Plan for Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr

Ah, life is good again. Pushing forward on the PR "job" I picked up, The household is now completely Indie, I got my money, and more in this issue of the Continuing Saga Of The Elusive Indie, part Umpteen!

For a while, I was starting to get a bit uptight. Ya see, I did a medium sized contracting job for game development, and one for some industrial automation work. Both of my customers decided we would all try out a different way of doing things - instead of the usual bill, wait 30 days, get check cycle, we'd just do a credit card transaction.

The first transaction was on the 19th, and the second was on the 20th. That's not JUNE 19th either - this was a month and a half ago. Every possible thing that could go wrong did - lightning may not strike twice, but Captain Murphy sure as hell does! After lots of struggle, many MANY phone calls, various pieces of documentation faxed back and forth, and me jumping thier case every couple o' days, it's finally over and I have my money.

But it gets even better... that money has shown up in my account, and now I find out that one of the customers that's been holding out on me for 6 months is going to finally pay his bills. Oh, thank ye gods - another thing I can take off the books. And, well, more money in the bank. And there's a couple more bills that I need to send out (that were still on hold until we resolved the inital credit card payment situation - just in case it had to be chargedback and a regular check cut or something strange like that.)

My wife is quitting her job. All I can say is "About friggin' time!" Her job has always sucked. It's 3rd shift. It doesn't pay a lot. And it's somewhat dangerous (She works at a level 6 juvenile detention facuility here in Wichita). That does mean, however, that this is a completely "Indie" household - whatever gets made money wise comes through my company. That would be scary, except we had been trying to reduce our debt load and streamline our lives - so when she quit, we didn't need nearly as much money as when I was working a full time job making $42k / year. I suppose I should be scared to death at the prospect of my piddly little game company being the only source of income. And to tell you the truth, I was for a bit. Then we did the math, and realized how little I had to make. Not bad. Of course, at some point I need to get down to the business of selling games, rather than doing contract work. But that's ok - a lot of the contract work I've been doing is really enjoyable, and at least one item I'll be reselling on my website as another channel for it.

But after the contract work is done - it's time to buckle down. TZ is going to be sold online. Eric and I did some playing one night with the demo version of Trajectory Zone - we managed to reduce it from a 200MB project to a 14MB project without sacrificing any quality. I'll be taking another shot at it, and try to get it down to just below 10 MB - I think it's possible, since we've mapped out places where savings could be made still.

After that - I'll be all over The Uber-Secret Master Plan :-) I've also got a couple of other irons in the fire, but, how much any of them pan out is anyones guess at this point.

One of those irons that is beinging to pan out is GamerZone - the local LAN gaming center that I became the PR guy for (well, it should probably be called something like Marketing Manager or similar, since it's gone way beyond just sending out press releases or talking to people.) I just thew a dev shot up of GamerZone, but, who knows if it's really topical enough to get posted (I have my doubts :-) If it doesn't, I'll throw it in my next .plan file.

What's cool is that it's already generating excitement - we have people interested in getting Gamer Zone's done from exactly the same model in thier town. Which is really the plan - this is Gamer Zone #1. Of course, I really can't say much about the what / when / where / who / etc. of the other Gamer Zones until they happen. But this turned out to be a bit more exciting of a deal than I planned on. What's also interesting is that I was informed by the owner that I was being cut in on a part of the action.

Unluckly, we had some construction problems hold things up - namely, the building wasn't ready. It needed painting on the outside (the owner, manager, and I painted it last week, so that's out of the way), a new counter built (I did that) and a multitude of little odds and ends that needed fixing. So, Heather and I have spent a lot of time over there with tools, getting the place in shape (same goes for Greg the manager). Which is great - I was being forced to be a little more "active" again rather than being the slug that I've become recently (spending all day in a chair doing business with no start or end time except "when I'm tired, I sleep" does NOT do good things to a person's physical well being!) It's all done except for a little more paint on the back of the building, and the bathroom (which is Heather's area. She isn't just redoing the bathroom. She's turning it into a work of art. When it's complete, I'm going to take a couple o' pictures and post 'em in my next .plan. While it might seem odd to be posting pictures of a bathroom, this thing involves blacklights, electroluminescent wire, classic games, etc. It's not what you'd expect in a public restroom. Or a private one either! ;-)

You'll probably be hearing more and more about GamerZone in future .plans - I'm using it as a marketing vehicle for my projects too. And possibly for someone else's projects (the company I've been doing contract game dev work for). Sure, getting my games in one little LAN gaming center doesn't make a lot of difference. But, one little LAN center isn't thier plan :-)

Bryan Edds and I started doing a collaborative project a while back, and due to various things, that went by the wayside for a while. Well, Bryan is back, and we've spent a little time over the last two days working out the plotline for the game in question. A nice, short term game (which barely deserves a plot, but, it does help to explain what the player's goals and motivations are). But there's something different about working on the project - I'm not getting my hands "dirty" with code for the most part. Instead, my job is to be the producer / manager for the project. This should be fun - I'll be keeping an off and on log of what happens with this project just like I did with TZ, and post it online when the whole thing is done (I think that's just going to be a continuing thing anyway - release game, then release a post mortem for anyone who's interested in finding out what went right / wrong, and what I walked away learning from the experience.)

Ok, nuff of my babble for now. Hope everone enjoyed thier tea / coffee break while the read this ;-)

-=-=-
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr
Owner, Midnight Ryder Technologies
http://www.midnightryder.com
Baby philosophy: If it stinks, change it.