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

Live Werewolf game scheduled for 8PM eastern time this evening. I'll be "filming" it for The Gameshelf, probably using only a minute or less of footage from it.

Visit http://volity.net and come play!

The next werewolf game is at 8pm Eastern (a coupla hours from the time I am posting this.) I can't make it due to random gobbidge, but you should play.

Didn't sleep much last night for no particular reason, so up early and at the Diesel. I know I'll regret coming here once I start to head back home; it was already pretty hot when I walked here at 8 a.m. I allegedly came here to work on job applications but I think I will leave once I am done with this post, and this tea. Not looking forward to puttering around the square to take care of my mailing and banking chores... that's how bad it is out.

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Visited kyroraz last night with daerr and Bob. (Is there really only one guy in my mid-range social sphere named Bob? That seems weird. Make more Bobs.) Was fed pasta and then we went nutso with the DSes. Four-up Tetris is a fine thing, as is New Super Mario minigames, but Mario Kart DS was the highlight of the evening. I have never played MKDS with more than one other local human, and oh my goodness is it a heck of a good time with four players. We must have laughed and shouted for a good hour, chasing each other around the track and pelting each other with shells and bananas and ghosts n shit.

It's all been said before, but much of what makes the Mario Kart games so wonderful is their ingenious of negative feedback, using power-up distribution and other tricks to reign in lead racers and boost trailing ones. They manage to keep the game fun enough so that newbies and experts can race together and still have a roaring good time, and yet avoid seeming like they're is throwing too much weight in the newbies' corner. That's a really delicate balance, and these games nail it.

It's too bad that, if people without their own MKDS cards are playing, you're limited to only eight of the game's 32 tracks. But that doesn't keep me from wanting to go ahead with an even larger DS event at Volity World HQ sometime soon...

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Eight people signed on for the werewolf game tonight. That's wonderful, though it occurs to me that I really should have scheduled an earlier game of something just to make sure that the scheduling system works outside of the jmac-and-Andys range. I've already moved on to other sub-projects in the meantime; daerr and I spent hours kicking butt on the forums before gaming last night, and they're now nearly done (insert standard wards against jinx-fueled code gremlins here). I look forward to steamrollering on to tackle my end of the revenue model.

Despite all this time and BS&T poured into it, and all my recent bitching about wanting to do other things, coding for Frivolity and volity.net is still one of my favoritest things in the world.

Two notes to myself:

• There needs to be an RSS feed for scheduled games. (daerr?)

• When the forums go up, I should make a post to that "wibuddy" page that you see whenever you connect to the Diesel WiFi network. And then plaster ads in Your Move Games, already, sheesh.

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If I might make a post-mortem sort of statement, despite the fact that nothing is dead (despite our best efforts ho ho): we really weren't thinking like businessmen, in assigning our order of work priorities last December. While I certainly don't regret any of the work we put into the games, Gamut, and the website, I do think that with more foresight we could have recognized the importance of getting the revenue model built and functioning early. But we are hackers before MBAs (chortle) and so didn't know that our lack of a revenue stream (even a potential revenue stream) would seriously hobble our arguments to professional investors.

It seems stone-cold obvious when I put it this way, but for a whole year our thinking was more or less We have all this really cool tech! Look, look, you can play games right now!! As it turns out, that does not matter, if you are making no money. Well, we have a totally awesome moneymaking plan! That's nice, kid. I have a plan to turn purple and fly to Mars next month. What do you think of that?

(To give ourselves due credit: it's clear that our tech is in fact sufficiently cool to wedge our foot in as many investment doors as we did. But with no hard evidence of cashflow, our follow-through stunk.)

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We are making some pretty good headway with our first potential game development client, enough so that I'm starting to have concerns about legal protections we'd need to set up if we land the contract - that is, what sorts of things would go into that contract. I have no doubt that we can meet all obligations vis a vis the game itself, but we must keep in mind that we would provide both a deliverable and a service, so it would behoove us to make some signable statements about uptime/downtime ratios and AUPs and so on. And I really don't want to mess this sort of thing up.

I'm hereby declaring the next few Thursdays to be Werewolf nights on Volity (coinciding with a local-tribe regular Thursday event being on hiatus).

I cannot stress how stupidly fun this game is, even though it still needs more testing and user feedback. If you have a sense of humor at all like mine you will laugh your fool head off while playing. It is a wonderfully crazy social experience. Play at a cafe and make people look at you funny!

So yes: Mark your calendars, get the latest Gamut and hop online at, oh, let's say Thursday at 8pm EDT and the couple of hours thereafter. Feel free to hop into any existing werewolf table and join the fun!

(You can also probably find people willing to play on Wednesday evenings, but not the core Volity team, coz we'll all be offline and at a different thing. At least tomorrow.)

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Side note: I am busily working on an online scheduling system that should make this sort of thing unnecessary. But until then: Thursdays.