Where are they now? (IE - what the hell have I been up to lately?)

So, it's been ages since I sat down and wrote one of my novellas on what's going on, or my opinion on the current direction of Torque, whined about the community, or raved about someone's cool project.

Yeah, I've been a little busy. :-)

For a while, I got completely out of game development - I spent 100% of my time doing things like trying to get Gamer Zone, a Wichita, Kansas based LAN gaming center going like crazy. Running a one person indie game company takes a lot of time. You start dealing with a business that has a real world location, and things get even more insane :-)

And in the middle of doing all that, I did something insane. I started a TV show. On video games. Really. I'm not kidding you at all.

So far we've done 11 episodes of "World of Gamer Zone" which currently broadcast locally in Wichita, Kansas on KTQW channel 49. The way I did things, I kept the rights to the show - I don't make jack doing it, but, it allowed me the flexibility of doing the next logical thing with a show about video games - put it online. You can find all the current episodes of the show on YouTube, and at the show's website, WorldOfGamerZone.com.

The other beauty about owning the show - we decide what goes on the show, not a station manager or program director for a network or local station. Since I'm an indie developer, that means part of the show is on, well, game development usually with a skew towards Indie stuff. Cooooool :-)

The first thing you should know about TV. TV is evil. No, I'm not talking about watching TV being evil, I mean making a TV show is evil. The first episode was an amount of work you wouldn't have expected. Two cameras, a director, two camera people, two co-hosts, and lights. Should be simple, right?

BBBZZZZZZZZZT!! Wrong answer. Anything that could go wrong did. A couple of hours before the episode had to air, the editing machine died, but not before spitting out a really really really bad version of the first episode (the audio lost it's sync, so the episode was like kung-fu theater.) I'm one of the hosts for the show, the other host being a 6' 2" female friend of mine named Meredith - uh, luckly we set for all of the shooting of an episode, or my 5' 8" self would look REALLY short. Neither one of us had done something like this, so along with the tech problems, we had serious issues finding our footing both on what the show should sound like and getting our conversational style down. (Heck, if you want to see the evolution of the show more closely, on the website below each episode is a section with the credits for the episode along with notes from the Executive Producer (that's me too) about what changed that episode and what hurdles we overcame.)

Episode 2 was a bit better. Episode 3 rocked (erm, mainly because we reviewed Guitar Hero ;-). As you keep going, the thing slowly gets more refined, Meredith and I get more polished at it, etc. Episode 10 & 11 look closer to professional. It's cool to see it evolve.

Now, I mentioned that we're doing stuff on game development. One of the things added to the show was "Work In Progress" where I've been giving weekly updates on a game currently in development by myself (I picked on one of my old standbys - I'm doing Boulder Panic! 3) Of course, I had to pick my favorite engine to do it in - Torque2D (I almost refuse to refer to it as Torque Game Builder. Sounds like it should have a big "Make My Game Now" button in the upper right hand corner. Why must marketing people screw with a perfectly good name? Torque X - ok, that's a cool name that represents it's functionality when you find out it's for the X Box 360 setup. But Torque Game Builder? Give me a bloody break. It's still Melv's Torque2D work to me ;-) Anyway, rant aside, it's going to be cool to watch the game evolve on a weekly basis, all the way into the marketing portion.

Now for the bad news - my co-host works at a job that ends up being 6 or 7 days a week towards the end of the year all the way until April. Ug. So now I'm digging for more co-hosts and stuff like that. David "RM" Michael of PaintBall Net & "The Indie Game Development Survival Guide" fame (along with him and I co-speaking at IGC '02, '03, & '04) is planning on coming up and doing two episodes of the show. Cool :-) I've talked to David a number of times since IGC, but, haven't seen him in person for a while (ICQ and phones are nice, but, setting down and chatting with someone in person is still completely different.)

But needless to say the co-host situation has slowed things down a bit, though I've got the next episode planned and go back to taping next weekend. Woohoo! This got me to thinking a little more about stuff like interviews using webcams (or if they are close enough, stopping by the studio in person for an episode as a one-episode co-host), stuff like that. So, if you're an indie game dev, drop me a line (daviss@worldofgamerzone.com) if your interested in possibly showing up on the show sometime - I've got the format for some panel style discussions about the market, etc. that I'd like to try out one of these days, along with just a regular ol' interview type thing :-)

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr
World of Gamer Zone / Midnight Ryder Technologies