves programmers. You have met people like this. You might even be a person like that...

So regardless of the fact that it takes me 30 seconds to setup the CEOs Treo 650 and it took their old admin 3 days, I am still very busy pulling my new company out of it's suicidal nose dive perpetrated by about 5 years of terrible administrators.

I'll write more on game design as I can, and share some of the ones burning a hole in my notebook.

By the way, I would like to get you involved more in this blog. Yeah, you, the 18 to 35 year old male with a PC or Mac computer and more than just a passing interest in video games.

Where do you do your best design work? What environment do you find you get the most ideas in?

For me it's airports and planes. Seriously. I look back at my little red notebook with my ideas and designs poorly scrawled all over the pages and I can recall the smell of the recycled air as I wrote those words on a flight to somewhere.

Why is that?

For me I think its because that space is dead, there is no distraction or sound or motion, I can just sit there in a void of activity and let my mind wander around and create in itself a game that would be fun to play. Then the creation of the idea itself becomes a game a I try to balance rules, systems, interaction, and then encase it all in a story so that you aren't just scalded in the eyes with raw math when you load my game.

There-in lies a new game: Eye Scalder! Throw boiling hot Math at your players in a game so horrific it feels more like a time share seminar than entertainment!

Now you answer. Where is your idea place? Why?

What should I do?

2007-11-27T16:06:00.000-08:00

Well... as I work a day as a linux admin I keep having all sorts of fun ideas for something that would make a great game.

Then there is of course all the games that I designed that will never see the light of day.

I was wondering, what should I do with this blog?

1. Leave it here to get bit-rot, the knowledge it contains is worth something but without constant updates it is worthless.

2. Post your game designs so that all 5 to 10 of us can read them and either steal them for our own or by our collective might finesse them in to something truly amazing that nobody will ever program unless they steal the idea off this public forum.

3. Go back to flexing my imagination at http://www.sect.net/ instead. "Nathan, your insight and clever wit were fun for a while but you just don't have the stuff to be in the game biz."

4. Stop talking to myself, nobody reads this anyway.

Thoughts on keeping things the same.

2007-11-17T15:28:00.000-08:00

I left my position at Skill City feeling a bit downtrodden that I was departing what was basically, at it's root, my dream job.

I had left a position of comfort and power (and paycheck) to start Skill City, or at least to chase some unformed dream that during my resignation I hadn't yet named.

It is nice to know that the responsibilities I held at Skill City were not totally wasted. I earned quite an education working there.

I walked away from it with the sense that I needed to go find work right away to pay my bills, and to pay the bills of the now dead Skill City Inc. because it was about 900 bucks overdrawn. I said was, because I paid that now.

I also walked away from that endeavor having gained a sense of command of my own destiny. I wasn't just being buffeted by the winds of chance any more, my own personal success or failure was totally up to me. Even the people I rely on because I lack skills they have, I am still responsible for hiring them or keeping them on.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here, and hopefully I can shore up the limb with some boards... maybe some bits of string and tin foil.

I think failing at a startup business taught me more than being successful. I got to learn all about the negative side of the business world. Some people say "Well my boss is jerk, I know all about the negative side" but they are stupid because they aren't running a company, they don't know the real despair you can feel.

I entered a new job, but I still had that empowerment that I found by working at my own business and falling flat on my face. At times I think I felt a little like a drug addict who has hit Rock Bottom and realizes they have nowhere else to go but up, or dead. I met death once, and he was wearing expensive shoes.

I climbed up and got myself that new job but I see it through a different lens, and I know that it is just a waystation on my climb upward to try chasing a dream again. I will chase it with much greater care this time, and attention to all the spiky bits that tear at skin along the way.

To that end I saw my new job in a state that was similar to me, I sensed that decay that was setting in here like it was at Skill City, only this was a slower doom here at my new job. I went to the CEO and shared with him my thoughts and perspective and was amazed at the response I got. He agreed, 100%, and now I'm the manager of the IT department here.

I honestly think that without the wisdom gained from Skill City imploding, I wouldn't have had that meeting, and I certainly wouldn't be the department manager after only having worked here for 3 weeks. Some perspective for you, my co-admins have been here for years, one of them for over 5 years.

So I have carved out a little niche of happy again, and when I am not gloomy I tend to think of ways to entertain people with games. Ideas for systems of rules and colored things start to fill up my brain. I even had another dream last night about a puzzle game.

Ok because it was a dream I was actually IN the puzzle game... and that was kinda freaky and unpleasant but I still woke up feeling quite good about it.

I wonder if I should just start posting game design docs here and do something like give away all my game designs to the public. Just to see if anybody makes them.

/me goes to find the GPL rules on releasing IP to the public...

Need a job?

2007-11-13T11:31:00.000-08:00

My friends over at Gameshastra appear to be hiring. I thought I would do my part and spread the word out anybody interested. It's a really good chance to get in to the game biz with a company that won't treat you like dirt.

You would end up working with some of the coolest and smartest game developers I have had the pleasure of knowing.

Company: Gameshastra
Job Title: (1) Technical Lead - Console Games and (2) Technical Lead - PC and Casual Games
Description: To apply: Please email your cover letter, resume and comp requirements to devjobs@gameshastra.com

=======================
Job listing (1)
Department: Game Development
Position: Technical Lead – Console Development
=======================

Gameshastra is currently looking for one additional Technical Lead with a focus on Console Development for our US and India game development operations. In addition to being a brilliant senior coder on AAA titles, the ideal candidate will have several years experience as a Senior Developer for “current-gen and next-gen console hardware” in a midsized or major development studio, ideally with a recent specialization in Xbox 360 and/or Nintendo Wii development.

Showing expertise in a broad range of development areas – such as understanding console specific hardware issues, memory optimization, managing PC-to-console downsizing and porting issues, expertly wringing the most out of console rendering and graphics pipelines, physics expertise, AI knowledge and most importantly – having the ability to communicate efficiently with your team members – all will be key to your success in this position.

Job Responsibilities:
• Manage all key technical decisions in one or more 10-20 person development teams, each working on different aspects of various titles for different publishers.
• Have the ability to communicate clear standards and provide direct coaching and mentoring to individual developers as well as to large engineering teams.
• Solve the peskiest problems when they show up in the game development pipeline – no matter what they may be.

Qualifications:
• Expert C/C++ developer and problem solver (7 or more years of professional C++ experience preferred)
• Uncanny ability to find problem in other people’s code – and the grace to communicate these discoveries efficiently, and to turn every one of these instances into a learning opportunity.
• Ability to lead, manage and direct technical development teams full of strong minded and creative development personalities.
• Very deep console hardware system programming experience.
• Game physics expertise
• Rendering and 3D API mastery (D3D and OGL) across all kinds of hardware.
• Infinite patience with everyone in the team.

=======================
Job listing (2)
Department: Game Development
Position: Senior Developer or Technical Lead – PC, Mac, Casual and Mid-Core games
=======================

Job Responsibilities:
• Manage all key technical decisions for each "mid-core" or episodic title that we bring to market – including engine decisions, development and OO architecture approaches, and the ability to these decisions through to the final delivery.
• Have the ability to communicate clear standards and provide direct coaching and mentoring to individual developers as well as to large engineering teams.
• Solve the peskiest problems when they show up in the game development pipeline – no matter what they may be.

Qualifications:
• Expert C/C++ developer and problem solver with 5 years of C/C++ experience.
• Extensive experience with at least one major game engine (UE, GameBryo, Tringy etc.)
• Exposure to Casual C++ game development frameworks (PopCap, HGE, PlayGround etc.)
• Some exposure to online casual games (AS2, AS3, Lingo etc.) is also a plus
• Knowledge of various server side technologies (.NET/PHP/Ruby) can be helpful
• Game physics, AI and Networking/Sockets experince strongly desired
• A clear understanding of graphics rendering pipelines and 3D APIs (D3D and OGL)
• Ability to lead, manage and direct technical development teams full of strong minded and creative development personalities.
• Infinite patience and a good attitude.

If you are interested then you can email me for the contact info. This way I can screen out the evil time wasting headhunters who will see this listing and then call people claiming to be a rep of the company just so they can extort a finders fee once you get hired.

I fucking hate recruiters. I have never in my life gotten a job through one, or hired any of the dross they bring me when I am hiring. I don't know why they even exist any more, with the prevalence of do it yourself job hunting tools on the internet nobody needs these people to get in the middle and charge fees for no real value added.

Recruiters are the spammers of HR. Shun them.

Anyway these jobs for Gameshastra are located in El Segundo (thats near Los Angeles for those out of town) and requires a lot of travel to their HQ in India (which is freakin awesome).

We are back!!! ok not really.

2007-11-08T12:44:00.000-08:00

Well sorta.

Drew has taken the machine that was at one time my workstation and set up the Skill City game servers on it, and the database, and the dispatching server, and the chatting and world and banking servers...

You'll have to be a little bit forgiving if the machine seems slow. It is anything but idle now that it's thread cup runneth over.

Oh did I mention its running the games on a cable modem? Yeah ultra slow. You got some lag issues before when we were on a t3, just you wait.

But the good thing is that Skill City actually runs again. You can like, login and play Explodinator again, which is honestly something I have been thinking about a lot lately and not just because I want to explodinate a lot of the idiots I work with at my new job.

I thought about all the "I'll share more reasons why Skill City died" promises I made to you, all 15 of my readers, and then I decided to just let that lion sleep. It is over.

However I will say this: Do you have marketable skills? DON'T GO IN TO VIDEO GAMES

Drew put it to me one day when he said "I'm not doing this for the fun of it, I'm doing this for the money." I was mostly in it for the fun of it, honestly I was having a blast, but I also could move at my own pace.

I look at job postings that places like Big Fish post and decide that being a professional producer is actually a shit load of work (omfg I cussed). The thing is, you would expect that to come with a big salary to make up for it right?

Not so. The video game industry is very very lop sided. Nobody makes phat salary, the hours are long, and often your product is forgotten as soon as something else shiny wanders across the vapid gaze of your target consumer.

I went back to being a Linux administrator and once again realize that not only am I good at this job which makes it tolerable and often simply easy for me, but it pays really really ridiculously well. Like six figures well if you are keeping track at home.

Nobody in the game industry makes a salary like that unless you are the CEO of something doing crazy well. A small games studio, even a medium one, won't be paying anybody salaries that big.

It's ok though, you aren't in it for the money. Just pay your rent with what you make, walk or bike to work, and gaze through my window at night wishing you too were drinking an obscenely tall glass of very expensive bourbon. All your friends will be jealous because you "make video games" and thats good enough for those 12 hour days you work.

Then you will turn 30 and realize the best years of your life are gone, you have no money, and you are ultimately replaceable by any high school kid willing to work 80 hours a week for peanuts just because he wants to "make games."

Yeah I know, I'm so harsh.

I'm also the only person who is telling you the truth.

Dutch interview.

2007-10-30T09:20:00.000-07:00

Click here to see the full text of an interview that Bashers did with me.

They asked some good questions, I think I have given them the best answers I could.

I find it a little bit ironic that after I shut down Skill City and basically throw in the towel that now I am getting more interest in our technology and product than before.

Is the lesson to be learned that people like bad news more than good? It looks like the best marketing Skill City ever got was from its own demise.

Speaking of, I sort of went off on the coders in the last two entries. I tried to balance that ire by at least stressing it wasn't anything they did wrong, it was just bad circumstance and personality issues.

Anyway you probably want to know what the rest of the circumstances leading to our eventual shut down were, and so I will share those.

But right now I have a meeting to go to so I'll have to share that tomorrow, or maybe this afternoon.

Needless to say it will probably have a very clever metaphor like "Man who wears too many hats eventually gets a broken neck."

I'm fond of that one.

The Continuing Adventures of Baron Munchausen

2007-10-17T14:41:00.000-07:00

Maybe I should compare myself to Baron Harkonnen instead?

I think after reading what I said yesterday most of you probably think I should. I got a little carried away there.

It's not my intention to paint a completely negative picture of those I chose to start Skill City with. Not completely anyway. You see while my coders and business partners had talent, they simply were the wrong people to do business with.

You will find countless better blogs than mine which will tell you the right sort of person to form a startup venture with. I personally enjoy Marc Andreesens blog cleverly linked via hyper thermal linkoid technology: click here.

See, the people I chose to start the business with were complete opposites of the "right kind of person" for this task. It doesn't mean they are jerks or bad workers. Quite the opposite, Drew and Chris are the rare shining exception among coders: They actually know what they are doing, they do it well, and they can pass the fizz buzz test.

What they don't have is drive. Marc puts it best on his blog, go read that. They don't share the vision I have for Skill City, and while I know my artist and music guys did, we can't make much without coders.

As soon as things got rough in the office and morale began to sink, they just jumped ship. They don't care about the project in the same way as somebody with a real deep seeded drive to see the project through regardless of hardships. Some of it isn't their fault even. Owning a house puts a large financial burden on you, so starting a company that might require you to go unpaid for a year or even two is probably not a good idea. Doing it anyway and then screwing the company by leaving it is also a poor choice, and one that I regret I have to bring up because I feel strongly thats one of the main reasons why Skill City might not recover from it's current state of "down and out."

It certainly could, if it had the right people behind it. Those who were willing to give more, move it in to a garage business and take day jobs to keep the core business operating and looking good for the public.

The people I chose to work with refuse to do that, further backing up the argument that I chose the wrong kind of people to work with.

This was not their mistake.

It was mine.

See how I put that on separate lines? I think it adds emphasis to two statements that are certainly true. I made a huge mistake in starting a business with them. This is not a black mark on their records, it is a black mark on mine.

Now you are thinking, but aren't you blaming your programmers for your (you and your partners') business's failure?

Nope.

Remember the too many chefs? They are all to blame for the failure of their soup.

Management is there to take credit when his team does well, and lay blame on somebody else when they fail. Good management gives credit to his team, and accepts the failure as his own when that team fails. I think somebody said that more eloquently once, but it's true.

What else happened at Skill City though? Clearly there were personality conflicts between the founders that we just couldn't hold in any longer. What was the trigger? Why didn't it make any money despite that?

I know you are all wondering these things, and I did make that list of questions to keep me on track. I'll answer it tomorrow though, I have many an email to answer today and a throbbing headache that demands my attentions.

The center cannot hold

2007-10-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

1. How long did you spend developing Skill City?
2. How long has the service been running publicly?
3. What marketing did you use?
4. Have you thought about advertisers, selling the eyes you have to somebody?
5. Didn't you have a business plan? You have to have had a plan to get money in.
6. Are you going to pull your games out and sell them as stand-alone games?
7. What exactly happened? What events lead up to the decision to shut down?

This is what I am being asked on the Indie Forums. I write it down now so I have some kind of guide to adhere to, otherwise I'll just spew information all over this page and it might get confusing to read for somebody without actual experience of the events I reveal.

It's funny, because most of these questions are answered already, many times in fact, on this very blog. I am a gracious host, and have no problem repeating myself in these long days of unemployment. It gives me something to do other than send my resume out to everybody I can think of.

To do a post-mortem of a business that has officially failed at it's original business plan is hard, because one must say why it failed. That means that laying blame is inescapable, and therefore I feel like I should lay that out near the beginning. Nobody likes to be told they are the ones responsible for something bad, people only want praise. I was always more fond of saying: Spare the rod, spoil the child. Nobody likes a prima donna.

The first major problem with Skill City: It had no captain. Have you ever heard the old saying that too many chefs will spoil the soup? Did you wonder that means? These little idioms we use every day aren't just parables, they are tiny ways to convey absolute truths in a general sense using words every common person can grasp.

Skill City was the product of two things: My desire to create an online game community for puzzle games to chat and play, and my experience working for a game shop called K2 Network. I worked there for about 2 months, and it was a bitter experience indeed. I watched a company blunder from one huge mistake to another and just spend amazing amounts of money to fix those mistakes only to make another. Yet to them, it didn't seem to matter. They had money coming out their arses. How were they making it? Hideous games like Mu and Knight Online. Games that were "free to play" MMO treadmills in ever sense of the word. They looked terrible, they had all the exciting game play and user interface of a torture device. Yet they made money, lots of it. They still do. I don't know if its just amazing amounts of hand waving and crafty salesmanship to investors, or if people really are forking out tons of money to play bottom of the barrel cat-barf looking MMO games.

I watched this and thought about my dream to start a game company and then decided
if they could do it, so could I. I did some more research in the evenings and found indie game sites and read all the forums and news. I downloaded a bunch of games and tried them out. Most of the time I was still shocked at the low production quality, or the lack of polish they got. Then I was always attracted to the social aspects of gaming. I don't care if I win or lose, I care that I got to spend time with another person. Playing a lot of these games is the pinnacle of total isolation. Ever chat with another playing while playing Cake Mania? You can't.

All the while the technology / internet industry is spouting on about communities, building social networks, and interaction. They are making sites like MySpace and FaceBook. The games community continues to fawn over MMOs for their massive social spaces, and slowly a few sites start to catch on.

I saw this is an emerging space, and wanted to take my little dream of games in to it. I thought about how to make money with it too of course. An idea isn't a good one if you can't monetize it, at least according to our standard of success these days. One such revenue stream would be wagering. Yes, gambling on the outcome of the game. As long as you are playing in the game and not betting on third parties, and the game is based entirely on skill and has no chance or randomness involved (poker) then you get in under many state's ignorant anti-gambling laws.

A little research on that lead me to Skilljam, World Winner, and King.com. Of course I signed up for an account and played them inside and out while my technologist mind deconstructed them. What sucked about them? What could be added to make them more sticky? Etc.

