Nick and I have one big weight off of our shoulders: we signed a lease on a new apartment yesterday. We were able to meet our rent goal and find a place without too much struggle despite living entirely off of capital (landlords read: "lack of income"). Over the next two weeks we'll be packing and moving and trying to get as much work done in the meantime as possible.
The neighborhood is nice, the apartment is magically bigger than any place we've lived prior, I'll be closer to all the things I usually drive to, and we have an off-street parking spot. What more can you ask in LA? We're not allowed to walk on the landscaped grass, but I suppose that's what makes it greener.
Friday, February 21, 2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Cutting costs
The first week of our venture, my wife and I started pouring through our finances. The big question was: "Do we have enough to sustain ourselves for 2 years?". In indie games, 2 years is kind of the magic number -- longer than that and a lot of startups would run out of money, or possibly even become obsolete by the time they're done, and anything shorter than that, and it's difficult to make a game that is competitive with other games.
Crunching the numbers we found that we're close. We need to cut our costs by about 30-40% to make it work. Our two biggest expenses are Housing (39%), and Food (22%).
Right now we live in Santa Monica, which we moved here in order to avoid a Los Angeles commute. Cost of living here is pretty tremendous, and we're paying 1880 / mo for a 1.5 bedroom apartment. (It has a dining room we use as an office). So we entertained the idea of moving back to Minnesota where you can get the same sized apartment for half the cost, but that would take us away from Nate and Annie, and also tear up the roots Candy has been growing here in LA. I'm sure we could make the distance work, but we decided to look around LA. As it turns out, it's not hard to find places to live in LA that are much much cheaper. Albeit there may be barbed wire on the fences.
The next biggest expense to cut down is food. So far this has been pretty easy. We now only eat out on occasion, preferring to live like shut-ins to make the game. Not eating out has cut our food budget almost in half.
I hope we can make it to the other side with enough money to actually promote the game :). At the time of this article we have an impressive 5 viewers per day. When we have a game, we might need to buy some friends.
Crunching the numbers we found that we're close. We need to cut our costs by about 30-40% to make it work. Our two biggest expenses are Housing (39%), and Food (22%).
Right now we live in Santa Monica, which we moved here in order to avoid a Los Angeles commute. Cost of living here is pretty tremendous, and we're paying 1880 / mo for a 1.5 bedroom apartment. (It has a dining room we use as an office). So we entertained the idea of moving back to Minnesota where you can get the same sized apartment for half the cost, but that would take us away from Nate and Annie, and also tear up the roots Candy has been growing here in LA. I'm sure we could make the distance work, but we decided to look around LA. As it turns out, it's not hard to find places to live in LA that are much much cheaper. Albeit there may be barbed wire on the fences.
The next biggest expense to cut down is food. So far this has been pretty easy. We now only eat out on occasion, preferring to live like shut-ins to make the game. Not eating out has cut our food budget almost in half.
I hope we can make it to the other side with enough money to actually promote the game :). At the time of this article we have an impressive 5 viewers per day. When we have a game, we might need to buy some friends.
Sunday, February 9, 2014
UI Chart, Draft Zero
So we used to do this thing at an old job of mine where we'd make giant flow charts of what the UI screens were going to be, what options there'd be, what linked up with what, etc.
I started a very very rough version of such a thing in Illustrator. See if you can click this to full size.
Now obviously I'm not writing any of this in stone. And there are unanswered questions, and I haven't even addressed some of the mechanics that have been mentioned. But it helps me at least, when we're talking, to have some basic visual to go on. So then people can say "What?! That's totally different than what I thought we were doing!" and "You call that a flow? Are you high?" and other constructive feedback.
(Edit: Hmm, it seems like even when you click it, it won't show the thing at full size. So, if you can read it, cool. If not, I've thrown it up on Dropbox in the "design" folder.)
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Infinite folders!
Hit a bug that cost me a full evening. O_O
I wrote a simple script to copy a directory into another*. I didn't check for one fatal condition... I didn't check if the destination directory is a child of the source directory. So after about 10 seconds of running this script, I now had thousands and thousands of folders nested one after another. I then tried to delete them, but got the error, "The source file names are larger than is supported by the file system." Searching for this problem online gave me several possible solutions which none of them worked. Most involved using robocopy to purge a directory, but in windows robocopy would just crash, and from an emergency boot disk it would run for an hour and end up doing nothing. Other solutions involved manual steps that may have worked eventually, but I had so many folders here it might have taken me a hundred years.
*I know I know, I should have just used Apache commons FileUtils library, but I figured it is like a 20 line script, easier to write it than to pull in a new library for the one thing I needed.
What ended up working was creating a windows batch file to rename a child directory, move it up a level, then delete the first directory, repeat.
My infinitely nested folder was named "assets".
I cut and paste that folder to C: and ran this script:
I wrote a simple script to copy a directory into another*. I didn't check for one fatal condition... I didn't check if the destination directory is a child of the source directory. So after about 10 seconds of running this script, I now had thousands and thousands of folders nested one after another. I then tried to delete them, but got the error, "The source file names are larger than is supported by the file system." Searching for this problem online gave me several possible solutions which none of them worked. Most involved using robocopy to purge a directory, but in windows robocopy would just crash, and from an emergency boot disk it would run for an hour and end up doing nothing. Other solutions involved manual steps that may have worked eventually, but I had so many folders here it might have taken me a hundred years.
*I know I know, I should have just used Apache commons FileUtils library, but I figured it is like a 20 line script, easier to write it than to pull in a new library for the one thing I needed.
What ended up working was creating a windows batch file to rename a child directory, move it up a level, then delete the first directory, repeat.
My infinitely nested folder was named "assets".
I cut and paste that folder to C: and ran this script:
@echo off :LoopStart REN "assets/assets" "temp" MOVE "assets/temp" "C:/" RMDIR "assets" REN "temp" "assets" GOTO LoopStart :LoopEnd
Please don't take this as an opportunity to post comments about how much better Mac is than Windows. I don't care, thanks! :-)
Magical Tree Hall
Not sure what's going on here really. You know how it is... LotR soundtrack is playing in the background, it's late, you're making ill-advised decisions involving "foliage" image searches...
Dunno, could be some interesting place later in a quest.
I figure we'll have to have a few of those per campaign/story. "Special" places, so that you know you're getting close to a sweet reveal/plot twist.
Kick the music up a notch.
That sort of thing.
Friday, February 7, 2014
All on black
It sunk in the other day what the magnitude is of our decision. Life savings, all on black! There are only a couple certainties. I will learn a lot, and it will be a fun couple of years.
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Research Room
"When we first settled into the tower, our mystics found a room near the top that would serve as a place to conduct research. They've added a lot since then—the original chamber was a useless mess, moldy scrolls piled in every corner and not much else. Except for the enchanted rooster, of course.
What rooster? Oh, the one that was pecking around when we got here. We're assuming it's enchanted, anyway. It doesn't eat, its eyes glow, and its crow bellows forth in some demonic language. Can't imagine why anyone would've... ah well. It's quite ill-tempered, so we keep it in a cage near the window."
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