On Work, Blogging, Programming and Publishers

The last few days have been particularly busy.  It’s inventory time at my place of employment.  I’m an office jockey, but once a year we all gather together in mutual brotherhood and count things.  Anything.  Everything.  Being that my office is attached to a medium-sized warehouse, that means there are a lot of things to count.  A lot of dusty things.  So, we bring in some temps and over the course of two or three days we count up tens of thousands of things.  And then we check discrepancies.  And then we check more discrepancies.  And when all is said and done and we emerge from the aisles looking like coal miners after 14 hours of digging, sore, bleary-eyed, and not particularly interested in counting so much as our fingers for the next year.

The main problem is that one of the days we do this is Saturday.  Ordinarily a non-work day.  A day of rest, where I can sleep in and recuperate from the prior week.  But not this week.  Today I counted.  And counted.  And counted.  And I’m beat.  About the only thing I appreciate about inventory time is that at least the time passes quickly when you’re zoning out counting things.  But that’s about the only positive thing I can say about it.  We do get an extra day off during the Christmas holidays to make up for the Saturday worked, but by the time inventory rolls around, that extra day is but a fond memory in a distance past, so it just feels like the 6-day week that it is.  Easter is just around the corner though, and that’s a nice long weekend — even if I’m kinda working that weekend, too, if work of a different sort that I’m even less inclined to do.  It involves a mother-in-law and a garage that needs cleaning out.  ‘Nuff said about that.

Yeah, that means not much has been posted on Frapstr, even though I’ve got several articles still to do.  Stuff happens.  I’ll probably work on one after I’m done posting this though, if just to get something posted today.  I hate leaving big gaps in postings.  Makes it seem like I’m only doing Frapstr half-assedly.  I mean, I suppose I am, but it’s all for good reason and will eventually pay some dividends.  It seems so far off though, that day when I can finally call my first game done and submit it to the App Store.  I’m kind of nervous about that even now.  I’m fine with the programming part of it, monstrous though the task still seems.  It’s the business end I’m concerned about.  I don’t know the first thing about registering and running a business … tax forms and a company bank account and assets and profits and losses and … stuff … about … business.  Not a freaking clue.  I could always register as an individual I suppose; I can still use a company name, but my real name will appear under the publisher name.  But that seems so indie and unprofessional.  I mean, I am indie, me and Jody both are, but I kinda want to try and project a professional image.

I dunno.  That particular day is a ways off yet.  I haven’t even started the first line of code for the game yet. I suppose I can cross that bridge when I come to it.  That, and I’ve got a lot of people I can ask about the business end of it, which is cool.  One thing I won’t do is use a publisher.  I understand the potential benefits of using one, but it tends to be at the expense of personal exposure (their name gets recognized far more than yours does) and you take a risk with lowered profits on a product that may not sell any better than if you had published it yourself and reaped the full benefits of doing so.  Sure, I run the risk of getting buried in the avalanche of daily apps and flying under people’s radar — but I’m not without resources to get the word out myself, either. I have Frapstr for one, Touch Podium for another, and there are popular forums and social networking sites on which I can hold promo code contests.  Perhaps using a publisher would get a quick infusion of cash, but I can’t help but think the costs in other areas just aren’t worth it.  I’m not in a hurry to make money; nothing I have invested financially in this endeavour is anything I need to make back.  It’s all part of the cover charge as far as I’m concerned; beyond the financial investment, it’s all about my time, and since I will enjoy writing games, I consider it time well spent.

No, yeah.  No publishers.  Especially Chillingo.  I mean, I have nothing against them personally other than that they come across as your standard unctuous salesmen, but when they pimp a game, their name comes first — always.  Your name tends to be little more than a footnote and a splash screen, and when they issue press releases for their game, it’s always “Our latest game.”  Not mine.  Not yours.  Theirs.  Sure, you get a mention, but it ends up feeling like they’re saying, “Who?  Oh, yeah, those guys.  They mashed a bunch of keys and churned out some code.  Hey, check out our logo!” Maybe I’m over-dramatizing here, but it just doesn’t sit right with me.  I’m not out to be an attention whore or anything, but if I’m going to put all of this effort into writing a game for the iPhone, I want to damn well build my own brand while I’m at it.  I want people to think, “Oh, yeah, Loaded Games.  They make some pretty cool stuff.”  I do not want them thinking, “Oh, yeah, Chillingo.  Didn’t they make that game with the thing where you do that stuff?” where that game with the thing where you do that stuff is my game with the thing where you do that stuff.

