Plan for Xavier "eXoDuS" Amado

Gaming industry future and some personal thoughts.

Super-Ultra-Awesome Computers

So I'm sitting here in my super fast and modern computer, with ultra fast 3d hardware accelerator with built-in vertex and pixel shaders, super fast hard drive and 5.1 sound, playing this awesome game with tons of fun... made in the 80's...
In the new technology era we live in it's incredible that many of us still play old games because we consider them unbeatable fun games. We can play any of the new games around that put our super computers to their knees, but we only do so for a couple of months, and when we are bored we go back to playing some oldie game we have sitting around or that we can get from any abandonware site. It's a very cool thing that we can still play those games, sometimes with some trouble, but in the end either by using an emulator or tweaking some configs the games run flawlessly.

World-Wide-Fun

Let's face it, Internet has become part of our lives, it's almost impossible to live without Internet today, everyone has Internet access, email, chat clients, etc. Of course, the gaming market couldn't be held behind. Multiplayer games are a blast, everyone wants to play their latest game with other people and show off how good they are, beat your opponent while singing insulting chants to their faces.
Multiplayer games have become so popular that many games don't even differentiate, they are just games to play on the Internet, no single playing for you lone heart. Game companies invest millions in building the game and then millions mantaining game servers, building patches, adding features to maintain their gamer community, etc.

The true death

Sometimes we become real fans of a certain game or game-genre that we start to love and follow the companies that made them. Some people just know how to make a certain genre fun, and they are worshipped for it. There's always room for another game of the same genre made by the same guys that made the game that hold us in our homes last summer playing it all day.
In the past year we have seen many of our favourite companies go under. How sad it is. But we have to face it too, we've built this world. A world where not always good things prevail nor good professionals, but the decisions of the big guys in suit with the fat wallets, so if they say this company is no more, it's so.

The mix

Although many of the companies that made those oldies don't exist today, we can still play perfectly those games since we don't need the company to do so. Know, let's picture the future for a while, making the same time comparison we have with today's oldies. Today's latest mad multiplayer game, where will it stand in 5 years?
The life of a company today is uncertain, maybe tomorrow the CEO wakes up wanting to paint art instead of making games and closes his game company to follow his dream. But what about the staff of the company? What about their supported products? What about THEIR dreams?
At the same time the company closes, so do the servers, and that brand new super fun multiplayer game we were playing goes under with the company since it was a game meant to be played only online, and the game company never released their server code, for "obvious security reasons" (according to their official word). So there we will be, throwing out in the trash can our copy of the game that we can't play anymore, looking for the next multiplayer game to waste our money in, which will probably face the same fate in the end.
Of course, the company might not go under, but after the life cycle of the game the servers will probably be closed or put to best use hosting game servers for another title from the same company, so the game dies, exactly like before, which doesn't happen today with our oldies.
All this brings me to the conclusion that in the future we might not have oldies anymore. Heck, what will happen if you in 20 years find a CD full of family/vacations pictures that you took with your old 10MP digital camera, just to find out, they don't make CD players anymore, neither does your computer have one (come on, who has a 5 inch diskette drive today? That was mainstream 15 years ago). So this obviously doesn't apply to games only, but to most of the technology that we call innovations today. It seems that technology nowadays is doomed to become obsolete faster, although my main concern and focus of my writing is the gaming world.

What am I doing?

After 4 months of vacations I'm finally back, and meaning to get back to doing some serious game coding. During the vacations I've limited myself to play from time to time with Java Mobile. I've spent most of my time with my girlfriend and taking many many photographs (the real ones).
Not sure what I'll be doing tomorrow, but today I'm working on a side scrolling beat-em-up game to bring back some of the fun of the oldies to the 3D world screen. I have a big list of ideas planned, and it sounds like a fun game to me, although I'm limiting to technology coding for now. I'm working on the combat and AI aspect of the game currently, which is the key element to get the game done, after that I can work on adding features like ladders, platforms, power-ups, etc, which are all minor issues.
I'm currently looking for a good modeler or two, so if you are interested in working on such a title be sure to drop me a line to my temporary email (xamado@gmail.com).

Black Blood Studios

Although we are still alive, our domain doesn't exist in the time being, so I've also lost my email account, since I was on vacations when all this happened I couldn't do much. It all happened to be that my partner changed credit cards and forgot to update the hosting payment, so the domain wasn't renewed and it expired. We are in the process of getting it back, but it's still locked by the hosting company, we are talking to them.

Torque & GarageGames

I'm amazed how many things happened during these last months in the community, we have Torque 2D, a first release of TGE 1.4, new TSE demos and shader enhanced water and last but not least RTS pack, along with some website improvements. From this .plan, my personal talking space, I would like to congratulate the GG staff and the community for the awesome work and collaboration that made all this possible. It's very exciting to see what the community is today compared to what it was when I first joined and started learning from it. Thanks for your support GarageGames, and keep it up!