A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I haven't written anything lately about what's actually going on in my life. I have been holding it out for myself as a treat. I can only remember so much, so lemme cash it in now.

Really, all I've been doing since the housewarming is work on one project or another, occasionally shoving myself out the damn door to go do something that is not work. I've been doing an OK job of that, so I will tell you about these things first.

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At the end of August, radiotelescope and I attended Boston GameLoop. I failed to blog about that in a timely manner, but I did at least burp my transcribed notes at one of the organizers, and you can find them spread around that wiki. I especially enjoyed the sessions on discussing non-marketing ARGs, and on baking viral aspects into digital games. I networked a lot, and left feeling, perhaps for the first time, that I really was part of the games industry now. I still have rather complicated feelings about this.

The weekend after that cthulhia and I attended shatterstripes' gallery opening of her beautiful tarot deck art. I know the artist as an acquaintance from MUDs many years ago, but hadn't actually met her in person before, so it was fun to chat for a while about all that stuff. I look forward to being able to buy a mass-printed copy of the deck someday!

Labor day weekend I sat inside and prototyped a new project, and then helped Joe with a SCAT shoot; it was nice seeing the Gameshelf crew again. Weekend after that, my parents spent Saturday with us. We took them to the Summer Shack.

Last weekend classicaljunkie, dictator555, Nate and I went apple & berry picking. I wasn't that into it, but I really needed to go far outside my bubble and walk around outside for a while. It was also interesting being in an organic orchard - really ugly apples, covered with bugs! I considered this a feature.

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Some of you are aware that I've taken on yet another commercial project. This puts Project X on the back burner, while the Volity Network remains in the freezer. That feels like a joke at first - oh, look, jmac is unable to finish something again, so here he is, serially launching a new thing. Right?

However, the new thing has enough going for it that I decided to risk taking on this extra self-loathing in order to pursue it. It's a relatively small project, it primarily uses a web-based interface, and it re-uses various technologies I developed for Volity.

As such, it's now a project of Volity Games, the company, so I have my two partners there working with me on it. It will get done.

No no no, I'm not even gonna hint at a done-date. Don't worry, you wont miss it when it's ready. But, in the meantime, this is what's taking up all my work-time (besides the bread-n-butter stuff of Appleseed contracts).

Had a decent time at Post Mortem last night; I think I'm going to make a monthly habit of it. An open but passively advertised event (I honestly don't recall how I originally heard about it), it's much less crowded and stressful than certain other pub-based nerdly events I could name. Arguably its industry focus helps keep the number of attendees down, but it's not like they ask for proof of employment at the door. The fact it's out in "the boonies" of Waltham probably helps more.

I ended up spending not a dime on the whole adventure, which is always nice. The commuter rail ticket-seller ignored me during the trip out, as sometimes happens, and a collision of events at the venue led to two drink tickets and a free buffet of hot pub food for all comers. I would end up bumming a ride home from a Gameshelf crewmember I bumped into there.

(OK, I did drop a couple bucks on tips. I think I was in the minority of people who were actually tipping the bartenders as they surrendered their drink tickets. WTF, people.)

Didn't write a company name on my nametag, which was an error, because evocative company names can act as a great conversation starter at events like this. People will either see a name they recognize and want to talk to you for that reason, or see a strange name and want to talk to you for that reason. Next time I'll just write "Appleseed". Though that's not the name of either of my game-producing personas, it is the name of the one thing I consider "my company" right now, and makes for a fine conversational lead-in.

Introduced myself to the event's organizer and asked if he knew anyone doing anything with Live Arcade. He didn't, which surprised me. I said, "Well, you do now, ha ha ha," big deal. The organizer is a cool dude and a great host, anyway; he makes a point of attending with an easy-to-find bright orange shirt on, and makes a point of drifting around and making sure everyone's happy to be there. He's done that at every Post Mortem I've attended off-and-on over the last couple of years.

Bumped into my Gameshelf friend and a friend of his, who has created games in the mobile market, a topic always interesting to me. Through that conversation, we drew in another indie game developer in a situation much like mine - writing the code for a casual game, contracting out the art & sound work, and looking for a publisher. Key difference is that she's going to shop around a finished and ready-to-publish product whereas I'm just shooting for a get-the-point-across prototype right now. Looking forward to following up with her.

Talked to a guy writing a book having something to do with game culture. I said I had a handful of angles he may be overlooking and would follow up with him as well.

The formal presentation was about selling "virtual goods", those little one-dollar images you can buy as gifts for people on Facebook (or indeed here on LiveJournal), or bonus clothing to spruce up your avatar on an online game, or what have you. Right, that thing that you probably look at and go Arrghh people are stupid that's the one. I decided that it didn't have much to do with the kind of downloadable, add-on content that, as a hopeful XBLA publisher, I'm interested in. But it was interesting to learn about nonetheless.

A couple of people have volunteered to provide further seed investment. When the first one offered some weeks ago I said we didn't want any, since we were just starting up our big funding round. But by the time the second person offered, only last week, it became clear that we have between 100 and 200 unclaimed units, leftovers from January investors who hadn't actually sent us any money. (Units are shares, except we're an LLC and not a corporation, so we call them units instead. Shrug.) It would actually be to our benefit to sell them to interested parties, even at January prices, before moving into our next round. So, I'll wheel and deal and things will work out OK.

The variable comes from the fact that one investor has explicitly backed out while the other continues to make "I'm still interested" noises. But it's been five months now, so I have the distasteful task of calling this person I don't know very well at work and asking point-blank if they're in or out. I'd rather do this over email, but this person has demonstrated that they're not interested in communicating that way, despite the fact that the one time I called them before they asked that I keep my follow-ups to email. (No, it's nobody you know.)

I dislike telephone conversations specifically because they are so intrusive, but there are times when this aspect makes them handy. If still quite dislikable.

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Attended an MIT startup clinic last night, my first in several months. It was good time, and I always enjoy meeting other entrepreneurs in every field and trading stories and cards (even though I am always full of nervousness and dread right up until I walk through the doors).

This one had a lot of people who weren't sure what they wanted to do, or whose startups were in very early stages. As always people love to hear about Volity Games, whether or not they know anything about games, but this time I got a lot of impressed looks when people learned that we actually have a working public beta. I'll have to remember to open with this fact in future elevator pitches. I'll also have to look into the possibility of giving a presentation myself at a future clinic.

And in case you thought I was kidding about the competition for funding being all cancer cures: one of the two presentations last night was a brand new startup pitching a service for early oral cancer detection, which they hope to sell to dentists and oral surgeons. There's a lot of money to extract from the field of dread diseases, my friends.

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My networking experiences over the last couple of weeks has made it clear to me that, contrary to what I expected a year ago, there is very little game industry representation within capital-land. This presents a complication for us, because investors typically keep their investments within fields they know about, and few know anything about games.

It seems to be true the other way around, too: The one angel whose attention we caught last week is himself from the games industry, and told us how refreshing it was to see a funding application from a startup whose plan and product he could actually grok. So there aren't many entrepreneurs in games, either!

This seems rather counterintuitive, given the famously tremendous size and growth of the games market. The key, I suppose, is that it's not an invention- or innovation-driven market... it's mostly a lot of people grinding out new content through existing tools. So a startup that has truly invented something new, like us, is an anomaly.