Anyway.  I should get to doing a review, and then maybe hitting the books a little bit.  I really need to spend more time learning.

Tags: app store, blogging, chillingo, frapstr, iphone publishers, work

Flog’s Disappearance, Music & Other Stuff

Well that was a bucket of ‘tard.  Somehow, for some unknown and assuredly moronic reason, the subdomain that pointed to this here blog disappeared into thin air right off my host.  Flog!’s files were all there right where they should have been, but going to flog.frapstr.com produced a Bluehost notification screen that nothing had been configured at that address.  After checking my subdomains in my CPanel, sure enough, no Flog subdomain.  It plum up and vanished without so much as a goodbye note.  The fix was a simple matter of recreating the domain and pointing it to the right directory, but that doesn’t answer the underlying question of where the hell it went in the first place.

*sigh*

Anyway, things got a little extra busy over the last week or so.  This past Monday, Chris at Movile sent me an entreaty revealing that he discovered there were two more levels on the next iteration of Theme Park Madness that he didn’t have music for, and asked me pretty please with sugar-coated Swedish supermodels on top if I could write something for them.  My choice, no ethnic music required, carte blanche, write whatever I wanted.  So over the next few days I did, and I think the two new looped pieces turned out pretty well.  Chris thinks so, too.  They’re only about 30 seconds a piece, and they’ll loop in the game, so they were pretty easy to write.  I also polished off the Russia level music, so in the end I’ll have 4 tracks backing as many themed levels in the next version of Theme Park Madness: Greece, Russia, outer space, and underwater.  Full credit in the game, of course.  Hey, I’m not getting paid for these, so at least I’ll get some recognition.  I’m not planning on making a habit of doing music work pro bono for just anyone though.  Chris and I have become friends, so this is my favour to him and my contribution to his game and iPhone development in general, which is more than I can do programmatically right now.  Plus, now he owes me one.

Meanwhile, at the Hall of Justice: You may be wondering where the new guy Jimmy is.  Dave’s Jimmy’s not here, man.  But he will be soon.  He’s got some stuff in the works, and I’m looking forward to reading it.  His problem, you see, is that he doesn’t have a working computer, so all of his stuff is being done on his iPod Touch via WiFi until he can get a new Mac.  He can still write, but it’s slow going, and I’m going to have to add screenshots and reformat everything to Frapstr spec when he does send it up.  That’s cool though.  What I’ve seen of Jimmy’s work will be a nice and well-phrased change from some of the help we’ve had over at Touch Podium over the last while.

In the mean time I’m plugging away as I can.  I ran into a snag last week with the Mac though.  The power adapter overheated and died, which is something I found out they seem to have a habit of doing, which is rather unfortunate, not to mention irritating.  I wasn’t planning on doling out the exorbitant fees Apple charges for their damn power adapters.  So I bought one that was almost-new from someone on a local forum who thought he lost his, bought a new one, and then found his old one.  So $70 later I have a new power adapter for the Mac.  I think I’m going to buy a second backup adapter though, just in case this one decides to bake itself, too.  So much for “just works.”   In this case, it seems more like “Just works ’til it gets fed up with the daily grind and eats a bullet.”

On the personal side, I pulled a muscle in my leg.  Again.  For the fourth f%#@ing time in a year.  Calf muscle, right leg.  Same as the other times.  I must have really done a number on it the first time I pulled it.  I could barely walk that weekend.  The second and third times I pulled it happened when I stressed it before it had properly healed.  Took months to properly heal, too, and I thought it was pretty much better, but today, doing nothing so much as walking down a flight of stairs, I pulled it again.  Not as badly as that first time, but it’s still sore and stiff.  I’m lathering on the A535 but it ain’t helping much.  I’m ambulatory, but I have to walk off the stiffness and soreness for a few minutes before I can stop limping like a feeb.  No, smartass, it’s not old age.  I’m 37 for Bob’s sake.  I may be working on my lawn-protecting inner curmudgeon in my writing, but that don’t mean I’m ready for the walker and colostomy bag yet.  I’ve still got quite a few good years ahead of me, and I’ll be damned if I’ll become a bald, drooling, liver-spotted invalid who smells perpetually of Ben Gay before I see those come to pass.

