People have been asking, so here is where stuff be at:

The Volity Network (including the webclient): Personally, am completely burned out on it. I have no plans on doing any active work with it at any point in the foreseeable future. The proper thing to do now involves wrapping an open-source license around the webclient and letting it fly, right? That's a conversation I'll need to have...

Planbeast: After a successful early testing phase and an initial bump of interest, approximately zero people are using it right now. This is OK. As far as I'm concerned our soft launch was a success: we have a much better service now than we did in mid-February.

But now we need to figure out how to get the users to come. I had a truly excellent day of meetings a couple of Fridays ago on this topic with a couple of new voices. My major take-away is that, this early, our main customer shouldn't be game players but game producers. We should form partnerships with companies, offering Planbeasty tools they can use on their own websites and such, driving traffic to us while we increase the visibility (and online multiplayer-ability) of their games.

I last week spent a long time writing the first letter making such a proposal, aimed at a very particular target. Now that GDC is done, I'm going to send it, and then I'll see about writing some more like it.

Project X: Regretfully, and for reasons not entirely under my control, I had to move it from the back burner to the freezer. If you want the full poo-poo on this saga, feel free to contact me through another channel. Given everything else I have going, my heart isn't exactly broken over this, though it is rather disappointing just the same.

If nothing else, it was a great one-year hands-on course covering both the technology and the business of commercial game publishing. Even better, starting on it gave me the confidence to reconnect with the local game-dev crowd (hi dariusk), a resource that I expect I'll continue to find invaluable - and worth being an active participant of - as my focus shifts back to meta-gamier projects like Planbeast and...

The Gameshelf (the show): This has been idling for as long as Volity.net has, another victim of the Project X bug biting me, even though my attitude towards it is entirely different. Still have tons of new footage waiting for me to get awesome with it. I haven't really been zotted by a bolt of inspiration to resume work, and haven't been bored enough to do it anyway. But I really am expecting that I will return to it, when the time is right.

That all holds true for Jmac's Arcade, as well.

Project X is back on the shelf for the nonce; I'm doing a good job eating through my Appleseed pile but there's plenty more to do. There's a finite amount of it, so it behooves me to ker-chunk ker-chunk continue processing it into ca$h money before swinging back into X mode for a few weeks. There is more business X-related communications I can do in the meantime... in fact, I should get on them presently.

Almost certainly no prototype by August 1, then, especially with the move coming up, but it was a good target to aim for anyway. If I'm especially industrious I'll be able to at least put it back on my workbench before then, and I really think I'll have a prototype about a month after that, so long as I can really focus on it.

But we can't have that, can we? So I have another damn new project idea in mind, a more passive one that ties into a topic I'm known to be interested in but haven't blogged about in a while. You'll see it when you see it.

I've completed Project X's logic library to my satisfaction, and have begun to figure out how the UI's gonna work. All my recent game-UI experience has involved working with raw SVG directives, so it's interesting to approach a modern high-level game programming API with that oddball background. Creating sprites by plotting rectangles directly onto the screen is quite familiar. Less so is how they all insist on being pointed to on-disk bitmap image files which they can then paint onto themselves. So I'm going to spend some time in graphics programs generating some artwork, before jumping back into the code. Lots of scanning to do, in this case...

Yes, I think I can get away with entirely 2D graphics for this game. Certainly for the prototype, anyway, and that's all that matters for now. Sadly, even the latest beta of VMWare still can't let Windows take full power of my MacBook's graphics card, so I'm going to have to go back to rebooting into Windows every time I want to do work on X from now on... boo. At least until I get local access to a halfway decent PC, a sub-project that is indeed underway. (Have decided to pass on the rar-rar gaming rig that mr_choronzon advised me on, for now. Cheaper options have arisen.)

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Still moving on August 1, and the traffic of strangers tromping through my apartment is getting a little ridiculous. Especially when they have a less than perfect hit-rate for warning me ahead of time. I accidentally opened my front door into the face of a rental agent as I entered my own apartment this evening, returning from a ten-minute coffee break. Apologies exchanged, and now I've learned that I'm getting at least three separate visits tomorrow!

I've had plenty of these sorts visitors already, over the last couple of weeks, but the rate's getting nuts now. I'm going to straighten the place up some tonight. At first I didn't care if lookers-at found it messy, but I'm quickly wishing that someone please hurry up and find it attractive enough to sign for, so they'll all leave me alone!

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I have once again downgraded my cellphone. The normally tolerable Sony Ericsson that I got in 2004 "candy bar" has a loose antenna or something, and all conversations are filled with loud static unless I squeeze very hard and stand very still. So once again I charged up my circa-2001 Nokia something-or-other, which I've kept as a trusty backup (cthulhia will remember it as the BLAH blah BLAH model), and swapped my SIM into it. I had forgotten what a damn fine phone this is. I'm still on-track to buy an iPhone after its July release, but I'm no longer desperate for one. It's a real relief.

It's been a little over a year since I signed my first truly independent work contract. I continue to feel like I've solved "work". I don't think I'll ever need to go job-hunting again. Unlike every other job I've had since graduating college, I'm not bored after a year of it, and I don't foresee that ever changing.

(Of course, in a real sense I am in fact looking for work all the time, now. But there ends up being a world of difference between attracting customers and seeking employers, as far as their respective outcomes go. It has everything to do with who controls you.)