Skill City was born in my apartment living room in February of 2006 as I sat down and wrote all this down in what was then about a 20 page business plan. How would we be different with avatars that played in the games with you, avatars that you could dress up with our virtual currency and give a virtual home, avatars you could walk around in a world. Ok that last part ended up getting scrapped despite the creation of the virtual world because there just wasn't enough time to get all the art for a world done.

I went to my two friends here in Orange County who were then working for Compudyne writing bland police department reporting software and said "Wanna write video games?" and they said no. You see I had been one of the founders of their company Copperfire that was acquired by Compudyne and made them some money. The other founder was my brother Scott. About 4 or 5 months in to the creation of Copperfire, Scott and I had a falling out when I asked him if he had a business plan, an exit strategy, or if sloppy day-by-day operation was going to be the business plan and we would just struggle forward without a real blueprint. My brother doesn't take criticism well and when he lashed out at me for raising such concerns I washed my hands of Copperfire. It struggled forward for nearly two years before it was finally bought and made some money in the process. I got nothing of course, and was bitter about that, but I had come to terms with the fact that I was ultimately my decision to react to my brother's obnoxiousness by departing.

Why am I telling you this? Well Drew and Chris were the programmers of that venture and were also friends of mine. Scott never would have known them if I hadn't brought them together at the founding of Copperfire in my role as the technical director hiring programmers to code the product. Drew and Chris saw Scott through rose colored glasses from then on. He had made them some money, and had done with it without me.

If I wanted them to join me in a business venture I would have to get Scott to be part of it as well. Anything he did, they would climb on board.

So one afternoon in March the four of us sat on the floor of Drew's living room and said "Can we work together on this business if we are all equal owners?" and they said in unison "Only if you don't freak out and try to ruin the company like you did at Copperfire." At that moment I should have seen it. They didn't just see Scott through the lenses of children seeing somebody who had brought them success, they saw my departure as something that threatened their companies well being and even years later they still held a grudge. Not just that, but their grudge was twisted and sharp.

I needed them, so like I always do when I need something I sacrificed. This time I sacrificed my own pride. I hadn't tried to ruin their company, but telling them otehrwise would be futile and lead to arguments that would get me nowhere. I was convinced I needed them on my side so I acquiesced and just accepted their derision.

We decided to all be equal founders. That nobody could override anybody else because we were equal. Anybody could decide the business' fate or folly because we held equal percentage of ownership and authority.

That was the second mistake. A ship cannot sail when 4 navigators cant decide where to take it. To put it another way, 4 chefs in a kitchen are making a pot of soup. Each has an idea of its flavor, and each puts in spices. You are left with a pretty shitty pot of soup when each one finally realizes what they have done.

Then each of them points at the other and says "You ruined my soup." Nobody looks in the mirror and says "What a stupid idea it was to try and make soup with 3 other chefs."

I do now of course. I had the realization halfway through the creation of our product that this was doomed. The fighting had begun, and when it came time to take responsibility and be equal partners nobody would. "You do it." I was told. Yes, the one they were scared would "freak out and ruin the company" was the guy they would just look at and say "You take care of it."

It was easier that way because then if a bad decision was made nobody could blame them, it wasn't their fault. Then when a good decision was made it looked like money was on the horizon everybody would come up and want a share, to take credit.

The resentment began.

Communication and group dynamics built on trust and loyalty would have been the medicine for such a hideous affliction. I tried many times to get the employees together and talk all the issues out. Sometimes it worked.

Once I was having a severe bout of stress related depression from doing everything at the office. I had headaches and sleeplessness that wouldn't cease. I was so busy running everything at the office and having those who demanded equality not make any of the crucial decisions that I felt like my head was going to pop. I took the day off and stayed at home so I could self analyze and solve the issue. I'm good at that. I sat on the couch and thought about life, about what it was that was wrong. I realized I needed to simplify, to just relax and instead of fighting the torrent I should swim with it.

I had this epiphany while I was peeling a pear. I don't like the skin on pears so I peel them first. I realized it was so relaxing to just slow down my whole life and pay attention to something little like peeling a pear, and to do something that forces you to go slow. It's one of the reasons I always liked gardening too. You can't rush it. Nature forces you to be slow and still your mind.

I felt so much better. I blogged about it the next day on this blog. That same morning at work I was litereally screamed at in my office by my partners who told me I was posting terrible things on this blog, and that it reflected badly on the company. Verbatim I was told that "posting my suicidal thoughts on this blog was the worst."

I laughed. Suicidal? They brought up the pear peeling, saying that it was a metaphor for how I wanted to slash my wrists.

That was the third sign that our business was doomed.

If the people I worked with would see my blog entry about a personal realization that made my entire outlook on life turn around, and gave me an exit to the soul crushing abyss of hectic business management, then what else were they grossly misinterpreting? Not just grossly, but offensively.

As always, I kept my outrage at such a foolish and stupid accusation to myself. I needed these programmers to stay with me, and see Skill City through.

I highlight some dark times, but know that these were flickers in the 11 month period of development we had. They were only brief flareups. Most of the time was pretty good. I designed games and we had meetings to talk about how the games would fit, how the interface of the client would look, what people could do and how they could do it.

I really liked that stuff. To design something in your head limited only by your imagination and then see it become real is what being alive is for. It's the ultimate fulfillment. It's why people sit around and chat about "Some day I'm going to make a game / build a house / paint a picture / start a band."

I am happy knowing that I didn't just sit around a table with some beers one night and talk about how great it would be to build a dream. I did it. I architected the fantasy in my head and brought it out in to the real world for people to see.

Over three thousand of you liked it. Probably more if I had enough money to advertise and show the rest of the population... Sadly, most didn't like it enough to PAY for it. Other game companies saw it and liked it too. We had several interesting conversations with some very big names out there... I can't name them, because they asked for confidentiality.

I'll type more tomorrow or something. It really makes me sad thinking about all this and how it ended, and how there is still a chance I could be running Skill City from my own home except that the two programmers I need to help me do that aren't speaking to me any more.

Remember: don't hire immature "even my spare time is worth 400 dollars an hour" coders to work for/with you. The world has enough spoiled, passive aggressive, little bastards in it without people like us contributing to it.

They make a cream for that.

2007-10-09T23:52:00.000-07:00

I have been procrastinating writing up the post mortem on Skill City because I vainly hold on to the hope there is a way out for the company.

There isn't of course. I'm busy interviewing for any jobs I can line up. Most are like the games industry. They want you to come in and talk to them, a lot, they take several days between the times they talk to you and you wait a lot.

Then eventually they get in touch, if you are lucky, to tell you thank you but they are going to hire somebody else, or contract to somebody else, or build that game themselves, or that they have decided to admit they are evil time burglars and give up their world possessions and move to a Buddhist monastery on a mountain top.

Ok I sort of vented there but I just watched an episode of this show called Chuck and it has to be the worst thing on TV. When will idiots in Hollywood stop making shows for geeks without hiring a single geek to watch the show and say "Dude, this sucks, we don't talk like this. We don't act like this, and your show isn't funny or cool and has all the attraction of a deer carcass."

I hacked your firewalls and stole your webs.

Maybe when I'm not drunk as a hobo to drown the out the buzzing throbbing sorrow of having my game company blow up I'll write a post mortem on why it blew up.

Pointing fingers or saying "This is why things didn't work" isn't exactly going to make me any friends. Then again ... I can't exactly damage my relationships more than they already are.

If you haven't picked it up by now one of the major destructors of Skill City was the fact that the founders (me, my brother, and two programmers) didn't get along, at all, and instead of talking out the problems everybody just held them in until the angst and passive aggression blew up in a steamy fount of liquid hot magma.

I'll type in more words when I am not distracted by this awful teen horror movie I stole on the internet.

Goodnight moon

2007-10-02T15:03:00.000-07:00

Goodnight chair.

Goodnight desk.

Goodnight little server with the humming disk drives and the little green blinky lights.

Goodnight bank accounts.

Goodnight equity.

Goodnight 3379 registered users.

Goodnight avatars.

Goodnight games.

And goodnight to all those who stuck with us on this wacky journey.

Today Skill City was forced to re-structure itself and go back to it's roots as a garage company. Literally, everything is now in my garage.

I will take some time to write up a post-mortem and maybe even send it in to Game Developer magazine or something. Although they usually only want PMs on successful titles instead of businesses that made several bad decisions and then slowly crawled their way to the grave.

So welcome the new Skill City in to existence. I'm going to keep the game servers up (although they will be slower now without a robust data center). I am also still taking contracts for development.

After all, I have proof that I can get a game made quickly and cheaply. Most others have a hard time making that claim.

Anybody wanna hire a game producer? I am currently filling out the immigration papers to move to Australia as a "skilled worker." Like many countries, certain job experience is in demand enough that they will let you immigrate if you can prove you have those skills. The process takes months, but I really do want to move someplace with the warm sunny beach like where I live now only without the hideous cost of living. Aside from the great pleasure I would get from not being subject to the dumb little Texan who runs this country.

Aside from that, I'm also offering the Skill City source code and all of it's assets to anybody who wants to buy them. All you need is a C# compiler and you have your own online skill gaming community! (some assembly required, offer not valid to people I don't like)

Why do we fall?

2007-09-25T16:16:00.000-07:00

I been thinking a lot about personal evolution lately. The events in a persons life that shape who they are and set them apart from the rest of the cattle that is the human race.

Lately, I haven't been able to say much about what's going on behind closed doors at Skill City. Stiff upper lip and all that.

The company itself never really had a very strong market, I have said that already. What we do have is some very fascinating technology, and a team of people that are talented at creating it, though about as easy to motivate as roadkill.

I have been looking for a second round of funding, you know this because I have said it here. What happens if I don't get it?

Skill City is my dream and my vision. It is that which I always had in my heart finally come to life for others to see. I would say that its only half done as it stands, and I need to get the other half complete. I am a driven person, and I will do anything to see it get completed.

I'll post more on Friday, until then I am busy trying to find where the next paycheck will come from... you know, the usual.

My advice and lesson from all of this going on here today is this: have at least two years of operating funds in the bank before you start. At the end of your first year, start raising the next five years worth of operating funds. If you can't then your product isn't interesting, or has no market, or you are a poor salesman who doesn't really really at his core want your product to succeed.

Your entire staff needs to be that way too. If they aren't and they quit when things get choppy, it will ruin you.

Your friend, the time burglar.

2007-09-19T10:50:00.000-07:00

So the business is in need of a round two, a phase B, whatever you want to call it. We need money to continue development of both our web based front end, and our uber cool back-end.

Having read the Andreesen blog yesterday I will not call it a platform. It is a back-end. I know that some people want us to call it a platform because thats the current buzz topic among various people with lots of money who want to invest it in to tech stuff.

Anyway I have two very nice opportunities, and of course I can't talk about them here because of many things. The first would be that I have a corporate image, and blogging about the inner workings of my company is already sketchy. I share here more than I think most people would, but I do keep a lot of things close to my chest.

I think thats a card analogy. The only thing close to my chest right now is my shirt.

I had a few meetings, and a few people who asked me for things like white papers or full documentation on my entire system and its design before we had even begun to talk about partnering or shaping any sort of deal.

WATCH OUT FOR THAT

People know that you are a small business, and they can sense the chance to milk you for information. Information that might let them, and their larger team of coders simply reproduce what you have. I know its one of the top 10 fallacies of business startups: not everybody is out to rip you off. Guess what? In casual games they are. These are such tiny games that its very very easy to copy somebody else. Why buy what you can just create yourself for cheaper?

Well most of the time they look at something like we have and go "Whoah... hold on. This is very complex." and then they set up meetings where they pump us for information.

They may have no intention of doing anything at all with us. These meetings do two things. One is that they waste your time, and theirs. They should be smarter than that but if every executive was a genius then one company would rule them all. The other thing they do is give you important face time with your competition, or cooperation.

Face time is critical as a small business. You want people to know who you are when you walk up to them at an industry mixer. Even if it's because that abortion of a meeting you had a week ago is how they know you, it's still an excuse to shake hands and say hello. You might get linked to somebody else through it, and then meet the one guy who says YES to your proposals.

Anyway you can tell by reading between the lines I have been told NO a few times, and that I have been dealing with lots of people who "think there might be a good opportunity here, just send me all your designs and then we'll see!"

Yeah right. I'll let you drive that car off the lot and if you want to buy it maybe you'll come back later and pay too.

Part of your job as the good entrepreneur is making these dead ends in to something useful, or knowing when to turn the tables and say NO first.

Google yourself.

2007-09-13T16:00:00.000-07:00

I know, that sounds like some sort of derogatory remark doesn't it?

It isn't. If you google for your own name do you get a lot of hits? If you do, you are doing well building the brand known as YOU.

If you start a business and you google it, or you google some things that it does like "casual games" do you see yourself in the results?

No? Get on it them. People need to link to you, talk about you, and search for you a lot so that your google rating rises. Set up some dummy sites... just kidding that's evil. I would never do that.

I found this while googling myself today:

Skill City Interview

Lol! Im on TV mom!

Don't google yourself too much, you will get hairy palms... or go blind... or get addicted to internet porn or something.

Funding.

2007-09-11T10:18:00.000-07:00

You are thinking of starting a video game company, or a restaurant, or maybe a comic book store. It doesn't matter honestly. You are going to need money. Where do you get it?

First go to google and read up on how to approach investment groups. There are some good coaching articles out there, and there are even some good professional places that will give you a weekend class on how to talk to investors. Then you will be ready to go out and talk to them for real.

Remember that most investors already know you are just an entrepreneur, they don't expect you to be a big money roller because then why are you talking to them?

So you need that startup money. I usually tell people that its easier to sell something that partly done, or all done, than to sell them vaporware. This is usually true. If you can keep your day job and get the foundation of your new gig well laid before actually start drawing on your startup cash you will be better off.

Common sense? Probably. Did I make this mistake? Yup. I learned not to do this again though. While the benefit was great, I could dedicate all my time to getting us up and running, that time spent could have kept another month worth of money in my bank account and would only have delayed my time to market by like a month. A month wont kill ya.

I would like to stress two things for you to consider, and I think they are pretty important.

1. Go to friends and family (or your own reserves) for your startup cash before you try to seek outside funding.

2. Do not screw around with equity / stock. It's a trap, it's filled with paperwork, just don't go there.

Its going to be a lot easier to try and get your friends and family to give you some money for your business idea. The best part is that it will give you practice trying to sell a good idea to people, and if you totally screw up your presentation they are more likely to forgive you since they are relatives. Then there is the other side of screwing up: your business fails. Your friends and family are once again more likely to forgive you for losing their money than a stranger is. Sure your mom may get mad, your friends might not call you to go to the pub with them, but they probably aren't going to sue you like a stranger would.

Okay now for number two, do not bother with stock. When you first create your company you can create a corporation. If you are taking other people's money you will probably want to do that, but you might want to so sole proprietor instead. It really depends on how you forsee yourself raising money, and how you want to be taxed on everything you do.

Talk to a small business attorney and find out the pros and cons of each one.

If you create a corporation you have to issue stock (I think) and I would recommend creating something like a million shares. It's easier for the future. Now, just give yourself 100. You are now the sole owner of stock, and own 100% of the issued shares, so you are the boss. You can also write off the business' losses and do other crazy tax things. Laws vary by the state in which you incorporated.

DO NOT give out shares of your company to the friends and family that invest in you. They want something in return for the money they are giving you? Fine make a contract with them that says you will pay them back their money within the first year (or 2, or 4) that your venture is profitable and that their money to you is a loan, interest free. Now, that takes care of paying them back, but what else? They probably want to make more than they paid because that's the whole point in investing. So add on something like "You also get a percentage of any profits that the board of directors decides to pay out to the investors."

That way you are selling them the promise of future money, but you are avoiding the sick mountain of paperwork that selling them securities (stock) requires.

If you do this, you might want to think about acquisition or how it will affect your investors in the future. If you have a pile of loans that need to be repaid is anybody going to want to buy your little company? Probably not, nobody is in the business of buying debt. So take your friends and family money and make it last long enough to get your product made, and launched, and in to the "it's making money but I need that push to really take off."

Now you are more attractive to an investor. You have a real product, you have a market share, and you have some revenue. Your loans become less off putting now.

Thats my advice so far. I learned this by doing it, and by shopping Skill City around to various interested parties. Hopefully you will find your experience easier now, having read this.

Oh and read this: http://blog.pmarca.com/

Tradeshows

2007-09-06T19:42:00.000-07:00

You are a new company to the games industry, and you are wondering how it is that you make those important connection with others in the same industry.

The answer is trade shows, conventions, expos, whatever you choose to call them.

You need to go. A friend of mine who is now the successful business man in the games world once told me the same thing when I asked him how it was that he met all the contacts he now has. Go to trade shows, he said.

Today I was standing in my booth alone, because I hate to admit this but my staff abandon me. They decided they didn't want to come to the trade show because its very time consuming and far away from home. I agreed, it is hard to see a benefit to something that hasn't happened yet. For a moment, I wanted to stay home as well in the safe womb of my own space and enjoy a week of doing the usual comfortable task to which I have grown accustomed.

Then I woke up and smelled the stench of reality, and decided that here lies another lesson I have learned and deemed worthy of sharing on this blog.

My business, and if you are reading this probably yours too, will utterly fail to achieve the greatness you seek if you do not attend these shows and speak to those who matter, and those who don't. You will never know until you talk to them for a while.

Who are those people? Who matters to you? You have a game and you are distributing on your own website and it appears to be doing well, so why bother right?