Anyway, it’s about time I eat a pillow, being 3:30am and all, so I’ll wrap this post up.

Tags: jimmy xander, macbook, macbook power adapter, movile, music, theme park madness

New Blood for Frapstr

I’m pretty protective of Frapstr.  I mean, it’s my baby, top to bottom.  Yeah, I did a lot with Touch Podium, too, from its first days, but I wasn’t the one who started it, so it’s not well and truly mine.  Frapstr is.  But with everything in my life right now that’s going on — the day job, learning how to program on the iPhone, beta testing for a few different developers, writing a couple of tunes for someone else’s game, writing the music and aiding in the design of a future one of our games, and talking with a lot of awesome developers who are helping me out in my quest to do something more than just review games on the iPhone — Frapstr is feeling a little neglected.  Sure, I still try and stick to my one review a day at minimum, but that’s a far cry from the earlier days when I’d do half a dozen or more.

So I’ve enlisted some help.  His name is Jimmy Xander, also known as Black Fedora, and we’re both members of the EODSoft beta test team.  Having been dissatisfied with another site he was writing for, he put the word out that he was looking for new digs, so I offered to let him help out here, and he has accepted.  I’ve read some of his reviews on that other site and they’re coherent, written well enough, and even spelled properly — which pretty much one-ups most of the help we’ve brought on board over at Touch Podium, so I am eagerly awaiting what he has to say here on Frapstr.  I’ve given him a bit of a crash course in what Frapstr is all about, so I guess we will see if he takes the reins and runs with it.

It’ll be good to have some help on Frapstr, an extra pair of hands to pound out some reviews other than my own.  I mean, sure, the masses are clamouring to read my prosaic opinions and scrambling over one another for my autograph, but I’m sure Jimmy will do what he can to earn his place in the pantheon of elite Frapstr reviewers — which has now officially doubled in size.  Welcome aboard, Jimmy.  Don’t spill anything on the carpet.

In other news, at least one of my side projects is wrapping up.  I’m about halfway done with the second of two songs I’m doing for the next version of Movile’s Theme Park Madness.  It’s rather fun and challenging; I’ve never really stepped outside of my comfort zone when it came to composing music, and having to write something that’s relatively modern, but with an unmistakable ethnic flair has been a learning experience.  Granted, I’m using royalty-free stock music as the backing track over which I lay my own material, but it has taught me a thing or two about a thing or two just the same.  I think they’ve turned out rather nicely — or rather, the second one is turning out nicely, but I’m sure in the end it’ll all click.  Plus, I’ll get to see my name in the App Store and in an app, even if it’s not associated with one of my own games (yet).

Fun(?) Anecdote: Once upon a time in the mid-90s I made the acquaintance of one Andrew Whittaker.  Old school spectrum fans will probably recognize his name: He was responsible for games like Quazatron and Magnetron, and later, working for Rebellion, writing Alien vs. Predator for PC and Jaguar.  After writing AvP he founded his own company, Perceptions.  He was working on an epic RPG for the Jaguar.  Since we talked pretty often, when it came out that he needed a musician to do music for the game, I threw my hat into the ring.  (At the time I was writing 4-track MODs, rather than _real_ music.)  I sent him some samples, and some others I was competing against sent theirs, and Electronic Arts, who were to publish the game, had final say in who would be doing the music.  In the end, EA liked my stuff better (though with the caveat that I needed better equipment to write with more channels.)  As a result, I was tentatively hired to write 5 songs for the game and would be paid £200 per song — which at the time was like $500 Canadian.  Score!

Or not.  My services weren’t immediately required because development hadn’t yet progressed to the point where he needed music yet, so I was content to wait.  Sadly, the Atari Jaguar platform died a horrible and painful death as a result of Atari dying a horrible and painful death in a reverse merger with JTS Corp. where the Tramiel clan kept saying “Everything’s A-OK, this is just a temporary measure to build capital!” right up until JTS went Chapter 11.  What a sorry mess that was.  But as a result, Andrew’s project was scrapped and my services turned out not to be needed at all.   The irony?  The songs I sent Andrew were from a game I was writing at the time that itself ended up getting shelved.