Part of me just wants to embrace this evolved sense of work completely, invest some spare cycles into the next potential leap forward (Project X), and just let go of everything else for now. But I don't wanna, so instead I just procrastinate, by putting more time into Appleseed or X. Well, that could be a lot worse.

And X is going fine, thanks for asking. I am a little bummed that both my career and my biggest sub-project both deal with computer programming right now; though the projects are quite different the overall context is kind of monotonous. X is finite, though; the software itself has well-defined goals, and then it will go through a pass/fail submission process, which I hope to hit in around ten more weeks. If it fails, it fails, and if it passes, everything will change. But let's deal with that when we come to it.

Other than the localization problems, have well and truly broken ground with Project X and am roaring ahead, test-driven-style. This is the first time I've picked up a new programming language since getting the test-driven religion, and I have never sat more comfortably with the task. Very nice.

One of the first things I learned is that when you're not working with an interpreted language, you don't need to write tests check that return values and internal properties are the right types of things - if they every aren't, the program simply won't compile! So that's something new.

On the downside, I am not working fast enough. I wrote the previous two paragraphs at the end of last weekend, when I was feeling very much on top of things. Then one of my clients delivered a phat project they'd been speccing for months, so I said "Um, yes, money" and picked that up. A couple of days later, Wits & Wagers for XBox was released - an adaptation of a tabletop party game - and I learned that Dungeon Twister has added itself to the queue of tabletop games coming the the 360.

While I am not concerned about any other implementation of this particular game getting stolen from underneath me (it won't), I am worried about the platform getting saturated with adaptations before I can even finish my prototype. Therefore, I resolved to give myself a three-month deadline to finish it, and furthermore to work every day on the project, even if only for an hour sometimes.

That was Wednesday, and so far I have done a crappy job on the follow-through. Maybe I just need a fresh weekend to ramp things up again.

Picked up one of these dongles at Best Buy yesterday. Less than half the price of a new controller, and it lets me use any wireless 360 controller (of which I own two) with Limburger. This should make debugging much faster. Thank you for the pointer, lediva!

(LImburger is the name of the stank Windows XP side of my creamy white MacBook, which is otherwise named Brie. Yes, there must always be at least some vestigial amount of Mac Pride goin' on.)

Extra props to VMWare: This was the first time I tried installing new driver-dependent hardware onto XP through a VM, and it didn't even blink. That's very nice.

Extra props to Best Buy: I initially located a blister pack containing the adapter and a new controller together, so I picked it up and walked to the first blueshirt I found, asking if they sold this without the controller. She didn't know but proceeded to escort me from one of her cowrokers to the next, all of whom doubted that they had any but suggested the next person to ask. We eventually came to a fellow who said "What, this?" and handed the right thing to me. "You have succeeded where all others have failed," I told him.

Posting from the Windows side of my Mac. I just confirmed that exporting XNA games to an XBox works as advertised, at least if you're running Windows natively; there seems to be no way around it if you're going through VMWare. Am presently attacking the Asteroids tutorial I posted about earlier.

On the fence about buying another damn computer. An alternate strategy is to use my G5 for the things that I had been using my MacBook for. But... enh. My MacBook is better at being a Mac than the G5 is. It'd be a downgrade. Maybe I'll feel differently once I've put a couple more checks between me and the hurty, hurty tax pay-off.

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I have been sticking to my exercise and my "diet", which gets scare-quotes because it amounts to: Hey, why not pay some attention to what you're shoving into your gob, for once. I have been eating only when actually hungry, and allowing myself one (1) treat per day - like a honking big P.B. Cookie from Rossini's - since I find that I don't really desire more treats than that. The treat always tastes very good this way. It is always worth every totally worthless calorie.

This is all noteworthy because I've stuck to it long enough that my body's adjusted itself in a way I'm not used to: my appetite dropped by a discrete quantum literally overnight, two nights ago. It took me two mealtimes to work through a True Grounds breakfast burrito, and it's been like that since. Everything else seems fine, so I'm not doing my usual reaction to internal changes of jogging up the walls gnashing arrgh it's a tumor. So that's all right.

XNA 2 is great. The documentation really wants you-the-reader to rapidly understand how to make games with it. It hands you the full source of XBox-SpaceWar, and a lot of documentation projects would stop there, leaving you to learn by poring over the code. The XNA docs, though, say "OK, now let's borrow all of its art assets and rework them into an Asteroids game," and proceeds to lead you through the process, step by step. That is genius. I would be proud to write code tutorials as good as this, some day.

So, yeah, the scariness and scope of the project I have in mind shrunk by 50 percent today, and I feel I can now hold it (using both arms, and lifting with my knees).

After I do taxes (yes, I know) I will start planning on buying a cheapo PC that I'll dedicate as an XBox development station. It's not so much using Windows that is painful - it's having no access to all my stuff and tools on the Mac side of my laptop, while I'm booted into the Windows side. All my favorite note-taking and organizational utilities are there. And Google tells me that combining Mono with XNA is possible but deeply voodooish, so I'm not gonna go there (but thanks for the suggestion even so, those what suggested it).

WIll also hafta hand MS a C-note for the privilege of sending builds across the room to my own damn XBox for a whole year. But that's pretty much the only other cash outlay until prototype, so that's cool.