Well those people are your peers for starters. You need to know them. Know your enemy, because they compete with you, and know your friends because they are there to help you when you need it. For example I have met several business people at this show alone who provide a service I had no idea was even in existence. These things benefit me, I need to move forward and incorporate them to get that important leg up on those who are in the same market as I am.

Then I also met my competition, and received enlightenment. There are things I am doing, that they are not. Should this be cause for arrogant triumph? No, it should be cause for a meeting with them to discuss how what I have could benefit them, and in so doing I can turn a competitor in to a partner and we both flourish. Seeing this beneficial synergy (and yes I hate myself a little for using that word but this is a case where it makes sense) is what sets apart a savvy business owner from one who will blunder in to becoming a statistic: 80% of start up companies fail.

Don't give in to your desire to stay in your comfort zone and stay home. Even if you are anti-social you need to go to these shows and network. It may be acting, but like any role you will find that which you pretend to be is what you eventually become.

Be friendly, talk to everybody who approaches your booth. They will skirt you, and dive in o grab a brochure without making eye contact. Trump them with a friend greeting, a smile and a question about how they are doing and what it is they do. Don't talk about yourself at first.

Don't sit. Don't stand behind a table. You are there to connect, so make your physical self connectable.

Don't put your hands in your pockets, and do shake hands with people when you meet them and begin a formal conversation.

Don't eat at your booth, and keep some breath mints around. You can't smell the slaughterhouse of your own horrid exhalations because you are immune to them.

I have learned these things through careful observation as some sort of scientist observing an island of untouched wildlife would.

I talked to a few people who were just passing by, and discovered that they were in fact looking for exactly what it was that I am selling, only they didn't know it until I spoke to them.

Diamonds in the rough, but one has to brush the dust aside first to find them. These gems do not arrive gift wrapped in to your hands.

Oh, I would also like to add that while the cost of attendance is high (about 2,500 dollars for a booth, and then about 2000 more bucks for table rentals and hotels and plane tickets) your option of making a sale to somebody would pay for this ten fold. Do not be daunted by the high price, because it is part of your advertising budget. You have one of those right?

Have any observations of your own? You do... I know it... share now or you must narfle the garthok.

A fan?

2007-09-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

I am currently at the Austin GDC show. I was just sitting there in my booth, getting things ready for the expo hall to open up to the public in he morning when two very strange things happened.

The first was this: a guy walked up to me while I was busily getting things ready to go. He began to ask me about our games, and then before having seen them launched in to a pitch for a game he is currently developing. Then he told me all about how it is a perfect for Skill City and that there are some good options for partnership and revenue sharing.

Now, let's not get confused about my intention here. Lets call him Jim because it's a short name that isn't his. Jim is a nice guy, I have nothing against him, and his game really was neat.

Jim's pitch was horrible. Please all ye seekers of publishers, distributors, do not make these mistakes.

First, I am busy, and most other people who you would like to meet with are busy as well. While a tradeshow is a great place to pitch your idea and to network, you have to know there is a time a place. I am extremely annoyed when people fail to realize that I value my time as much as they value theirs. You cannot approach a CEO and pitch your game out of the blue. Call me? Email me? Make an appointment. I will set aside time just for you, time that is all yours, even if your game is trash or you don't have anything I care about... I have set aside that time for you.

I have met with several other people in the video game production world, publishers, and developers. Some may be terse, some may be rude, but all will respect you if you call and ask to set an appointment so that you can pitch your game idea.

The second mistake was his complete lack of knowledge of what we do at Skill City. When you are going to pitch your game to somebody you must do your homework. Take a moment to get to know them. If you are going to cold pitch like this (that's the pitch to somebody you haven't talked to before) then that's fine but you must understand that you know not to whom you are talking, and you need to adjust your pitch.

If you don't, you might give one the impression you are arrogant and even worse than that you might impress upon your listener that you are foolish.

My visitor made this mistake a few times and I am a nice guy so I just smiled. For all he knew Skill City was an online porn site and had some web based games people could play while switching photo galleries.

The third mistake, and honestly the most fatal one was that he bad mouthed the other companies he had spoken to about his game.

Sigh...

You never do this. You do not walk in to Microsoft and try to impress them or win them over by talking trash on Nintendo. Why? Everybody sitting in that room knows, personally, somebody over at Nintendo. Your chances of them ever talking to you again go down by an order of magnitude every time you make this blunder.

I have made this blunder too. I am not without sin. I learned from my mistake though and now when I am in meetings and the names of another company come up I nod and agree that I have dealt with them in the past. If details are pressed from me I might say something like "It didn't work out and I am not doing business with them right now." See? I didn't say I am not doing business them ever, or that things went badly. I left any emotional qualifiers out.

Please let me remember to do this from now on, because its an easy pit to fall in to.

The final mistake that was made by Jim Von Doomedpitcher (I made up that name just now) was that he had no game design spec, no timeline, no milestones, and brought up such immediately. His defense was just that he was a fast coder and needed no such things because his game would be done on time, and he was a man who was always timely. Further he blundered in to his last pitfall once more and slandered the last executive he pitched to for asking for such a ludicrous thing as a plan for his development.

At this point I finally had to halt Jim because a time burglar left un-checked will consume an entire day of mine, and I am nothing if not busy. Simultaneously I knew that Jim was a man with talent, and no experience.

Ah, you are leaning in to your monitor now and saying to your screen as if speaking to me that I am also a man of no experience. Nay, for I am one of little experience, but certainly more than your average basement indie developer. It may seem common sense even, the wisdom of my experience.

Back to Jim. I told him that he needed to stop, because Skill City had no use for his game, and while it was impressive he needed to be talking to other people. I offered him their names and pointed him in the right direction. Undaunted he pushed on insisting there was a synergy for us, me as the holder of a site with traffic and him as the maker of a game.

I am sorry, I told him, but we make our own games, and our business plan is such that we will continue to do so. Further his lack of a written plan and slander of those who request it was something I stated to him as being very foolish. Did he not understand that a million dollar business is only that because of its use of plans and documents? He cannot fault them for wanting one, and to be surprised when they ask for it, or offended, is just stupid because they will ALL want this. He was forced to agree.

Now Jim had a leg up on everybody else. His game, while a prototype that was 90% done, was way ahead of most who come pitching. He had a game to show me, not just a written plan. Why then do we want a plan? Here is the game laid bare before me. I want a plan because I want to see written down what the 10% that isn't complete is going to look like, and a written guarantee of when it will be done.

So will everybody else.

That my friends is todays object lesson, and I do feel badly that I am using this guy as the example of what not to do, but that is life. We learn the most from mistakes, we never notice the subtleness of a choice well made for very long.

I did say I had two visitors that surprised me.

The second from a reader of this Blog, and that was really cool. I have never met in person somebody who reads anything I put on here, and his words of praise motive me to keep going here. The best part? He is from Australia, so aside from the cool accent that's a really far away place, and to just walk past and say "Ah, thats the big logo on that booth for the guy who does that company with the blog I read while I am here in the US a billion miles from home."

Well that's just cool. It blew my mind for a second and I recognized again that this is a tight knit little industry we have here.

So, don't talk bad about anybody 'cause it will hurt if ya do. (sorry Jim)

Pandora

2007-09-04T23:17:00.000-07:00

A long time ago in the isles of Greece there was a girl named Pandora.

The gods, feeling that the world needed to be tested as they often do, and having grown tired of springing out from behind trees with a series of trivia questions or math problems gave to Pandora a box.

They told her not to open this box, that it contained within it all the sorrow and pain, death and horror that the wide world could offer. Gods were much like that chef who knows that while he was baking you cookies he dropped one on the floor and he just brushed it off and hands it to you anyway. This box was just like that cookie, the gods knew she would eat it and therefore ruin everything, and they would laugh because they are jerks.

Pandora accepted the box, and for many days it sat upon her table. Dust gathered upon it, and the sun rose and set as the days past in the usual way. Her curiosity burned within her and so she set one hand upon the box, and decided to take a peek inside.

The moment the box was opened, the very second that its lid cracked and light entered the darkness within it, she knew that she had done something so Bad it had to be capitalized.

The box spilled forth the woe and tragedy that it held, and forever hence man has known that Pandora is ultimately responsible for the existence of attorneys.

Pandora also found hope at the bottom of the box, but the attorneys sued it for slander and it was barred from sale or use in all countries.

Your boutique teeters atop a pyramid

2007-08-29T12:16:00.000-07:00

Think of the video game market, or better yet any market as a pyramid.

This pyramid is also a graph, its a 3-D graph made up of golden blocks. Also it's made of people. Soylent Pyramid is people.

As you go higher, the amount of money that a single person is willing to spend goes up. The man sitting at the top of the pyramid has lots of money to spend on frivolous things that he doesn't need, but that he wants.

As you go lower the base widens on this pyramid, because there are lots more people here being crushed under the weight of those above them. These people on the bottom are willing to spend less, because thats how our X axis of this 3-D graph works.

So this market has a large amount of consumers who are willing to spend little to nothing, and a few who are willing to spend a lot.

Skill Games is at the top of the video game market pyramid. There are very few consumers of it, and its very hard to reach them and say "Here I am, waiting for you to come spend yer money at my magical pyramid of gold."

So Skill Games get smart and say "Where is there a surplus of people, and how can I trick them in to using us?" or to put it another way "How can I make money off the rest of this goddamn pyramid cause the pointy bit at the end is one guy, and I need a few thousand."

So Skill Games tend to be casual. Casual games have a large market, and attract people easily. Who can't sit down and play Tetris for a half hour? Ok my grandpa can't, but he is dead so he is excused.

Skill City on the other hand is sending its thick ropey tendrils all over this pyramid. We have avatars and experience systems that attempt to go after the dress-up crowd, casual games to pull in the inexperienced larger mass of gamers, competitive titles that grasp the serious gamer who values a good fight, all of this wrapped around subscription models that give you just a little bit more if you are willing to pay, and doesn't feel like it hurts those who aren't.

Will it work? Who knows... that's what we are finding out. So far it looks pretty sexy though, and now all I need is that million dollar budget to advertise it to everybody.

I think that means its time for me to talk about going after investment money, because unless your daddy is rich you gotta get that money from somewhere. Its the money that helps you make the leap from startup to success. Lots of people use it, lots of people need it.

Even I need it. I'm contact every VC, Angel, and Equity Investment firm on the planet right now.

It's a weird experience, once that I am hip deep in and wading through as one crosses a murky swamp filled with things unknown.

I am eager to share these experiences with you, so that you don't get bitten by the same snakes I am. I'll even leave little signs on the trees as I pass them, marking the way for those who come after me.

Best Mai Tai Ever.

2007-08-22T18:29:00.000-07:00

I don't think I have posted anything in a while that is at least somewhat off topic. I also think that in my entire life (that's a long 32 years this November) I have never posted to a blog while intoxicated. Do forgive the typographical errors, I will hope to use the spell checker to remedy these and you will be none the wiser as to my current state of manual dexterity.

Allow me please to share with you the most splendid recipe for a mixed beverage ever.

First gimme a second to turn on some appropriate music. Alas, I have none, so I will instead play something by Dukas. It has lots of strings and rythmn and I do believe I heard this in a Disney film once...

The best mai tai recipe ever
by: The Mayor of Skill City (a monkey who knows his tropical beverages)

In a shaker combine:
2 jiggers orange juice
2 jiggers pineapple juice
1 jigger rum (vodka works too if you are outta rum)
1 jigger of peach/apricot schnapps (of peach/apricot brandy)
1 jigger of triple sec (please dont use Grand Marnier)

Shake vigorously. As the sage bartender said, anything with fruit juice needs a good kick in the ass in to wake up the flavor.

Now, pour it in to a nice tall glass. A collins glass would work swell if you are a barware fiend as I am, I like to have all the odds and ends. I even have that stupid spatula with the spiraly wire going round the outside.

You are not done. A Mai Tai needs to look like a sunset. Pour in some Grenadine very carefully so that it gathers at the bottom. No worries, its heavy and sugary and will go there on its own.

Now for the layer of smog, this is Los Angeles after all. If you are more nature inclined just think of it as a lovely night sky slowly darkening. Pour some very dark rum on top (Meyers is my dark rum of choice as its very sweet and very dark) using a teaspoon or some other device that you have handy. It will float nicely on top.

Now you have made a tropical three layered drink worthy of any puzzle game. Unlike puzzle games though, this is something you can then pour down your gullet slowly.

Warning: Not responsible for hangovers.

A different angle.

2007-08-21T13:21:00.000-07:00

If all these "at home" projects are making use of our computers idle cycles, those times when your CPU isn't doing something like running a web browser, when will I be able to plug in to the idle cycles of the human brain?

I have been thinking about a game for a while now, and I want it to be something that isn't derivative. I know, the post modernist in me says that isn't possible because everything has been done. The rapper in me says that it's played out. Yo.

While I use my idle time, the small spaces between emailing business contacts and writing up game design specs and making sure this company is still running, I think about how to make this game.

It's starting to drive me crazy that I can't think about how to come up with a compelling reason to play it. Then today I was sitting here in my office with this little wooden ball in my hand. Thank you macrovision for giving me this neat little toy at a trade show. It solved my problem.

You see, I was thinking about it all wrong. I knew I wanted to make a game and I knew how I wanted it to look and some of the key features. I was just having a hard time getting them all to fit together. I was trying only one approach, and then I saw that my problem is like a sphere and I only need to try another angle. The destination is the same, but my approach could change.

This is really really really hard to do. One suddenly has to shuck all their instinctive and learned problem solving skills from 31 years of life. Toss them away, and look at it with fresh eyes from another perspective that isn't your own. How would a concert pianist's approach differ from a molecular chemist's? The answer: one of their feet are both the same.

I know, that didn't make sense but I seek to guide you in a different way than simply spewing facts at you. Perhaps this is why nobody reads this blog...

Anyway I think that now I can see an idea beginning to brighten, that was once growing dusty beneath its star crusted vault of sky.

Where did I get the idea for a game like this? I dreamed it.

I saw this giant array of spheres in the universe and each one had a sound, and as I watched they all played their notes. It was neat, and pretty, and if I did it right I could make the galaxy do Mary Had a Little Lamb. This is a puzzle game, a challenge that is fun to look at and rewarding when done correctly. Well, thats what my sleeping brain said. It says lots of things, so does yours but perhaps you don't remember them as often as people like me? I don't sleep very deeply.

I'm writing it all down so that one day my music of the spheres can be played by others... maybe heard by them too. Then you can blog about how my universe opened strong but its current work isn't nearly as good as its first album, before it sold out.

Addiction of a different kind

2007-08-20T13:31:00.000-07:00

It has happened. There comes a time when the maker of a drug tries his own product to the extent that he becomes addicted to it.

This is such a drug.

In looking at it, and the many other kinds of games that people have labeled as addicting I find there are many easily quantifiable properties of addiction in video games.

1. Tasks
2. Persistence
3. Simple rewards

People like tasks. They like to click a person and have them say "Go forth young Druid Warrior and bring me hence the head of 35 yellow Squigglsproing." and you gleefully go out and do it because you get a simple reward, for a simple task, in a complex world. Feels good.

Persistence is just there so you come back, again and again you return because you know that your avatar is waiting. You know that when left the city of Harvest Town that people were busy there and when you come back things have changed. The raccoon in the store probably has turnips on sale, or a new desk perhaps. Its safe, you like it there.

The tasks you did and the rewards you gained are there waiting for you too. Killing 35 Bloodfanged Gnar Gnar certainly isn't all for nothing.

The addiction chain is easy to follow, its been around for as long as people so it's nothing new. What people miss, is that it's very easy to interfere with it. We aren't talking a physical need, so your body doesn't demand that you play WoW and cause you to feel like you are dying if you go too long without it.

I'm talking about getting those first few links in to the addiction chain and really shackling a player to your game. It's very hard. People try all the time. They tried and failed? (inside joke) Well yes most do. Its irony itself that a site called AddictingGames.com is mostly loaded with horrible games that repel every fiber of my being. It's hard to call that addicting. Maybe revolting?

One or two titles there fun, and I could see myself going back. I have no desire to though, because the more I play there, the more I realize that I'm getting nothing back. I'm not being rewarded with anything I can look at an hour from now and say "I did that."

What else? Clicking. Nobody likes to have their flow interrupted by a menu. I hate it when I click "Play again!" after a game is over and it takes me to two different "OK or Cancel?" boxes before the game starts again. I agreed to them once already, let's not ask again.

That last one is an observation of my own site. I get playing Explodinator for an hour because it's so challenging, and yet so easy... but one tiny mistake and you are doomed but you just don't know it. I love this game, I play it about 30 times in a row. I loath when the game ends and I have to click OK 4 times before it starts again.

Getting addicted to your own games is great, I get insights I would otherwise have missed.

Representation

2007-08-16T11:18:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been thinking more and more about how we are automating our lives, and how wrong most people have been in their assumption that humans would welcome such advances with open arms.

Nobody wants to feel replaced by a machine, and nobody yearns for the existence of somebody who has nothing to do at all because robots do it all for them. How exciting is 72 years of life sitting on a sofa doing nothing? How horrible a fate that would be.

Anyway I was thinking along the lines of automation and how most tasks are being reduced to simply pushing a button. What if that pushing of a button was actually fun? Could you get people to do that task for you for free instead of paying them?

What if sitting at the console of a power plant watching all that information flowing around and monitoring everything was instead a game? Sure, it's a game where the lives of people are on the line but all video games have that. These are real people now, so its not so much a game as it is a job and you are all that stands between a city being powered and a huge explosion.