So this is really just by way of saying that my short little tunes for Theme Park Madness will be the first real time that my music will actually be published in something.  Sure, it isn’t quite the epic Andrew’s game would have been, but that’s cool.  I’m still published somewhere.  Take that, EA.

Tags: alien vs. predator, black fedora, jimmy xander, magnetron, movile, perceptions, quazatron, rebellion, sinclair spectrum, theme park madness

The Journey to Developer

Yeah.  Three days without a post. A first for Frapstr.  But frankly, I needed the break.  I’ve been diving in a little bit deeper into the world of iPhone development — not coding yet, and not really even reading much.  Mostly I’ve been talking with other devs and working out how I should approach things from a design aspect.  Since this is the very start of my development journey, this is the most ideal time to get all of my ducks in a row and get fixed in my head the best way to dig in.  I want to get it right the first time — or as near as I can, anyway.  From experience I can say that the one thing that always bothered me was releasing something into the wild only to look back in it down the road and think, “I should have done it this way instead, it would have been so much better.”

It’s not even always a matter of a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of proper planning and forethought — not working out the details first.  My worst habit in the past when it came to writing a program was just digging straight into it.  No road map, no white paper, not even a hasty to-do list scribbled on a napkin.  I just picked a starting point and went to town for the next few months.  Don’t get me wrong, it worked, but it tended to be a bit messy, and it made the whole process harder than necessary.  This is different.  This isn’t the days of shareware and bulletin boards and asking for help on FidoNet.  This isn’t a forgiving high level language.  This is going to have to be clean, efficient, and professional looking.  I’m diving into some serious competition here, and the biggest thing I can do to stand apart from the crowd is to do it right, bug-free, and with a high degree of polish.

Thankfully, I’m in some seriously good hands.  I’ve got a number of very good and respected developers willing to jump in and lend a hand when I need it, and I’m tremendously thankful for that.  That’s part of what this little hiatus has been about, really: Cementing some good developer relations and working out my game plan.  I’ll be back on Frapstr duty this week, aiming once again for one review per day at minimum (I’ve got a bunch building up a backlog) which I will do in between my day job and working out this whole iPhone development thing.

How the hell did I become a workaholic?

Tags: frapstr, iphone development, workaholic

Back to Work

Well, my vacation is just about officially over. Well, technically it’s already over; this is just the weekend before back to work.  But now it’s Sunday night and it’s back to the usual grind tomorrow. Fortunately I managed to be quite productive this past week, getting a lot of the things done that I wanted to get done.  I finished one of the two little themed in-game background tunes I’m doing for Movile’s Theme Park Madness that will appear in an update in a few weeks.  (I’m not getting paid for it; it’s just a fun little side project Christopher and I cooked up, and I had some fun working on the one that I did get done. Chris seemed to love it, at least.  So did his mom.  No, that’s not a “your mom” joke — she really did like it.)  I also finally managed to print out the first 120 pages of Steven J. Kochan’s Programming in Objective-C, which I will start diving into once I’m back at work.  I’m looking forward to getting my feet wet and finally wrapping my head around iPhone development.  There’s another book I really want to pick up that also covers Core Graphics and OpenGL (something this book doesn’t even touch) so I will have to see about getting that one, too.

I managed to get a number of reviews done and actually managed to exceed my one-per-day goal — I psysically missed a couple of days (today being one of them) but I made up for it by posting multiple reviews on a couple of other days.  If I’m going by my one-a-day rule I’m ahead by a couple of days.  I’ve still got more paid app reviews to write though; I seem to be doing more of those than freebies lately.  But that’s okay.  I think reviewing paid apps does a bit of a better service to readers because these apps cost money and reviews help people decide whether or not they’re worth their sticker price.  Always assuming of course that my opinions count for something. I like to think that my determined lack of bias and many, many years of gaming experience lends some credibility to them however.

I did a bunch of other stuff, too — kept myself busy, which is how I like it because I don’t feel like I’ve wasted the opportunity to do things I don’t normally have time to do.  My wife has finally finished watching the entire seaQuest DSV series, so I can have my MacBook back, now.    For now though I’m just spending the rest of my Sunday chillin’.  I need at least one day of relative rest, after all, especially when I’m not going to get any until the next long weekend…

Tags: iphone programming, movile, objective c, theme park madness