Been offline - status

Well - first off an apology for all ppl trying to email me without getting answers. I'll catch up with you!

This has been my first major "offline" time from the GG community, and its been really hard. My fingers are itching hard to get back into game dev for real, and now its time.

So what happened?

2 things - contract work and moving

Contracting
Since start of this year I've had a full time contract work in non-game dev that is paying major $$$. Its a real evil devil.

As most of you know who have been there, working 40-50 hours/week for someone else and then doing game dev on the side is really hard to pull off. I do have a family with kids, and they are (rightfully) demanding more than 30 minutes a day together with me.

It did go well until approx April. Doing some unannounced game dev work on the side.Then I was contacted to do a mod for TGE, so a group could use it for machinima. They have done some really cool commercial machinima with it, and I hope that I soon can show some screenshots from it.

This ate up all my time, and the game project came to a grinding halt.

Having just a small team with 2 full time + 2 contractors it does take quite some work to coordinate and keeping everything running smoothly. My partner in crime also got married, and suddenly the team was left with none in charge and pushing ahead.

We are now at a standstill, and have to push hard to get running again. And the next few month the family will have to pay the price, as my non-game dev contract just got extended the rest of the year.

While it would be very easy just to take the money I've earned until now and do full time indie game dev the next year, its very hard to say no to a big sum of $$. And one has to grab the jobs while you can get them. Suddenly its over, and cash has to flow in from somewhere else. Having a larger war chest will make everything easier down the road.

Moving

Soon after I ended my machinima mod, we (my family) decided to sell our house in Denmark and move to Sweden - just 30-40 km away, but a hell of a difference for us economically (cheaper everything). This did eat the rest of any sparetime I ever had, and also has left me without any broadband until September. It simply doesnt exist yet in the little village I now live in. And running Internet over GPRS (3rd gen mobile network) is DAMN expensive. I currently pay $1/mb that I down/upload. So its text only for the next 2 month, and then I can get 10 mbit/s fiber into my house!! What a difference.

Moving to Sweden has until now been the right move. Some time in the future I wont have a full time contracting job to pay the bills, and at that point in time I'll be very happy that we did this. Because as someone famous said - right size your life when doing indie game dev. And by moving jost 30-40 km we effectively cut our monthly living expenses by 50% and still have the same living standard (if not better).

Near future

Besides settling in at our new home, I'll have to get time set aside to do start the game again. The plan earlier this year was a fully finished game for IGC. That is now impossible, but I hope that we can have the entire core game done with 1-2 missions finished.

As to commit myself a bit, I'll post a fast (old) screenshot from the game. Its a 3rd person battleship shooter game. Single player mostly with just a pinch of multiplayer (for version 1).

A proper announcement will come soon, so this is it for now!



New toy
Some of my warchest recently got "invested"...... into my new toy!



2000 911 Carrera 4 - and its the best money ever spend on myself :-D