Still... what if that console was made differently, and the ideas and goals of a casual game were put in to it? Would it make your job more fun? Would it make you want to come to work every day and therefore get paid less?

See it has to come down to money at some point otherwise our reptillian overlords would never consider such a thing.

The power plant idea is just too over the top. But what about Taco Bell? I worked there once I kid you not. They have little bins with about 8 ingredients. Each menu item is really just those things combined in different ways. Didn't you notice how all their food tastes the same?

Replace the human workers with a robot arm and now make the entire staff just one person. He sits at his console playing a Diner Dash meets Cooking Mama type of a game where his moves are actually making real food and actually delivering these items to the pickup window. He gets efficiency bonuses, high scores, etc... they are compared to other workers at other stores and aggregate performance and customer feedback determines if you get paid a "High Score" bonus.

This is the psychotic world of the future I envision. Video Games will some day mediate our basic tasks. Children playing "shoot the zombies" really are controlling soldiers?

Hello. My name is Ender.

You get the ankles and I'll get the wrists

2007-08-13T11:12:00.000-07:00

Couple of fun things to talk about today.

First, people are starting to cash out on Skill City. In the last week I have written checks or clicked submit on Paypal for an amount well over $2500 in total. People are winnin' the cash, and its pretty dang easy because most of you aren't playing for cash, so that monthly tournament for 500 bucks had like 10 people playing for it. Pretty nice odds, since the top 5 take the money.

Why is nobody talking about us on the news? I get a phone call from my sister in San Diego that there is a news story on Skill Games and how they are the new way to gamble in the US but since it's a video game that you play, and there is no house to benefit from the outcome, it's all legal.

Wow that's a hot news item, considering Skill Jam started doing this eight years ago. Then again the evening news on the telly has always been known for being written mostly by, and for, farm animals.

I'm bitter at the free press they gave to our competition obviously.

Second, things zip along here at Skill City too. I have four separate companies that are currently exploring our super skillful and ninja like grace with which we can make a game, an engine, and tools to support it. Development contracts with them would be nice, so would a paycheck. I'm on NDA with these companies so they shall remain unknown to thee, my reader. I'm also looking at another deal that would be extremely sexy, and the details of it shall also remain undisclosed at this time but suffice to say that it will make us all happy and therefore you should pray to your various pantheons that it works out. It's a vague prayer without my giving you details, but hey, if you have some sort of omnipotent superhero for a deity then he/she/it already knows.

Just take a moment to think positive thoughts in my general direction, if you are so inclined. For most of you that would be roughly southwest.

I have taken to daydreaming about new games lately. As I sit and attempt to distract my mind from important tasks (television) I have noticed that the proliferation of the internet is much like some sort of cold war between products.

"General, Lucky Charms has built a website sir." said the nameless soldier handing his report to the superior officer.

"Dammit!" The General slammed his fist in to the desk hard enough to knock over his pencil jar spilling its contents across the smooth wooden surface. "We must respond in kind and show them we are just as strong as they are! Execute these instructions immediately. Fruit Loops will come out on top of this!" He growled, sliding a binder across to the waiting soldier.

The cover was labeled clearly: Plan 47A - Website with Casual Games. Probably Something With a Bunny

So as each warring product builds a website, then a bigger website, then a big website with games... someday they will build a website with games so big that it will destroy them all, or it will take over 20 minutes just to load and then people will stop going there.

I see myself as the guy who walks in to the office of Decision Maker and says to him "I hear you are escalating your defensive position against Product X. You need something to keep your brand in front of people. You need casual games, branded and dripping with the sweet honey of your intellectual property."

I'll smile and they will hand me a briefcase full of money that I will use to build them a game, cause that's what I like to do, and I'm good at it. Building the games is what I'm good at, not taking money. I don't have a lot of practice in the taking money activity.

Saving some of that money so I can mosey over to Decision Maker at Product Y so I can sell him the same thing seems like a good idea.

See how I just equated being an arms dealer with making games? Did you like that?

Coolest job ever.

Oh here. Have a screenshot of the new game. It's awesome. I would go so far as to say it's expletive deleted awesome.

Click for a larger view!

Game news

2007-08-06T16:30:00.000-07:00

What am I particularly opinionated about today?

Mostly the total lack of interest I get from site owners who advertise. I send email like:

"Hello. I run a business and I would like to purchase a banner ad on your site. I notice you have ads up there already in the format of blah-blah and I have an ad formatted and ready to go. Please quote me on running a campaign for 15 days, include your CPM, and if you have stats on your site please include those too."

Lets pretend you run a site, and you sell a service. Somebody walks in and says "I have shopped around and chosen you. Here is a pile of cash." What is your response to this?

Thats right! You ask them to leave, because you don't want their money. Your bills pay themselves and you are independently wealthy, so why would you care about somebody who wants to pay you for the service that you sell and currently run a business to promote?

Sarcasm aside, that's the general response of many of the advertisers I am trying to buy space from. Project Wonderful has been nothing but wonderful. They are slow as crap and their website takes an age to load, but the prices are low and the impressions are high, so who can argue?

I can. Once you have run an ad on there for about two months you realize that the 500 hits a day that most sites get are the same 500 people day in, day out. Running an ad there for more than a few days every month or so is not going to get great response.

So off I go to various big traffic sites like Casino City where they rate lots of online Skill Game sites, as well as our less savory relatives: the gambling establishments.

Getting on their directory is easy, but getting them to return a phone call or email me a rate sheet has been a struggle I have been fighting with for over a month.

I gave up today. I sent an email to their ad rep basically stating that since they are clearly kajillionaires who don't need any more customers to toss cash at them I will be moving on and not inconveniencing them with my patronage. How dare I try to buy an ad from a website whose entire reason for existence is to sell ads?

I'm nervy like that.

Mostly though, I'm seeing that webcomics don't have the high returns on a product of the type that I have here. I need to find someplace else to put up my name... Maybe I'll tattoo it on the foreheads of sleeping hobos! I hear thats pretty cost effective.

I see good spirits, and I see bad.

2007-08-03T10:31:00.000-07:00

I have been spending the majority of this week sitting in my office writing out proposals for the various companies that want to work with us. It's taking up all my time this "CEO" thing and last night I was thinking on my bike as I rode home how funny it was.

I started the game company so that I could be my own boss and avoid all that bureaucratic junk. How silly of me to overlook that as the company becomes more successful I would get more and more bogged down with business stuff.

But thats a good thing. That means my business is growing. So it has come full circle. I left the corporate world only to build a company that is slowly becoming corporate.

At least this time a big jerk isn't in charge though.

Sorry todays blog entry is stupid, I'm totally distracted by 800 things and I can't focus.

Cat hair nose job.

2007-07-30T16:24:00.000-07:00

I was at Comic Con all week, and this weekend. I would like to start by saying that sleeping in my own bed was a blissful experience that only long absence can allow me to truly appreciate.

I think I also inhaled a helping a cat hair / dander that did a number on my sinuses while I slept on Iason's sofa. I have those good old summer time allergies to cats who aren't mine, and they seem to get worse every year as I get older and more battle weary.

I'll probably write a lot on this years Comic Con as the days pass, because I saw and did a lot there. Most of it was from the eye of a business man wondering to himself: "How can I get these people to give me their money?" and "What is that smell?"

First I would like to speak to all 20 of you (yeah, google says that there are more than 8 people reading this now) about seminars, and the dangerous misinformation they can give you.

I attended one called "FTW: How to break in to the video game industry" hosted by speakers from Foundation 9, Madcats, Sony, Capcom, and a guy who as far as I can remember was just an indie game blogger or somebody in the press/reporting circle of the video game stuff. I do recall though somebody saying he was there to give the indie side of the story.

After an hour of enduring questions that seriously were made up of deep insight such as "Do you like, read resumes that people send you, cause like, I sent mine and like, never got a reply?" the seminar didn't end. I was waiting patiently, and it just went on and on. I wanted to approach the bench and speak to the guys one on one, developer to developer, but I never had the chance because my phone kept paging me that Skill City servers were crashing and with no end in sight I had to leave.

I was there for 2 hours though, and what I did learn is that the big corporate game producers, and even the British fellow who was supposed to be reprezentin' us indie shops have a very biased view of their industry. I don't actually know why it surprised and dismayed me so much. I should have expected it, had I sat and thought it through.

I mean obviously a rep from a giant video game corporation is going to tell you that the way to "break in" to the industry is to start as a tester or QA person, then work up the long corporate ladder. It's what most of them did, and it's the method that is approved and effective for giant game factories such as theirs. Clearly they are now in positions of power and prestige, so who can argue?

Well... I would. I'm just a little scamp like that.

They never mentioned at all that to "break in" to the game industry all you need to do is wake up in the morning and say "Today, I am a member of the video game industry."

I'm serious, I speak from experience, and if you don't believe me just click here and let my work argue for me.

A lot of people will attempt this method of "breaking in" to the game industry, and they will fail, because once you declare yourself part of the industry you also have to act like it. That is the true sticking point. It's not that you failed to get a job for Soul Eating Corporation Number 91a. It's that you can't get anything done unless somebody is standing over you telling you to do it, and or paying you for it.

I'm not being negative, I'm just saying that there are a lot of people who go the indie game developer route and never finish even one game or product. It's very common. That same person, were they to work for a small shop like mine, or a huge shop like Sony, might flourish and become the next star of our time.

I think, as I write this, that the indie gamer method of "breaking in" (I hate that term so much I refuse to stop putting quotes around it) to the game industry is actually so hard that maybe it just wasn't worth mentioning. Maybe it wasn't lack of interest in that obvious route that caused a panel of prestigious gentlemen to simply ignore it for two hours.

There was a point at which somebody in the audience yelled out, in answer to a "Will you fund my game?" question "Portals will." and the panel shot him down. It was at that point I looked at him, as he was sitting near me, and said "I think everybody up there on the panel has never made their own game before, and probably has no idea how portals work, because I have many friends whose games were funded by portals/publishers."

A few minutes later the idea of finding a publisher to fund a game for you, so that you could use this proto game in your resume when applying for Capcom was actually broached by the panel.

Wow... so go indie, but only because that will allow you to make a game that you can use to impress game companies in to hiring you.

Yes my friends. That is the moral of the story of that entire seminar. I came away from it with the taste of sadness for all the kids in there who genuinely wanted to get in to the game world, and probably wont because they will spend all their time trying to get a job at a huge company someplace rather than just following their dreams and setting out on their own journey to greatness.

I am by no means saying the seminar was a waste of the men of the panel are not wise, and worthy of praise for giving their time. I was just sad that such a great way to break in to the game business (see? I'm over it now) was totally glossed over.

I sleep at night by telling myself that after I left to fix the servers they had a very long discussion of going indie, how it can be more fulfilling than working for somebody else, or being a tiny spoke in a larger gear. They probably didn't, but I'm a dreamer.

The efficacy of making friends in higher places

2007-07-23T09:40:00.000-07:00

Find somebody who knows more than you about what it is you have chosen to do.

In this case it's making video games, specifically making video games in a Skill Games Tournament setting. You might be deciding to grow lima beans in Ohio, or to finally take the plunge and start that antique book binding business.

Regardless of your chosen path through the tangled and web strewn hallways of small business adventuring, you should find a mentor, or an adviser, who will help you with your many issues.

By blogging my odyssey in to this strange realm for you I hope to at least provide a road sign here and there to direct you. I cannot ever hope to provide you with the level of advice that somebody who is a seasoned veteran can provide.

"But I cannot, because they are expensive these sages of business knowledge." you say to me. I will smile and let you know that for every horde of marauding bandits seeking to swell their wallets you will find one who is willing to help you, but only for the price of your friendship and gratitude. I mean that in a very Oscar Schindler sort of sense (go watch the movie), your gratitude needs to show that you aren't just happy to have found somebody you can mentally leech. Your gratitude needs to show that you are a person who takes care of those who took care of you.

I suppose a track record of success helps, but if you are genuine and sincere in all that you say and do those with true business acumen can sense this. We know who we can trust after about 10 minutes of conversation.

Take a shower too. Brush your teeth. Nobody trusts a person with an unpleasant personal odor.

Belle of the Ball

2007-07-20T17:15:00.001-07:00

As a tiny indie game company, or love developer yourself, you might have thought many times about how you should get your name out there and let the whole world know that you have the next idea right in the palm of your hand.

Many people post that on forums when they ask for advice, and my answer to them is always the same. You need to actually have a game done.

I'm putting my arm around you in that confidential way that says I'm about to give you some important info (or that I have been drinking) and I shall impart the wisdom of the ages: Don't show up pushing vaporware. Please don't. The industry at this point is so used to people showing up with hand waving and a grand show of nothing that they are just kind of tuning many people out.

Instead, before you are going to call yourself a game developer, or announce that your basement is a game studio, please actually make a game. I don't mean start making a game, I mean FINISH a game.

You might be wondering how Skill City went over at the Casual Connect conference that the Casual Game Association et al put on.

Thats what I'm getting to. See, we made a huge splash there. I had no intention of accomplishing anything by showing up other than saying hello to some friends, and making some new ones as I strolled the aisles introducing myself. Instead I ended up going to meetings with people I had never met.

I started by simply sending out meeting requests along the lines of "I would like a quick meeting just to introduce myself and Skill City, maybe talk about how we can do business and get some advice from you; my more experienced peers."

Flattery. That's key, and always will be. They are more likely to talk to you if you admit at the start that they are better than you. In fact admitting right now that a big company with a million bucks and a ton of employees is better than you isn't strategic, it's obvious.

So during these meetings what was it that, at the root of it all, made Skill City one of the companies everybody was buzzing about? I honestly think that it's the fact that we showed up with a real product. We didn't arrive saying "Look at us. We make games. We haven't made any yet, but give us money and we'll make some. We promise."

How refreshing is that for an industry that is thick with hucksters?

So we had a real foothold, we had actually made something, and then all the publishers walked by and said "How is publishing you though? Surely you aren't successful without the grace of our vast distribution empire?" Ah but we are doing pretty well in fact. Just using a website to chuck our installer at anybody who wants it seems to be what everybody else is doing anyway... This way Im not giving up my much needed pennies to somebody who isn't really doing much.

And this brings us to the other little factor in why people were talking about us. We were doing it all, all of it, alone. We had no partners, we had no big rock star game developer names or huge studio making our games. All we had done is work really hard, and really well, for one year and produce something that is amazing and nothing less than anybody here would expect for one year of such passion and attentions. You see, a lot of business are actually created these days with one goal: to do as little as possible and just use other people to make money.

They are often called Middle Men. Somebody who kind of just facilitates a few things you could have done yourself if you were inclined, or had the time, or were an unmarried network engineer with a gift for disarming conversation who designed a game service one day. I'm also incredibly handsome and I smell like roses. Where was I? Oh yes Middle Men.

The industry appears to be FULL of them. So when somebody comes along who is doing well without them I think people take notice.

Course this is all just speculation on my part, hell this entire blog is one big anecdote about me runnin' a game company. The best part about anecdotes though is that you can affix the word evidence to it and suddenly you get facts.

So here is some anecdotal evidence:
1. Everybody I talked to at the convention was amazed at what we got done in one year.
2. Most people were amazed at the quality of the games and our product, given the above.
3. Everybody was taken aback when they saw the demo included me actually showing them 5 games (and half of a sixth) working in our system with other people online using it too.
4. I wasn't selling them anything, I wasn't asking them for anything, I was just a friendly guy who was genuinely interested in meeting them, and hearing their opinions and feedback.

It boils down to this: Skill City is a deviation from the norm, and I think in general people were glad to breathe in the fresh air we brought with that.

So the iron is heated, it has seen the fire of attention and generated the warm radiance of industry buzz. Now is the time for me as the smithee of this little business to strike while it's hot.

Can I do it? I dunno... I'll try my best and so far that's worked.

I will of course share it all here, so do tune in for all the gory details.

Meetings with the 8th graders

2007-07-11T14:36:00.000-07:00

Remember when you were in 6th grade, or 4th grade, and the school seemed like it was simply ruled by those emperors of age: the 8th graders.

I feel like that now. I am stumbling around in the dark pretending I know jack about running a corporation. I stand in the long lunch line of video game companies all waiting for the lady with the hair net to slop some cash on our little plastic trays. The 8th graders are already seated, they rule the school and have formed cliques. I see the online web-based flash game casinos like King and World Winner sitting over there. Oh look, its Pogo and PopCap at the other end of the room, I look up to them admiration and like all those I admire I copy their moves hoping to obtain some of their success. I even cut my hair the same and listen to the same music.

I'm too nervous to talk to them. What if they push me down or beat me up in the bathroom and take my milk money?

That time has ended. With the nearness of being totally out of operating capital I have decided to grow a spine and do the thing I severely dislike, but that is also required of all CEOs: Shake hands with strangers, talk to them about what we can do to mutually benefit us all, raise money.

It's just that I never considered myself a people person, but I also think I'm a good actor. I had an epifane, why not just act like a people person? I'm good at acting like I know what I'm doing, I'm good at being sincere too. Lets combine the two.

Is that the ideal salesman? One who can become whatever the situation requires to close a deal? It kinda sounds like its the ideal hitman to me. A hitman who gets development contracts for family friendly games!

Ok now I like that image way too much... where is my skinny black tie and white shirt?

See you at the Seattle Casual Connect Conference. I have little bags of candy. Come get some.

A view from space.

2007-07-10T11:43:00.000-07:00

As I sat in the movie theater and let depression creep in on me, whisky bottle in hand and head filled with angry feelings of blackest sadness I found desperation to be extremely distracting.

