(no subject)

I have come in dead last in four out of four games at the game foo tonight. (I am counting one instance of beating a newbie employing a random non-strategy as the moral equivalent of dead last.) You'd think I'd never played a game before. Or that the people I am playing with are all very good gamers, but it's lazier to blame oneself about these things.

Games played: Cube Farm, Elfenland, Ticket to Ride Europe, Quo Vadis.

I hadn't played any TtR game with five players before; I think the crowded board knocked me for a loop. I made my original tickets only after deploying two stations, since I got completely cut off in so many places, and I had over 15 cars left by game's end. (My card luck was supremely rotten, too.)

Quo Vadis is fun, but I don't think that three players gives you the whole game. I'd like to play it again with a full complement of people. There's great opportunities for role-playing in it, at least if you're the sort of person who roleplays the Bean Game. Which I am. However, much like the bean game, I expect that I cannot actually play this game well, since I am not very good at game-diplomacy; I'd rather just work alone. These games happily allow this strategy, and the other players will ignore you, trade with each other, and rocket ahead.

Elfenland I'm just bad at.

Also came in last at whatever I played on Tuesday. I can't remember what it was now, except for coming in last. I have lately been meeting these crushing defeats with descriptions of suffering anal penetration or anyway hemorrhaging from my opponents, or perhaps by the game itself, but in either case there is just nothing classy about this. I need a new metaphor. Or maybe I should just grow up. I should look into this.

(no subject)

Second day I was at foo saw no games, but I had fun listening to people talk about the Civ game, and then going into the Freaks' garden and admiring their apple tree whilst jadelennox told me its secret origin story. It was a nice day out.

Feeling kind of weird; will spend the rest of the evening relaxing and hydrating, and will leap back into the thick of it tomorrow. Am back into my mode of not really wanting to play games much, despite everything. Completely monomaniacal about Volity itself. And this of course is not inappropriate.

Got some work done today, here or there. Caught up on some business mail, including finally finishing a letter introducing Gaming Steve about Volity (and not about any of the stuff I have written here about wanting to write him about). He has been voicing an interest in casual games lately, and judging by the show's mailbag he gets a lot of would-be game developers asking him how to get started. I'm hoping that Volity could become another thing he could suggest to these folks. (And I said as much in my letter.) Yes, most of the people asking such questions are gonna be kids who want to work on the next big console blockbuster, but we'll see.

Also I'm told that taskboy3000's interview of the Andys and me is gonna be published to use Perl tomorrow. I have read a draft; it doesn't go deeply into technical details, but the point is more to push our message out a little further. Maybe some Perl hackers will actually come by the devchat this way...

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April's done. I think that I have met my goals for the month; volity.net is online, the developer beta is certainly (and delightfully) in full swing, and I have begun the hunt for partners and investors, casting out lines every which way.

The one VC agent I spoke with last fall has vanished from his firm, and I can't find where he went to. His former assistant, still at her desk, was coy about providing any leads but suggested I instead follow up with his successor. I would be pleased to do so, said I, and it is so, but I must revisit sold old writing first. Our business plan's executive summary last fall cast us as a kind of MMO, the result of me trying to be buzzword-compliant but lacking knowledge of any more fitting terms. The presence and power of the casual games market has grown since then, though, and since this is exactly the market that we're trying to break into, I'll can the summary appropriately.

A little bit of good news: my 2005 tax refund combined with my Q1 earnings from camerawork and O'Reilly royalties add up almost exactly to one month's rent. This is a very encouraging reprieve to receive now, when I'm starting to feel in control of my (and my company's) financial fate, or anyway at the controls once more.