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

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.