Then the movie ended and my entire evening improved.

What you thought I was depressed about Skill City? Well I am but I mostly experiencing soul crushing sadness at how stupid Live Free or Die Hard was. Anybody who knows anything about computers should join me in being automatically offended at how Hollywood continues to portray hackers as some kind of techno-music swilling 20 something super-culture of buzzword dropping Gap models.

It makes me hate life, and people who are also alive. Mostly people who make movies like this where hackers live in a dream world and are capable of things that simply aren't possible. I think calling the writers of a movie like this "alive" is giving them too much credit.

Ok anyway you probably want to know what going on with the business. I know I sure do. If you find out tell me.

So far we have obtained from my brother a large chunk of money to simply toss at "the people" as an emperor might toss bread to the peasants. We are doing this by running some huge tournaments with gigantic pots. No more progressive, no more rake. These are flat prize, top 5 take a cut, tournaments of skill.

Its a good plan right? When your business is out of money what do you do? We give money away.

The hope is obviously that people start paying attention to us. Somebody out there will say "Hey I played a tetris-esque game and won $50 bucks today. I need to tell people about this." and then they will...

Maybe they will say "Hey I'm the only one entering these tournaments, I can sit here and take all 10 thousand dollars Skill City is giving away this month by winning all these things easily."

I hope they don't cause that would suck. So to prevent that we are advertising the big event.

Previously we advertised on Project Wonderful whose cheap silky smoothness led millions of users to our website, at least their stats said that. The web server disagrees, so I don't endorse them as much as I did before. Click-Fraud is an ugly word and I shan't throw it around.

Now we are going to just take off the gloves and admit what we are. We are a video game tournament site with cash prizes based on performance. Is that a legal casino where you play arcade games instead of poker?

It sure as hell is.

The longer I circle the drain, the more dizzy I get

2007-07-09T10:53:00.000-07:00

Building a game system and interface that has been praised by just about everybody is one thing, but telling people it exists is another.

Once you have told them, will they pay for it? I have found that the answer is no. I would like to say that I just don't have a large enough audience. I think I can say that safely. We get about 1 subscribers or cash player for every 100 people who sign up. If I had 100,000 users that would be enough to pay for the servers every month but nobody here would be getting a salary still.

The ones who do pay should balance out the freeloaders, thats the hope anyway. It works for a lot of places. Why isn't it working for us?

Those other places are casual. You can load a web browser that remembers your login info and just play some brainless mouse clicker games. Then wander off... Skill City requires more input, it's a dedicated "Im going to sit down and play" activity. It's breaking the casual game mold.

As my friend just put it: Asking people to play a progressive tournament on your site for money requires them to enter their billing info and deposit money first. Its a long process. I might as well be saying to them "Just go to DOS and configure IPX/SPX and then we can play some DOOM!"

He is right. Our conversion from download to account creation went up when we stripped every field off the registration screen and just had it ask for username and password. If only we could do the same with cash games. Sadly the mark of the beast hasn't been implanted on every human yet, and you cant just wave your hand in front of the computer screen and have it debit your bank account. We still require typing, and the entry of a 16 digit number off the back of a plastic card.

What Skill City needs is revenue so that we can continue to build more games, to eventually offer the huge citadel of puzzle games that one can get from sites like Pogo and MiniClip. That should get people more motivated to either subscribe to that service, or to put in cash to play tournaments when they easily have an opponent waiting for them.

We built a space in to Skill City for advertising, because I knew someday we would use it. Now I need to figure out where the people who buy ads for that space are located, so that I can call them up and ask them to buy it. I wanted to run Skill City pure and clean, unsoiled by garish advertisements, but that's not gonna happen.

People actually turn off ads on sites, or complain about them, and then use that site anyway. They don't get that without that ad the site they like wouldn't exist.

My hopeful optimism is fading of late, and its getting hard to write perky blog entries where my eyes glitter with visions of a grand future. I feel like the architect who has built a utopia, and now sits alone in it. I am not giving up hope, and I am not saying that we are done. There is no towel to be thrown in, I sold it for grocery money.

Achievement-esque

2007-07-05T11:57:00.000-07:00

I don't like the modern over-use of the suffix "esque" on to a noun to simply mutate it in to an adjective, but then again sometimes the easy way out beats writing a 6 sentence explainer on how you think your idea idea is similar to something else.

I heard a song on the radio Friday on the indie music station here in Southern California and I thought it was great. Then it went to the reviewers who all ripped in to it calling it unoriginal and derivative. I liked it, I'm the consumer, not these pompous radio DJs and their has-been movie star guests.

I sat for a moment in my car, probably at a red light or trapped behind the mummified remains of some ancient monarch driving 20 miles an hour, and thought to myself how often I get that same reaction.

A player plays one of my games once, and then shrieks that its derivative and hates. Librum Confundo haters baffle the hell out of me. They keep calling it Bookworm. Please name something other than the general "word find" that it has in common with Bookworm. If we are gonna get really stupid like that then please call it call Boggle, because that game was first. While we are at it, why don't we complain that it ripped off soccer or poker? They are both games. Boggle totally ripped off soccer, its just a derivation of soccer for people who cant run and are more verbose than others.

Damn you soccer!

Anyway several people said I should do achievements in the games. I agree. We have a system in there now of experience, and you can't buy certain avatar items unless you get a set amount of experience. Other achievements we haven't put in yet will include special trophies on the wall that you will only be able to purchase (and they will be cheap, since you earned them) by getting a certain high score. Much like bronze, silver, and gold medals only these will be district and game themed.

I love the districts, they help me keep things themed and easy to classify. Provides a nice foundation for just about everything and an iron guideline should I ever wonder what style or imagery I need to call upon.

Somebody also requested more story in there. More fluffy info about Skill City and its bizarre founders... etc. I wrote that all already, its just that I had no idea where to put it.

I think I'll throw it in the forums for now... maybe later I'll make a spot on the website for it.

Insert Voodoo

2007-07-03T16:14:00.000-07:00

We finished the Progressive Tournament system today. For info on what that is, please see this link, cause I'm getting tired of retyping it all the time. Seriously like 80 people have said "Whats that?" and then I type this huge explanation in.

That's why I won't do two shows a night anymore. I won't do it.

Anyway to announce the new addition I emailed out an update to all our existing users. It took a while too, but they got it.

Its nice to see the Players Online screen packed with people again. Now if I can just get them to play a few progressives, or subscribe, that would be nice too.

Thats where Voodoo comes in. Having tried all conventional means of marketing, advertising, incentivizing, and downright bullying users to pay us, I have now forsaken these traditional means and decided to opt for a new approach.

Using state of the art Haitian Voodoo we will systematically perform some sort of ritual for each user in the database. It will involves bones and probably a chicken, because everybody knows that's what it takes for Voodoo. Without the chicken its just a bunch of people looking silly and drinking rum, like a frat party but with more people speaking French. You add a chicken running around and you go from boozed up 20 year old hazing party directly to supernatural recipe for success!

Early tests in to the Voodoo tactic was promising, with only moderate zombie attack.

OMG Ow.

2007-07-02T18:12:00.000-07:00

Just as I am celebrating the triumph of our programmer's avoidance of Jury Duty, or as the kids call it "Judy" because they like to mash up names, I get notified that Jacob was in a terrible car accident.

I am of course overcome with worry for his well being, and just as I am about to explode he walks in the door. He seems fine. Then about 10 minutes later as I am helping him stand up after he collapsed I realize the intricacies of head trauma can outfox even an astute observer such as myself.

One head X-ray later, and with medications in tow, we head back to the office. He has a CT Scan tomorrow to make sure his brainy meats are intact and not all mooshed up against his eyes.

Tonight we patch in Progressive Tournaments, or at least, we are going to make a go of it. We might find that its going to take too long and we do make more mistakes when sleep deprived so experience has taught us its better to get some rest and patch when the sun has come back up.

This, for us, is the big moment. I think its bigger than when we even went live and announced our presence to the whole wide world, because this is the part where we find out: Can we make money with this?

Clearly if the answer is no, then Skill City isn't long for this earth. Even though a few Korean MMOs I know have been running for years as the hemhorage cash, that's a testament to the skill of their investor relations staff as they wheedle money from the rich and foolish.

I'm currently accepting applications for anybody who has listed wheedling as their primary talent, and if you have used the word wheedle in the last 5 days on purpose then I'm already impressed.

That was a joke. I'm not actually hiring.

Civic Duty Disaster Averted

2007-07-02T10:57:00.000-07:00

It always happens like this. As soon as you are reaching some kind of critical point with your business, which happens to be only 4 guys, somebody gets the much dreaded envelope in the mail.

Its the one that talks about how you have to call a phone number at this date and time, and if you don't then men well come to your home and place a sack over your head and take you someplace awful, like Arizona.

Its the Jury Duty envelope.

Drew got one, and he diligently called the number every Sunday for two weeks as instructed. Thankfully for us the friendly recorded message always said "You don't need to serve at this time, please call again in one week. " He did so, until last night the recording informed him that his services were needed and his obligation had been fulfilled. He is now free of the recorded message's robotic clutches for another 2 years.

Thats the good part about living in Southern California. There are so many people here that Jury Duty is actually pretty rare. If you do get summoned, odds are good that the defendants attorney will just end up doing some smack with the plaintiff up in Hollywood and they'll work out their differences. No jury required.

The odds are also good that you will end up on a murder trial and your company will be screwed because the only guy who can program a specific feature is currently working on deciding if the bloody gloves fit.

I'm also sick today. I got some kind of weird ear infection and it feels like its getting better, but as I already naturally have vertigo an ear infection means that I'm so dizzy I have a hard time standing up. Ever played a video game with vertigo? Its really annoying.

Business as usual?

2007-06-28T14:35:00.000-07:00

As can be expected the concept art for Potions 101 is vastly different from what is being drawn right now in the room next to me. Jacob, our artist, has the magical ability to do things. He does those things with pencils, and often with a Wacom Tablet. The result of these frightening rituals is art that is luscious to the eye. I often close his door as I walk past, because part of the work process to produce these wonders means that he must have his music up really loud.

Skill City is in the "bumbling along" state right now. I'm almost positive that's a technical business term. We aren't making a lot of money, but we aren't wholly unpopular either. We still get several new accounts a day.

The plan thus far had been to mass mail everybody in the database with an announcement that all the games are free (bye bye keys!), and that we have progressive tournaments ready to go! We missed the deadline on progressive tournaments. There was some issues with communication here that fouled us up and for a moment, it was enough that a tiny bit of confusion caused us to miss patching it in on Tuesday.

No worries, that buys us more time to debug and playtest everything before we patch it in next week. Then I will send out a mass email to the whole wide world and announce our new features. Hopefully that will get some people in to try the rest of the games.

Right now, most people seem to login and play the free one then log out and never return. With all games free, I intend to keep more of them in our system. With progressive tournaments up and running, I intend to actually make some money.

We shall see how that pans out on Tuesday.

The To Do List

2007-06-24T14:58:00.000-07:00

I'm making this list in a public place because I get asked this a lot in forums, in chat, and in person.

In true first grade essay form I title this piece: What I Think Skill City Needs Before it Goes Live

Well ok it's already live, but I don't know what comes after BETA test, Gamma? Delta epsilon nu? Sounds like a fraternity to me.

Here is the list:

1. Installer is too big. I would love to make the installer something really small and break the client off from the games, so installation is just the client. When you play a game it will download the latest version of the game.

2. Patching. This will now be much easier for the user, because when you play a game its version info is checked and if there is a patch for that game only it will patch. You don't have to dowload 5 patches as soon as you start the client, just because you haven't played for a month.

3. No more Windows Installer. Its a terrible terrible unstable thing designed by a madman and I have a heap of technical support emails for people whose machines simply wont run it because it has too many weird components.

4. Progressive Tournaments. These are going to be in very soon.

5. Paypal. People all over the world use it, and right now we only take Visa and Mastercard. We need to accept something with larger use, like a gateway that just takes everything... like paypal.

6. Two more games: potions 101 and hangman. Potions 101 is as good as gold, its rolling through production and picking up steam. Hangman is... well its simple. Im not too worried about timeline on that title.

7. Website. Our current website is hard to update. I think maybe something with less graphics might be better, I'm doing a little updating on that. The survey so far says people don't like it.

8. The games. The existing games are in a constant state of update and patching to fix issues. I really don't get a sense we are terribly stable yet. I run in to one bug every ten games I play, on average. They could also use a little more fluffing up.

All of this comes down to time of course. Do we have the time to do it? If we rush something out so that we can start making money on it to buy ourselves more time to polish the product and then patch later, was that a good decision? Most of the time it isn't, but most of the time these games have corporate funding of some kind!

We'll get this list done, and it will be fast and solid because thats how we roll here at Skill City.

Im the tin dog!

2007-06-19T22:47:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I actually do feel like that, then I realize that its totally not true. I'm not the tin dog. I'm The Master. The cool new snakey one, not the dumb old black and white one.

On to this evenings topic! I had a lovely phone call with my friend Andrew who brought me up to speed on his thoughts re: Potions 101.

He made several interesting points, one of which is a roadblock to many users of Skill City: They see the games as clones, and then they have a hard time with the fact that they aren't.

Saying "Its Dr Mario except for the following list of changes, that when viewed from 30 paces distant will reveal the game is not Dr. Mario at all." That just confuses people. I try not to even name a games original inspiration because of that very effect.

We discussed my mechanic changes, and mostly we talked about the fear of leaving a full field behind when you clear yours of the imps that populate it. I had put in the bomb... but maybe, just maybe that isn't going to be enough. Just depending on smart play will take a game out of the "flow" region of entertainment where enjoyment comes naturally. Instead it makes the game a chore, and nobody likes doing chores. There was the exception of my sister that I think did enjoy doing chores, but I suspect it was some roundabout method of being existential and avoiding the more terrifying aspects of simply existing that drew her to enjoy house work.

Andrew proposed that there be something else, another powerup that can occur. After all, why stop with one? His suggestion was something like the Rainbow Crash Gem in our Mega Gem Battle... or at least cripple it so it only clears half... then what if another simply turned all of one color in to bubbles?

We talked about bubbles then for a while. It's an attack, yes its annoying, but it also adds a rich element to the game that allows greater counter attack, if used properly, that you never could have done before. Chains combos reaching double digits? Perhaps.

I still like the bomb. I think we'll add in the rainbow crash too, just because they are pretty and Jacob likes to draw rainbows, and unicorns. Sometimes he draws rainbows and unicorns on the same page even.

Customer Service is Dead

2007-06-19T11:35:00.001-07:00

I sit logged in to Skill City from 9am until about 11pm every day just to talk to the people who use it and make sure they have somebody to go to if they have questions or problems.

When the tidal wave of Penny Arcade people came in I greeted them all individually and made sure they know who I was and that I was there for them.

I was a bit surprised by how few said anything back to me, or ever asked me for help. Then Neala comes up and says that just about everybody is chatting with her. Why not me I wonder?

She asked around and got her answer: they thought I was bot.

Its a very very sad commentary on the state of human interaction with business that when somebody gets a personal greeting they assume its a robot and are so sure of their assumption they never actually check.

I did get one person who said "Is this a bot?" and I said "No. Last time I checked I was a person." He then requested that I take a Turing test. I informed him of my failure rate at tests, especially when put on the spot like that, and he decided I was indeed not a bot.

I think the reason that customer service is dead at so many businesses is because the management of those businesses is dead. Their zombie attitude, or even blatant hostility towards their customers, spreads to the workers. Much like zombies spread their undead scourge. I like zombie movies.

Lately even the ennui at the local Subway sandwich shop has made me no longer desire to eat there. Walking in to get a sandwich is like walking in to some kind of concentration camp where hollow eyes and sunken cheeks turn in your direction as you enter, pleading with you to simply end their misery.

Granted if they hate it so bad, they should go get another job. But it wouldn't hurt the employer to make the place a little more tolerable either. The place has NO air conditioning and the poor sandwich creators stand with their backs to the heat belching ovens all day. Ugh. No wonder they scowl at me when I ask for my bland sandwich to be toasted, in hopes of coaxing out some hidden flavor.

This morning I tried to visit the people who just moved in next door to us. They are a CAD translation software company called Elysium Inc. For those playing along at home, thats the place Greek Mythology equates to the Christian idea of heaven. I walked in with a little bag of chocolates and said hello so some of the programmers. They said hi, and I got that sense of Subway Face from them. That same sort of soul drained look, and it isn't even past 4pm yet. The female coder said I should take my gift to "the boss" so I did.

This man attacked me verbally, told me I was a solicitor, commanded me to leave his office, and then stood up and herded me towards the door before I could finish a sentence. I managed to say over my shoulder I was the business owner next door and wanted to give him a present. He told me that his business was not a fun business, it was serious, and to get out as he shoved me towards the exit.

Customer service is dead because people like him run companies. I have never met him before, and yet he insulted me, insulted my business, wouldn't let me even speak, and was physically abusive to a total stranger who was quite literally bearing gifts.

Take heed my readers. Should you start your own business, your attitude towards people is the same one your employees will wear towards your customers.

Can I swear? Can I say that assholes who run businesses have businesses full of assholes? I probably shouldn't. Swearing is crass.

The wang has smacked us

2007-06-17T11:14:00.000-07:00

I didn't want to talk about it until I had a few days to wrap my head around what had happened. It was all so much to handle. Now that the event is over, I'll relate the whole story to you here.

Since as long as I can remember I have been a Penny Arcade fan as are the two programmers here, Chris and Drew. Of course the artist, Jacob, had heard of them before in that he tries to keep in touch with anybody on the Internet that the art world talks about. Gabe's comic book style has evolved so much its awesome to just go back to the first comic and witness the start of it, like watching a galaxy form from cosmic dust and particles.

Naturally when we had started researching where to go for advertising I had gone to my old haunts: the web comics and the game blogs. It's probably no surprise that most people these days don't hear about a game from an advertisement, they hear about it from a friend. That friend most likely read about the game, or saw a trailer, on the Internet.

So I decided that web comics would be a good place to advertise and I hit up Penny Arcade for the ad. Their rate was double that of other sites, but their name is behind everything they promote. It's quite different from a normal banner ad in that they aren't just showing you an ad, they are showing you something they believe in. I couldn't afford to advertise there so I had to go out and raise the funds for a ten thousand dollar minimum campaign by cashing in one of my retirement funds.

If you are gonna start a company, and its something you believe strongly in, then I think its only natural to put your entire being behind it. Finances included.

I had a campaign running with Blind Ferret already, and it was doing pretty well, we had about 15 new accounts a day, but it wasn't enough to get us over that "I love your games, but there is never anybody online to play them with" sort of hump we were scrambling to climb.

Then the news came, Penny Arcade was going to review the site and get back to us with a decision on if they would allow to advertise. Shortly after that I got the email that they had decided not to, since we were "a casino." Needless to say my heart sank. I was extremely crushed getting that kind of news from a site I looked up to and respected so highly. I wrote back with a letter explaining we weren't a casino and basically overloaded them with links to videos of our games on YouTube, explanations of how our system works, and so on.

It worked. I got back an email that they would take a closer look, and that night I saw Tycho log on and try the games. The next day I got an email that they were still on the fence about it because of the cash tournament aspect, and when they are on the fence about something they chose to not advertise it. I cannot fault them for this, a personal policy like that makes decision making in a business much easier, and it's clearly working for them because they are quite successful.

Then came the news that made my heart stop, I think I literally had a little bit of a heart attack when Jeff (the advertising manager there) told me that Tycho going to mention us in the news.

We weren't going to get a banner ad up, but instead would get talked about on the most popular game related blog in the universe. I did a dance then in my office, with the door closed, so nobody could see what it looks like when a man having a heart attack does little happy dance. Its something you can't ever unsee, and it burns itself on to your retinas.

Wednesday the news went up. We went from having an average of 15 new accounts a day, to about 1000 in a 48 hour period. Let me just praise everybody here and the servers themselves for performing admirably. Even with all that traffic we never topped more than 5% utilization. Hooray for good compact design!

Anyway we now have a large user base and finding a match up has never been so easy.

Now we need to make sure we can carry that momentum. To do so we are adding progressive pot tournaments, that's where you pay something like 50 cents to enter a tournament with a prize that I start at 100 dollars. Every time you or somebody else enters, your entry fee gets added to the pot and it progresses. You can enter as many times as you want, and the tournament runs for a week. At the end of the week (or two days, or a month, whatever) the top 5 places get the pot split among them with the first place winner taking more than the second, the second taking more than the third, and so on. Games are played in single player mode so there is no waiting or issues with finding a match up.

Then about two weeks after we launch those, the next game will be ready for launch. Only subscribers get to play it for the first week, as a perk to thank them for subscribing... but then its open the public. We will pretty much just keep cranking out games every couple weeks from then on.

Yes, Tetris attack (aka Panel De Pon) is one of them.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the game design

2007-06-08T15:55:00.000-07:00

My prime directive: Make all games multiplayer-interactive by some kind of interference mechanic.

So how was I to take something with a Dr. Mario mechanic, originally, before I nuked it, and make it fit this directive?

I thought first about making your performance increase the difficulty of your opponent by having additional little beasties spawn on them. That would definitely add some annoyance factor, and it would certainly speed on their way to defeat as you do better. It would also give them the balance of now having more beasties to clear so they can simply get more points than you.

But what about when they clear that extra gremlin / imp/ dancing little monster thing? I should consolidate my nomenclature... I will call them gremlins from now on. So anyway you have given an extra gremlin to your opponent, wont he just clear his and give it back? This becomes a balancing act I didn't want to deal with. I scrapped the plan and decided to do something else.

This is the part where I find it extremely helpful to have a story for every game. Even if the user never reads it, your game needs to be encompassed by a story. Something as rich as a short little story can always give you a firm place to stand and think. Sit with me for a moment in the Magic School Classroom. What do we see here? Whats life like? Well there are hideous gremlins all over the place so its not entirely a bowl of cherries at the moment but as we clear them up we get a chance to race our opponents. Lets be nasty to them too and try to tip the odds in our favor eh?

Then it comes to me, and it fits the theme and my mental image of this game. As you clear imps, or puzzle pieces that have built up and touch 4 of a kind, you increment a counter. When that counter reaches its limit, lets say 4, you will toss useless pieces in to your opponents field. You see this in our Quadria and Mega Gem Battle game too. The mechanic of this interfering piece, which I like to call interferons because I fancy myself a virologist, is different in just about ever game. Sometimes you have to activate them, transform them, or rid yourself of them by various methods.

I decided that I would make them bubbles. What magic is complete without puffs of smoke, flames, and bubbles? Add some paprika and you could have some really terrific chili too.

Anyway that's what I decided on. Bubbles. You will get these annoying pieces based on the performance of your opponent. They are weight triggered, so to pop them and get them off your screen you just have to stack up some stuff on top of them until they burst. Doesn't matter what you put on them, however you should probably try to balance out your immanent death from overflowing your field by popping them with wisely placed pieces which come crashing down and trigger a combo. They make combos so much easier. See how that works? They have to hinder, but the wise can turn that in to help.

Then the player gets that "Oh darn, you attacked me!" and then a "Thanks for that. Now I'm gonna make a comeback!" experience. Personally, I don't play puzzle games that lack this because to me they are unbalanced. One player pulls ahead, and you can just give up because then you cant catch them. Balance is key my dear readers, and now let us walk the tightrope of project management and get this game made!

Internet shminternet

2007-06-07T17:26:00.000-07:00

Im currently involved in the middle of some ISP ugliness regarding DSL Extreme, and my current ISP who is SpeakEasy.

Both are, quite frankly, terrible. Speakeasy is so expensive only a madman would buy it (I currently am that madman) and DSL Extreme is so cheap they make up for that by never working properly and by hiring harpies as customer service reps.

Until I get this worked out I'll have to put my blog on the back burner. I should be back tomorrow though, I have the luck of the Irish on my side. Thats right, I keep an Irish guy shoved in one of my desk drawers.

More thoughts on game design...

2007-06-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

I figure that sharing this info probably makes for the more interesting blog entries. This is gonna be a multi-part entry so that I don't end up writing a novel in one day and boring you, or entertaining and informing you so much in a single 24 hour period that your head literally explodes.

Here is a movie where you can watch my original title called Antskrieg being played by myself and friend of mine in Skill City.

Designing this game was an absolute blast. How come? Well for starters my kitchen was over run with gross little wiggly ants that morning and I find that even the most mundane tasks spark my imagination. Second, seeing your imagination come to life and then be shared by other people is a reward that defies words. You just have to try it.

Im in the middle, or what I actually hope is the end, of the fine-tuning process on our new game called Potions 101. I think I have said it already, its a game that is inspired by the title Dr. Mario.

This game was fun, but it was also extremely short lived for me. I beat one or two levels and then put it away because it didn't keep my interest. Multiplayer mode was even worse for me. It was just a race to clear your screen of the little dancing germ monsters.

If I could place all video game design in to categories, I would place this one in the "taking an existing product, and improving it so much its barely comparable to its parent." There are of course many other categories like "totally original production" or "slight upgrade to existing product."

My project with Dr Mario fit in to the first one, because clearly there is a game out there that I have played before and thought to myself "Hey this is nice, but I got tired of it too fast, here is what I would do if I was The King." Not that King, I don't wish I was Elvis, although I do wish I could do karate with a cape on and look even half as awesome as he did.

First place I start is to list out what I don't like about Dr. Mario. Well I sort of said it already:
1. Its too short. Levels are just a race to clear a few guys and then you move on to a level with more guys, repeat until you get bored which is going to be about ten minutes.
2. Multiplayer is awful and features no competitive interaction.
3. We don't live in an 8-bit world any more, so lets update everything
4. Add some depth to the game by looking at how the mechanic can be expanded. I'm talking basic game mechanic here, not just multiplayer or "lets add another color" although that is part of it.

Now that I have an enumerated list its going to be much easier to explain how I diverge from the parent product. First of all its too short. I play a lot of puzzle games, seriously tons, their weight alone could crush a star. I found that for me, and for those I observed playing, most people tend to lose interest if a level or match goes beyond just a few minutes. I'm not saying that playing a level forever doesn't have its appeal, I get plenty of emails asking for something like Quadria to run forever with no timer. I am saying that a game needs a limit, and if its not something like gravity where the pieces simply fall faster and faster until you are forced out, then it needs a hard time limit. I fall back on my secret love of 2-d fighters (Darkstalkers how I love thee) and say that a puzzle match is just like a fighter match. If both characters are equal, the match could last 8 minutes or more as they trade attacks and counters and blocks. Time itself will then decide the victor.

In Dr. Mario, like most other puzzles, you can also fill your screen, which will end your game. Im a fan of that mechanic too, it forces you to play smart.

So how is Dr. Mario short? What do I mean by short? Well you clear the bad guys and the level ends. You are then met with a new level of bad guys, clear field, and you just go at it all over again. Its like painting a bridge, get to one end and you turn around and start painting it again towards the other end. You know they do that right? Now you have a new cliche in your verbal arsenal.

I wanted to make Potions seem like it just goes on and on, because if you are good at it you could certainly last forever. Those who aren't good at it, well they can pretty easily last over the 3 minute match time. This is true of fighters IMHO, though fighters do get tough to go forever since you have limited life.

I decided to change the mechanic. Now when you clear the bad guys, you don't move on with tabula rasa. You get more, plus one for each time you have cleared, and your puzzle pieces from last time remain on the field, littering it with debris that now mocks you. You must clear down through that field of trash you left behind from a rushed level to reach the little dancing monsters who have now spawned afresh. This effects the entire game now. Not just up to the point you beat the level and cleared all the bad guys. Now your mistakes in the past, the trash you left behind is still there and its incredibly dangerous to your survival of this next round. Its also profitable, as you have more stuff to clear and thus rack up some points. Maybe you were smart and left it configured in such a way that it will trigger combos and give you even more points?

With this largely negative impact on clearing a level, there has to come a positive as well. Unbalanced games are genuinely un-fun. I further changed the mechanic: new pieces! Instead of adding more bad guys or more colors to manage, I just added a random power-up piece that you will get to toss in to your field. It gives you hope in dark times, it gives you something to look forward to, and most of all it helps get rid of all the junk on your screen: bombs!

Its a traditional "blows up everything around it when it lands" sort of piece. Nothing flashy, it just didnt exist before and I think it helps to balance out the fact that your field can now fill with debris and kill you pretty quickly if you aren't strategic.

So thats how I met two requirements, I made the game infinite, and to do that I modified the mechanic to balance out those changes. I do think I made the game a little harder by doing this. Originally Dr. Mario required little thought until you were up in to ten or more levels of play, I often found I didn't get that far out of sheer boredom with the mechanic though.

Tomorrow I'll talk about the other stuff I changed, and even some changes I haven't made up my mind on.

Your tax dollars at work.

2007-05-31T17:33:00.000-07:00

First, my trademark for Skill City got declined by the United States Patent and Trademark Office because the name given on the registration was incorrect, according to them. What was the name? Nathan Reese, Skill City Inc. It turns out when the form asks for your name, and then the name of your business, you aren't supposed to actually fill that in. The kicker is that if you do, it voids the entire application and you cannot simply repair it. You just get to kiss your 250 dollar application fee goodbye.

So I did that. It was a fond farewell because I was really just starting to feel like me and my money were getting along.

I filed again, and guess what? I got it back again, this time saying that a pending application by a company with a similar name and logo are too easily confused with mine. Who would that be? Nathan Reese, Skill City Inc. of course. I was also told that my choice of colors was not acceptable because I used works like purple and orange, and they would have chosen to name different colors like red and blue, and yellow.

Apparently you don't have to be color blind, or a mad man, to work at the US Patent and Trademark Office, but it helps. We also choose to interpret the word "helps" as "is an absolute requirement" just as we also tend to think that orange is a different color than yellow.

That's just me though. Its not like it cost me nearly six hundred bucks to squabble over semantics with a faceless pseudo-attorney someplace in Washington DC. No... no wait... yes it has...

Oh but wait, the whining continues: 7 months ago I filed the artwork for our 5 titles with the Copyright office. I used Form VA for Visual Arts, as I wished to copyright the artwork for the games and not the sound. The first title, Antskrieg, was accepted and I received a letter back with my certificate. The second title, Explodinator, was rejected and I received a letter back telling me I should use Form PA for Performing Arts when copyrighting a video game.

Ok so who at the copyright office read my first application, and who read the second one? Clearly there should be some kind of actual system to this instead of just throwing a dart at the pile of Copyright Application Forms and announcing "These will be randomly rejected, the rest will be accepted."

Keep this in mind when starting your own video game company my dear readers. You must deal with a government that is as old and belligerently stupid as any carnivorous dinosaur ever was. You could say to yourself, that you have common law copyright. You do, its just nearly impossible to prove that in court, especially when the guy stealing your work has more money than you. So make sure you file often, and file early, because the one guy that handles all this stuff for the entire nation has the IQ of a pomegranate.

Thus ends this weeks Rant. Im in a foul mood because I just checked our metrics. 7000 downloads in two weeks!! Holy Crap Thats Awesome! How many of those registered for a new account? 500. How many of those subscribed? 9.

WTF!?

Lickable wallpaper.

2007-05-29T15:17:00.000-07:00

I'm totally open to suggestions on what you think would be interesting for me to tell you about during my rise from just a guy, to just a guy who does his best to run a video game service.

I have had quite a good time playing my own games and meeting an absolute crowd of new people. In the week that we have been actively advertising our presence, and openly discussing "the product" on developer forums and gamer blogs we have had just barely shy of 500 new accounts made.

Of those, 60% are repeat users, so quite a few people make an account and look around for a bit and then leave without ever talking to us again. I do intend to change that though, I have a survey I'm going to send everybody so I can find out what they think. I was just going to call that Montel Williams show and see if I could get hooked up with the psychic he always has on. You know the one who looks like somebody deflated a toad and then put lots of make-up on it? That's the one. She could certainly tell me what everybody thinks using her supernatural psychic powers.

Failing that though I'll just use The Internets to write a little web survey and get some more feedback.

So far the following ideas have met with smashing success:

1. updating puzzle games people love, that they haven't seen for years
2. making those multiplayer capable over the Internet
3. changing mechanic so they are new enough to not be the "same old thing"
4. Players Online screen
5. Challenge system
6. Avatars. Everybody loves dressing up an avatar.
7. Its an every day occurrence now that I am told how much people love the music.

What hasn't been successful? What is in our system that nobody uses?
1. General chat room. Nobody is ever in there, though people do chat during and after games a lot.
2. Subscription. Please subscribe, we need to pay the rent.
3. Skill City Map. I haven't yet witnessed anybody who uses it to navigate, no matter how cool it looks.
4. Baking with Nucoa. Everything just turns out greasy, someday I'll find out how to make this butter alternative work.

Coming soon to a theater near you.

2007-05-24T10:34:00.000-07:00

Would you like another peek at the future? Gaze now in to my magical crystal ball and all shall be revealed.

After some looking we noticed that the system to challenge somebody online to a game was a bit lacking. Lacking so entirely that it was just not even present as if we hadn't coded it. That was all due to the fact that we were working on getting a bunch of other stuff done instead. Now it is time to add the Challenge! screens in.

We built a screen that you can go to and choose the game you wish to play, then specify if its for cash, or tokens, and then who you want to challenge. Its pretty sweet, because now you can control who you play against just by challenging them to a game. The exception here is that they must not already be in a game, because once you challenge them the above pictured window will pop-up. That would be really annoying if you were playing Explodinator and that came up.

We have another major roadblock to Player Happiness that we are overcoming on this next patch as well.

If you have played Skill City by now, and hopefully you have because its linked all over the place, then you might have thought to yourself: "This place is really really empty. Nobody is logged in at all. I would really enjoy eating some Pecan Sandies right now."

After you return from your trip to the kitchen, bag of cookies firmly in hand, you sit down and keep playing and only ever see phantom people blink in to a game room, and then vanish.

That's because Skill City removes you from the main game room chat when you are playing a game and puts you in to your own private chat. So, there are plenty of people online. You just cant see them because they are all busy playing solo or with others.

We fixed two problems here then:
1. Finding a playmate is now ridiculously easy
2. You can now verify that you are not alone, and see who else is in Skill City with ya.

Enter the Players Online screen.

Here you can see who is on, what they are doing, and then have access to some easy little icons to click them and talk to them, or challenge them. Good thing the challenge system is being built now too eh?

You also have the options of hiding yourself from the Players Online list, if you wish to be invisible or whatever. The truly cool feature is the note. You can put in something like "I want to play Quadria, challenge me. I'm also up for Ants." so that people know what you want, and are not afraid to talk to you / challenge you.

We also continue to add about 10 or 15 new avatar items per week.

Who wouldn't want to look like this dashing Student Mage? He even has that Tom Selleck mustache that just scares the heck out of anybody who sees you coming.

Ouch.

2007-05-22T13:38:00.000-07:00

I crashed on my mountain bike for the first time in two years. I could sense it coming that morning as I clipped my feet on to my pedals and started powering my bike along the dusty trails. I made the mistake of looking down at my bike and thinking about the scratches along the frame, then wondering to myself when I would crash because it had been such a long time since I had fallen.

I was real tired from riding Saturday, and so I set off down a cursed hill named Cactus that was already the site of grisly biker death (due to mountain lions) a good 4 years back. About a 16th of the way down the hill sure enough I hit some dusty and my back tire began to swing wide, it was go over a cliff in to the namesake of Cactus Hill, or enjoy a picturesque swan dive over the front of my bike in to an erosion formed mini-ravine. I opted to dive, and the judges were they present would have applauded my gracefulness as I slammed in to the ground tucked neatly in a ball and taking the blunt force on my shoulder and hip. Mind you years of training in martial arts (Ninjutsu) came in play immediately. Never break a fall with your hands, unless you enjoy broken wrists. I personally do not and was relieved when I stood up after tumbling three times down the hill only to find that I had some minor scrapes and a few weeds sticking out of my helmet. The "roadrash" up my leg and shoulder was only just starting to bleed, and all told I was in great shape. So was my bike.

Showering the next morning was like being immersed in stinging jellyfish. I miss having skin.

So on to business! We opened a download.com account and paid for a premium listing which was I think possibly the worst mistake ever. Their service was terrible. I opened the account on the 13th. The download showed up on the 18th. It took them 5 days to "process" despite the premium account being advertised as a one day deal. Then come the emails from upset downloaders that one they have sat through the godawful slowness of download.com their installer says "Archive is corrupt" when they try to install.

I test and get the same error. I have a friend test and he reports it installs fine, so their distributed network appears to have a rotten apple in the bunch.

It takes them 4 days to email back about the issue, and I get a form response.

I closed the account this morning and got my money back.

This leaves me in a weird place. Our download is rather big, and the stats so far have been promising. Download.com shows about 600 downloads, and that's only one of our 3 mirror sites from the main repository. How many of those were real, or completed, I cant say. That's another reason I think download.com is poor. Its not hard to see if a file completed sending in the weblogs for any of my other mirrors, they all give me access to those.

I'm not railing against download.com, I just want to share my negative experience. YMMV and all that. They were good at providing basically free bandwidth for people to download, I just don't think the headache was worth the 100 bucks.

At this point, I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that our web hosts don't kick us off for sucking down too much bandwidth. Then of course primary to that concern is that in one week, after the bulk of this weekends banner ad driven traffic realizes their trial period is ending, that we get some subscribers.

We are approaching 300 accounts in the database now. When we reach 500 I think I'll go buy another bottle of champagne. It was so tasty last week.

Friendly like a knife.

2007-05-18T13:59:00.000-07:00

"In a lawsuit that is sending ripples through the once-friendly online casual games industry" begins this article about the Big Fish v.s. iWIN law suit.

A year ago I had hoped that the casual game industry was friendly, I mean they do make games called Chocolate Castle and Micro Panda. Those names alone let you know that you are in for a warm hug.

The casual games industry is the opposite of friendly. I think its the cosmic sense of balance at play. If you make games about cute huggy bunnies and silly unicorns all the time then somewhere in your company all the evil has to go someplace. Most industry people keep a fresh supply of extra absorbent towels around the office to sponge that acidic foulness and then neatly toss it in to the incinerator. I think a lot of people in this industry ran out of towels, and so they just troll indie gamer blogs and forums where they bash people with their big troll clubs.

Gamers and game developers are just as petty and snide as any other industry, probably worse because of the maturity level of its own market and medium. Its young. Say it isn't and I'll point you towards other art mediums for comparison: books, paintings, song... to our 40 years of electronic media they have hundreds and thousands.

The Casual Games industry is an industry. It never was friendly despite its Chocolate Castle, filled with prancing German ballerinas, and all this lawsuit is doing is proving that to people who aren't part of the industry already. Industry is about robots making cars, and giant corporations stealing from each other.

Skill City will never be industry.

We just hope that while we stand here and cavort and sing, you love it enough to throw some money in to our hat. The rent is due soon.

Next game!

2007-05-17T14:37:00.000-07:00

We began work on our next game some time ago, but it was shelved so that we could focus on getting the massive amount of work for the Skill City Navigator finished.

Now that the Navigator is done, we are working all the various back end support utilities and tools that will allow us to provide technical support tracking, easy solutions for customers, etc. Nobody wants to manually type in a bunch of SQL queries every time somebody says "I cant reset my password, what was my email address again?" Stuff like that.

Once we have those tools solid, I would say in about a week or so, we are going to finish up the third game in the Magic School district. Although people keep seeing that district and thinking hey its just a rip off of this, I know better, because its actually a rip off of this. I would prefer to use "inspired by" rather than saying rip off, but couching terminology is something I was never guilty of doing.

What is this game? Well its titled Potions 101 for now. It might get its name changed to match the mechanic in play but for now I like the title. Its a class at Magic School that has been over run by the wildlife that the students are supposed to be studying. One of our "npc" characters is named Chase and he is the young Wizard prodigy of Magic School. With his assistance you are tasked with vanquishing the magical animals and restoring order.

The music is done, I was going to be doing sound effects this week but with launch of our ad campaign coming up tomorrow, and my all day project of uninstalling windows Vista, I have been too busy. Side note: I uninstalled Vista. I got tired of basic tasks taking many times longer than normal, and general instability with every program.

The game itself is a standard match-3 mechanic taken up to a match4 mechanic, where one of the pieces must be one of the monsters. Ever played Dr. Mario? That's my inspiration here, but if you read below in another blog entry, one of the factors I need to work in to this game is that its multiplayer. Dr. Mario was a fun game, but there was a lot of things I didn't like, and thus as with everything else I solve the problem by making something new and improved.

I don't want to bore you with the details, especially when playing the game will be more fun if its a surprise, so I'll skip to the end and give you some more eye candy. Here are the concept sketches for our little monsters that you must eliminate. I am also including the concept art for the puzzle pieces. In the case of this game they are spells, or spell components, that when grouped up release an effect that vanquishes the monster of their same color.

Sorry if this blog is wandering today, I had a late night with my friend Jim Beam.

Screeching and other sounds

2007-05-15T21:13:00.000-07:00

"Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable."
-Samuel Johnson

IF you write music, you don't need to read this. You will probably just read a few pages of me flopping around in a nomenclature like a suffocating fish.

I don't write music. I don't know anything about wine either, but I know what I like. I have been a fan of all kinds of music since I was old enough to hear. Everything from rap to classical music to bizarre Swedish death metal has, and still does, grace my playlist. Ok not so much the death metal, but sometimes I do enjoy a little rock powered fury on.. the... um... I don't even know that lingo either.

Its really hard to work with musician because I have music in my head, just like I have ideas for characters and games. The hard part is sitting down and writing it out, all I can do for the music is write out the imagery that I want the score to evoke.

I fall back on my film school training for that. I found that the hardest piece we did was the theme song for our Winterbaum district. I had a visual, and I could hear some of the score as I sat in my office and thought about it. I think the master of "winter" themes in his music is Danny Elfman, with Tchaikovsky coming in a close (if not equal) second place. I called the music guys, which in most cases is just the music guy. Peter and Jesse do an amazing job, Jesse is just always busy and when I interface with "the music people" its always through Pete.

Pete showed up and I walked him through this long visual sequence. We start in the frozen wasteland, its barren and lonely, snow is falling. Trees are few and far between, perhaps there is a deer, but the typical forest wildlife is sleeping. We wander around a little, see the winter sights, and then we find ourselves being drawn in to a large mine, its not a mine, its a dwarven mine and as we descend we find the warmth and life that the frozen wasteland above is hiding. Its a party, start the drinking music! Then as our camera of the mind wanders out of the under ground kingdom we are back outside, leaving...

That's how it went, and if you want to hear what they produced please take a moment to download and play Skill City.

You see, when you first log in you hear the Opening Theme. It takes you on an audio walk through the various districts, and when it ends, the jukebox begins. You hear the main theme to each district played in full, and they fade in and out gently so that you hopefully don't notice them too much. The Winterbaum theme is in there. Its actually been revised but only once, the bagpipes had a bit of dissonance in there and I asked for that to be fixed. I also asked for a Porsche and a magical pink horsey but Pete and Jesse can only do so much.

What about the sound effects? Well if you listen closely, and I mean really closely, you can tell that most of them are actually me. Yeah I had a fantastic time screeching and clucking and screaming in to my microphone. I would wager that my neighbors had a fantastic time listening to it too. The cops never showed up though so I'll make sure to be more realistic next game I record.

I start with a list of the events in the game, and then think of events that don't exist visually in the game. Abstract things like getting a combo or "doing good" need sound effects too.

I'm tired now though. Talking about sound effects and how I do all that will give me a good topic for later.

Today flew by, as I got the new website completed. I opened the download.com account too, farewell to $99 dollars but hopefully it will be worth it. Have you seen the new site yet?

Check it out!

Yes, have some.

2007-05-14T11:27:00.000-07:00

Today I got an email from a reader and fellow game designer/coder/developer named Jon who works hard over at White Tree Games. He asked me something that I had never actually written down before, so I was pleased to have the chance to do it.

"What are the main criteria behind the design of your games?"

Its one of those questions where you know the answer because its just something that's in your head, and has been so long its just sort of part of you. Like asking somebody "Why is holding the door for a woman polite?" You just know it is, you never thought about why, but given the chance to write it down you have the opportunity to quantify something pretty abstract and then let everybody else see the result. I'm a total essay nerd, I'm just going to come out of the closet right now and admit that I was the only one who liked getting writing assignments in school.

So here I go, trying to answer that question. What is the main criteria behind my games?

I want to keep the primary focus of Skill City on tournaments, which means that games need to be head-to-head directly, or indirectly within the game. Every game thus far has some kind of way that your positive performance will negatively affect your opponent (ie clear 4 rows at once in Quadria and you send rows of gibberish to your opponent).

I was playing with the idea that games could lack the head-to-head element as long as two unrelated games always had exactly the same odds on every level. Then scores could be compared post game in a fair environment to award the winner. This is how our competition works now, and one of the main reasons I started Skill City: I hate having my score anonymously compared to a faceless person and then told I won/lost. It removes all sense of community and competition, and makes the game little more than a slot machine where I get the results via form letter 5 minutes after pulling the handle. That is the opposite of competition, and the anathema of all fun and excitement.

I come up with games quite often in my sketchbook and fall in love with the idea of them, until I come to the big question: How is this going to be head-to-head? If I cant answer it, I gently turn the page and say farewell to that game design. This has happened only once.

Lucky for me most games are easy to tweak so that they have a head-to-head element. Even traditional game mechanics can be upgraded to support this. For example, I thought of about 4 ways to make Minesweeper head to head while I was trapped in the Seattle Airport last weekend for 6 hours. Thank to Starbucks and their sugary baked goods for making that hideously long pre-dawn layover bearable.

That's my primary criteria when I design a game, but there is more.

The secondary goal to achieve in my game design is to make the product fit Skill City. Skill City isn't just the software, its a whole world. When you first login you see a map that shows you the geography of the place these games are played. I have written pages and pages of story that the general public, much to my internal sadness, will never even read. In them I detail who founded Skill City, why they did it, who the characters that make up this place are... I created a world.

Why are you playing this game? What do you get for playing it? Where is the game taking place? Who is in the game?

This series of questions boils down to one thing: Theme.

By way of example take the game called KLAX that was pretty popular a while back, a long while back, like dinosaur times. It was fun, don't take me the wrong way. However I have a hard time with this game because if I was to try and update its mechanic to fit my world, I probably would have no trouble doing so and could even make some great improvements to it. (please disregard the sound of me tooting my own horn)

Anyway I would have a hard time thinking of how this game fits Skill City thematically. Skill City is a very Steam Punk meets Disneyland fantasy sort of place, I don't know how this weird set of 3D blocks tumbling at you can fit.

Then as I write this, I cant help but start to day dream about how it could... Maybe the board moving the pieces toward you is a river instead of a conveyor belt. The pieces are cute little turtles, frogs, and fish, and you stack them up in baskets. I then write a little story about how you are a fisherman and replace the cursor mechanic that was formerly some kind of platform that slid back and forth, with something more suitable. I have no idea what, but already my brain churns with the ideas and possibilities here.

I suddenly want to stop this email and go write a treatment for a KLAX type game.

I also use time as a limiting factor for the games instead of increasing levels. Pieces don't fall faster as you advance in score, the game doesn't get harder the longer you play. You can play at your own pace and just have fun, but to prevent you from just going forever I limit a round to 3 minutes. That also plays in to the head-to-head where two equally skilled players could conceivably play forever. Gotta prevent that.

Those are my two main criteria. Head-to-Head in real time, and theme. Its worth saying that everything else is considered as well, but not with the high priority. What is everything else? Easy to learn intuitive control, fun to play, bright happy graphics, sound effects and music that are acceptable when listened to 80 times in a row and that enhance your visual experience.

That would be a good blog entry for tomorrow. I'll talk about sound and music tomorrow eh?

Desk zombie.

2007-05-10T13:53:00.000-07:00

For a limited time only I have been replaced by a zombie. I only barely resemble the active healthy person who used to sit at this desk.

I caught a really nasty head cold over the weekend and it has been getting steadily worse as the week goes on. Im at the "dizzy and light headed" stage now as the infection moves from my sinuses in to my lungs where it will take up its phlegmy residence and prolong my misery for weeks in the form of a gurgling cough.

Lets all take a moment to appreciate the word spetum. It does so seldom get mentioned.

How does this affect us as a company? (see how I worked that in)

I think a lot of businesses forget about illness as one of those production killing factors they have little to no control over. We already missed our programmer for about 4 days when he became ill with a rather nasty skin infection. Now one by one people at the office are sharing this germ and its so close to our deadline, what will become of us?

Its no big deal if a 100 person company gets a rash of influenza, or just a normal rash, but still. When a 4 person game studio gets sick, its suddenly a 2 or 3 person game studio. Its hard to get much done.

I was working on the new website. I know, you are thinking we already finished the website but honestly there was so much wrong with the website thats up right now I just had to take it out behind the barn and do an "Old Yeller" on it.

I pushed back our launch by a week. I cant aford to do that again, but I am confident that we are going to rock the casbah on Friday the 18th with our official launch.

Why havent I shown everybody here a link to the website where the Beta installer can be gotten? Because I am waiting for the next patch, the one with prettier game screens and more avatar stuff. I dont want to share our system with the public until I am confident that your first impression will be a pleasant experience.

Total protonic reversal.

2007-05-07T17:28:00.000-07:00

I had to take a few days off and attend the wedding of a truly great friend up in Idaho. Did I ever mention that I lived in Idaho for a brief period? While there I worked for the source of misery, but I got over that and now I make games in sunny places. In the trued form of nerd-boy that I am we all exlcaimed "weddinged!" in our best impression of a Teen Girl Squad voice-over.

Personal mumbo jumbo aside lets talk about Skill City, because thats what this blog is for.

We had a meeting to re-do the website, and I now have 3 days to get it built entirely before we launch. I think I wont be working on my suntan or going to the gym to work on looking better with a sun tan. Instead I will be sitting at my desk frantically trying to meet that deadline: our banner ad displays on Friday.

I think I can do it. I am also pretty confident I can do it even while managing to slink away to the gym and swim laps. As for the sun, it is the enemy of pale complexion anyway, and going outside would cause my nose to fill with the sweet scent of blooming flowers shortly before my sinuses shut down in painful itchy watering yuckiness. Maybe its a summer cold?

Anyway our tasks this week are simple:
1. Make a banner ad
2. Make a website
3. Finish the huge list of features we want to shove in to the installer before we put it online Thursday night
4. Come to work Friday morning and stand, poised like a coiled snake, waiting to thwart bugs and technical support drama resulting from product launch.

Go team venture!

Once again, from the top.

2007-05-04T11:27:00.000-07:00

Off Topic
Im going to a wedding in about an hour. I have that pre-flight sense of dread that I get every time I travel by airplane. Its not the fear of flying, its the fear of missing my flight. I have missed flights before and the resultant nightmare... well thank goodness the gate agent thought I was 16 and was going to be lost in big scary Los Angeles if she didnt pull some strings and get me on the next flight. Hooray for looking like a child I guess. (I'm 31 for the record)

Back on Topic
Our website is up. You can see it here: http://www.skillcitygames.com/

I enjoy it as a second attempt. It certainly gets the idea across that we have pretty art, but I honestly think its a couple of things, and most people at work here agree with me:

1. Its claustrophobic. I feel enclosed in a very small space.
2. Its like looking at a 6 page banner ad. Its trying to get you to download the games without giving you enough of a reason to.
3. Too many images, too much CSS. Where is the mind relaxing white space? We are guilty of doing something that our competitors do: shoving 80 billion things in to one page and then losing your attention.

Now I dont think the magnitude of our transgression on item 3 there is as bad as our competition but I think its present.

The true drama arises from the fact that our launch date is a week from today. Will I be able to re-do the entire website in just one week, from soup to nuts? Will I be able to find a layout that I like if I only have this weekend to do so? Will the Rocketeer save Betty from certain doom as he car plummets from the cliff!?

Stay tuned next week Space Cadets! Our adventure continues!!

Or something. Honestly I'll just end up using my fiendishly long layovers in Seattle and John Wayne Airports this weekend to sketch out a new site. I think 6 hours of social isolation in a crowded noisy airport will be just the thing to get that done. Thank goodness they have free WiFi too.

What did version 1.0 of the website look like?

Here is a screenshot, complete with a little alignment glitch, but you get the idea.

Turtle wax and eastern European hot dogs.

2007-04-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

I thought you might enjoy seeing the other instructions.

I had spent a lot of time trying to write a story for the games, something that Joe Lieberman suggests in his great article. I had actually done it before I read his article, but it was validating to see somebody else say it.

Its also a paradox. People like story, a reason for playing, but people also dislike text and will shut down when confronted with it. I think I must be an exception. My eye is drawn to text and I must read it as soon as I see it, much to the fright of anybody with text scrawled on their shirt who then thinks I'm looking at their chest.

So how do you give story to people, and do it without text? Well let them play the game and get the story from the moving images, and pepper it with a little bit of text. If you images are compelling and tell a story on their own, then kudos to you and your design skills.

My story on the other hand got in the way of the directions for the game, so you would see all this text and just get rid of it as soon as possible.

Viola!

So who is going to read all that just to find out they need the mouse to play, and then to find out HOW to use the mouse to play. Its an eye full, and its awful.

I spent some time making it pretty, friendly, and best of all I loaded it with shiny pictures.

You cant see the scroll bar of course but there are actually 4 steps now, each step is illustrated and in plain obvious letters with few words. A glance at these images is enough to grasp how to play.

Mission accomplished I think.

Now its time to work on the rest of the polish. We are going to add some more fun little things to the games to make them, well, more fun. We added some little BAM animations to the screen when you get a combo move now so that you know you got one, and believe me when I say that this tiny little addition made scoring in the games seem WAY cooler. Its suddenly something I seek, I want a combo because I want to see those jiggly letters float up in the little starburst (you know, like from comic books where it says BAM!) and reward me for my effort.

Next we are adding some little effects to the Win screen so that winning isn't so bland. Winning should be neat, and should look as much.

As for Easter eggs, and shopping list reward systems as mentioned by Joe in his article, we have those in spades.

For those following, we have decided to beta on Monday, its the "drop dead absolute no more delays, I'm serious" deadline. All this talk of polish though has made we want a Polish dog at Costco. Those are the best skunk meat and soda a 1.50 can buy I tell ya.

Some retooling.

2007-04-27T17:33:00.000-07:00

So yeah, I think this makes things a lot better as far as "casual game" archetyp goes. Its casual because the people who play it are casual, not because the game is wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

I forget that sometimes I think. That the people who play the games are casual, and not the game itself. Your game can be serious, you just have to remember your audience isnt.

So when I made these enormous storylines for each game's original treatment I wanted to include them for other people to read. I naturally assumed the How To Play would be where those went.

That was possibly the worst place to put them. People say a novel worth of text when they clicked How To Play and just closed the window without looking.

I moved the gist of it in to "big picture" format so that even a cursory glance at the page embeds in your mind what you need to do, and how to do it.

Here is what our game selection screen for Explodinator looked like before (and technicall still looks like this now):

Not much to tell you what to do here, and though the story might be fun to read, you probably wont read it and will just start the game then become annoyed because you dont know how to play.

New screen is much more obvious, and of course this is the rough draft. The graphic design guy will probably want to spend a few hours with this making it look good, etc. But the gist of the game mechanic is here, its only two lines long, and its BIG AND WHITE on a black background, so its hard to miss.

I think this is much better as far as interface goes. If you want the story, well, sorry there just isnt a place to put it. I would love to work out something, maybe a section on the website where I can post all that fluffy flavor text, but for now it really does just obstruct your path to our entire reason for existance: The Games!

I could post some before / after shots of what we did to our chat system too after much Alpha tester input, but alas I have no screen shots of the old client and the new one is already.. well, new.

How is it possibly Friday again?

2007-04-27T10:18:00.000-07:00

I notice a slight shimmer as I walk in to my office. That must be the part where I pass through the fold in time and space that somehow catapults me to the end of a week every time I enter. I live in a world of perpetual Friday somehow.

Anywho I read a fascinating book exerpt over at GameCareerGuide last night and it made me suddenly realize the solution to my problem. I had known it partially anyway, in the way that you know fire is hot and you need to do something about reaching in to it. I had an idea. Seeing it talked about, and then illustrated nicely with big pictures really really helped.

Speaking of pictures I need to start including them with my posts dont I.

All 8 of you who read this would probably like to see some. I am going to redo our interface a little bit today, and I'll post before and after shots for ya.

TTFN

And then for a long time, nothing happened.

2007-04-26T13:56:00.000-07:00

Im not sure what I can post about today. This week I have been working almost entirely on getting a web design program to actually run in Vista.

My solution was to turn off my computer, put it over in a corner, and bring my Windows XP machine in from home. I regret that I am forced to do this, but the cold reality is that if you want to be productive you need to use XP. The software vendors dont seem to care about Vista at all, given the barely functional misery of using Adobe CS3 on it. Its only a week old, you would think it would support Vista... but Dreamweaver was clearly written by the insane.

I pretty much have the website finished, and Im so glad too because its been "Coming soon!" for almost a year. I guess its prespective though. For an ageless being of unfathomable vileness such as Cthulhu, "soon" could be like a thousand years. For a rabbit whose life span is a few years and whose heart beats faster than the drum line for a Vondur song, "soon" is a third of a second.

I do think about this when I make promises in public like: "Coming Soon!" or "Now tastier than ever!" or "Probably wont make you go blind!"

I am using server side includes on my website so that I dont have to copy the same piece of HTML 18 times. I know some people roll their eyes at SSI and other applaud. I could never really figure out why, I think people maybe just need something to fight over. I also made such great use of layers I think some HTML gurus would call it obscene, or glutinous. Wait thats wheat protein, gluttonous is the word I wanted.

For my next trick, a spell checker that can read your mind!

No honestly I just want to finish this website. Writing help and tutorials is kinda fun, but since I cant be funny or entertaining at all in them they do drag on a bit. I think people would actually read directions to things if they were also entertaining though. We have a real problem with people not reading directions on our games and then requesting technical support that its broken because the keys they assumed would control the game, dont. Seems silly doesnt it? There are instructions, but people dont like to read instructions.

There has to be a solution there someplace, one that doesnt involve being rude and demanding they enter a secret word to show they read the instructions or clicking a "I have read the instructions" box.

I'll think of it someday, until then I am, as always, open to suggestions and comments.

Linux, the beligerent OS.

2007-04-24T16:40:00.000-07:00

Now might be a good time to point out that we chose to run MySQL for our DBMS. Why? Because its free! When you are starting up and you can barely find two dimes to rub together why would you spend a lot of money on something like MS SQL Server? I tell ya why, because you did a lot of research on which one would work the best for you. You tracked down all those little features that make your database much faster and you ran some tests to see which one performed the best. Or failing the large lab with two machines and two databases to test with you just read the analysis posted on the various websites and made a decision based on that, weighted heavily by the fact that FREE means you can afford to attend that Hat convention in July you had your heart set on. While at it, maybe I should consider not writing so many run-on sentances.

I bike to work because gas is expensive. Im that frugal.

But in choosing to run Linux one gets a lvoely bunch of coconuts filled with creamy problems all their own. At least with Linux I am able to look under the hood and get my hands greasy, so to speak.

[root@skc mnt]# mount
/dev/hda3 on / type ext3 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
/dev/hda1 on /boot type ext3 (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
/dev/hdb1 on /home type ext3 (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)
//192.168.0.2/backup on /mnt/samba type cifs (rw,mand)

[root@skc mnt]# umount.cifs /mnt/samba/
This utility only unmounts cifs filesystems.

I like that one. So... I mounted a Windows Vista machine, and I cannot unmount it. When I check the mountpoint, nothing is there, because it actually is unmounted. When I look at mount's output, it says it is still mounted.

Interesting eh?

These are the fun types of issues I can file under "Ignore these, they arent really hurting anything." and that migth come back and require me to file them again under "This caused the server to burst in to flames at 3am, and arent you glad the coffee stand is still open at this hour?"

Beast. Defiler. Source of all my pain!

2007-04-23T12:26:00.000-07:00

Windows Vista is thwarting my every attempt to be productive. I installed it on my own workstation just so we could test it out with our installer and our game. Vista installed fine, and then promptly, as expected, proceeded to devour all system resources.

This would be acceptable if Windows was all I needed to run, but I would like to get some work done today so I need to install productivity programs and use them.

I have yet to find a web design suite that works in Vista. GoLive CS would lock up constantly, GoLive CS2 doesnt redraw the screen, Dreamweaver 8 just doesnt even start.

Now the reports of install problems on Vista come rolling in regarding our software. It works for some, it breaks for others. The fun part is how diverse the installer errors are. Some people get security errors, some people get crahes, some people get told the program is incompatible.

While other receive a personal letter from Microsoft expressing how sorry they are to have sold you a 200 dollar OS that prevents you from working and requires you to have 80 megs of RAM for anything to run.

I wish that was true...

Off Topic Friday again!?

2007-04-20T15:12:00.000-07:00

Is it really Friday or is the calendar just playing some kind of prank on me?

Thats wierd. I guess when you have your eye on a deadline that you thought was several weeks off, Time likes to play that game where it jumps out from around a corner and yells "Boo!" at you and then it laughs at your shock like the uncaring jerk it is. Someday I shall defeat the basic laws of physics and reality, no matter how insane that seems. Then it will be me jumping out at the abstract personification of a natural force and screaming "Bla!" and laughing at it.

I honestly cant say that today's blog entry had a point other than my meandering brain telling my fringers to twitch on the keyboard.

Oh yeah, time flies. That was the theme.

I hope we can go Beta to the public at the end of next week. That should be really great. I could even possibly have the website done by then.

Cheater Cheater, bug eater.

2007-04-19T14:24:00.000-07:00

We had our first cheater! Yay!! Its actually not a big deal, its a friend of ours.

The conversation around the table Friday night was very pleasant, and made even more fluid by the presence of our good friends Gin, Bourbon, and Captain Morgan. As Drew and I discussed how things were "at work" with our mutual friend Pad, who hosts our domain on his lovely hosting system, Pad got that evil gleam in his eyes.

Its worth telling you that Pad once had that gleam in his eye a long time ago when we played a game called Everquest. It was truly a trend setting game, one that quickly fell off the radar of most self respecting MMO players. During the time we played it though he told me of a cheating program called ShowEQ which I then got heavily addicted to. I recall that look in his eye then too. Maybe it was the challenge, maybe it was just the fun of rampaging across a zone on a PVP server, I don't know really.

Today Pad played one of our puzzle games and got over a hundred thousand points. The highest score to date has been five thousand. It was fairly clear he was cheating, and then of course we had a good long discussion about it.

I mention it on the blog because its something that weighs heavy on the overtaxed minds of game developers. In multiplayer games, where there is clearly a winner, people will cheat. Its right up there in with piracy. How do you stop cheaters and video game pirates and hackers?

The answer is really easy: you don't. You simply cannot. You might as well try to stop that cheese in the fridge from growing mold. Oh yes you can wrap it in a bag, seal it airtight, trim the edges at the first sign of peril, and then eventually find that your cheese is still moldy but sleep well knowing you gave it the devil before you threw in the towel. Devil cheese. I think I just created a new game...

Anywho its not possible to stop them, all you can do is hinder them. Make it so hard to cheat that its just not worth it, and then make your detection of cheaters good enough to spot them when they do it. Detecting is usually much easier than prevention, since prevention is impossible.

As for piracy, I should be so lucky that pirates start distributing my installer on their new fangled file sharing servers. That would save me the bandwidth. haha

Pepperidge Farm Remembers

2007-04-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

Remember when you had a marketing plan? Remember when it seemed easy? Its not. Its hard to quantify who you want to play your game.

Banner advertising is nice. Its easy, its practically fire-and-forget. Best of all the banner advertisers want your money, so they are ready to back up their claim with pages of statistics so they are helpfully removing the mystery for me and answering questions in advance like "Who reads your site, how often, and why do I care if they see my banner?

I contacted several gamer websites, webcomics, blogs, etc... they all seem pretty savvy as to who their audience is and that makes me feel safe about tossing five thousand dollars at them for eyes to see my ad.

Once they see the ad, will they click it? If they do Im halfway there, because now I need them to see all they need to see on the first page they visit. Then if I could only get them to buy the thing once they are there...

Im so busy today and its already 5:00pm. I gotta cut the blog short today.

Mission And Moto

2007-04-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

Or is that motto and moto is an abbreviation for Motorola? I do like their phones regardless of which is correct.

Every company needs a mission statement. Even your tiny indie game company needs one. I like to start all my conversations by pointing out that a mission statement in no way has to be loaded with corporate jargon about leveraging synergy on dynamic platforms. Did you know that Pepsi's mission statement was two words? "Beat Coke" is all they had. Compelling isnt it?

Why do you need one though? Well it serves as a compass for your business. Remember that movie Office Space? There is a part where they hang a banner up that says "Is this good for the company?" and they tell everybody to refer to that when making a decision. Your mission statement helps to answer that question whenever you are trying to decide what to do, where to go, and how to do it.

Skill City had a very simple mission statement when we started out, but it required some re-working as I read over it last week and discovered that it had fallen out of date. We had changed some of the direction we wanted to go, and by so doing negated our original mission statement which was a little too narrow in places, and a little too wide in others.

Now our mission statement is this:
Skill City will provide a superior casual games community that will appeal to both new and experienced game players. Skill City is committed to providing an ever expanding interactive world that is rich in content and customization.

Our moto: Casual Games, Serious Rewards (tm)

Yup. I filed a trademark on the motto. Why? Because I would really hate to have somebody else use it, and trademarks are cheap in comparison to the damage that could be done if somebody else started using what I think is just a really great pairing of words that conveys exactly what Skill City is. We are casual games, with rewards that are more than just points or your name on a list.

We also made a list of what makes Skill City different from its competitors, and what is just plain special about us. Using that list we narrowed down to 4 main topics. Those 4 topics, we feel, are the powerful ones that will really set us apart. We also think they are the aspects of our company that will capture the market and make us attractive to anybody who looks. Therefore those 4 elements now become the highlight of all our advertising.

So in summary, a short 2 hour meeting Friday afternoon has formed a guidline for us in a blizzard of options. Having such a thing is a big confidence and morale booster, but also helps you as a business owner when somebody asks the pervasive question: So what do you do?

Somebody has a case of the Mondays

2007-04-16T15:53:00.000-07:00

It sucks moving across town. I have made so many trips with my brothers tiny truck in an effort to save money that I am now sore, tired, and I think I heard a crunching sound last time I lifted that heavy table out of the truck bed.

That stuff aside, the business is rolling along. Last Friday's meeting was extremely successful and we managed to get some core concepts of the business listed out so that now when we make any advertising or marketing material we can say exactly what it needs to sell, and how.

I think I'll post that stuff for you to read later.

Off topic Friday!

2007-04-13T12:26:00.000-07:00

What a totally insane week it has been. I moved in to a new home, having grown tired of living in a really gross apartment that was the epitome of noise. Well, I shouldn't say the apartment is self was the cause of noise. It was little more than a large building and is incapable of creating sound unless you count the way it creaks in the wind. We have no shortage of wind here in Orange County. Rather the source of the endless cacophony was the teenage girl who lived one floor down. She also has no shortage of wind, especially when she is blowing in to a cell phone at 2am about hair and makeup.

Do not brand me sexist, my walls are paper thin, and I swear upon your most holy book (I have none) that she does indeed squawk for hours about the most inane subjects, hair and makeup are frequent topics of great heated debate with whomever is on the end of her phone call. I wonder if her caller also has a sleep deprived game designer living above them.

Its so lovely outside I think of nothing but going for a long bike ride, and then swimming a mile or so in the pool at the gym. Its near to triathlon time now, so close I can see it coming around the corner at me. Its angry with me for ignoring it this year. The game business has gently tempted me away with its succubus charms.

As I depart today I have to share two things. One is that I think Starbucks has managed to actually shape fat and sugar in to many different configurations, and in so doing they have single handedly lain siege to any resistance I previously had to their "baked goods" counter. Damn them to hell.

Secondly I am really excited about launching the games to a public beta in a week. Maybe a week and a half... the new chat system we put in makes me smile with pleasure whenever I view it. It reminded me that often what we think is going to be easy to use, is counter intuitive. Advancements in technology and interface that thwart basic human instincts and expectations can be filed in the Bad Idea box next to these.

Lets reboot.

2007-04-12T15:17:00.000-07:00

Im rebooting the blog today.

Skill City news today goes a little something like this: We had a long hard meeting. It came up that our mission statement was like a small neglected housepet. Its cute and all, fun to pet and the way it meows is adorable, but it doesnt really do much does it?

Dont get me wrong. It did. When we first started out the Mission Statement was great, but I think over time in the heat of developing we forgot to update it as much as we updated everything else.

We decided to have a meeting and rewrite that bad boy so that it once again can serve as a shining beacon in the darkness of marketing, advertising, and generally answer the question: What is Skill City, and does this website/image/game/manual/press release reflect that statement?

It should be a fun meeting, I had a great time writing the mission statement for my last gig, but thats mostly because it was followed by 3 nights of heavy drinking in a really posh cabin in the woods. Seriously though writing a mission statement is easy, and its hard. There are whole books on the subject.

How are we doing on our release? Well things are rolling nicely. We might end our Alpha sooner or later than we had planned, mostly I think at this point its hinged on how soon we can have the requesite marketing and client updates done and actually be ready to beta. The beta is public, so if we do it too soon we might make a bad first impression.

Tomorrow we'll really set some dates on those types of things.