Gwaaaarrr!

Oh man, has it been that long since my last blog?

We're heading into the summer months now, which is a damn good thing for me, because I'm completely beat. I recently this week finished up a contract as an Expert witness in a court case. The case is still ongoing so I wont talk about the case itself, but suffice to say it was a LOT of work and definitely has left me drained.

In the meantime, I've moved house, started buying a house, been running around organising a new project event we're putting on with the Uni and trying to organise some PhD stuff for myself and a student.

Anyway, lets just accept the fact that I'm busy, but thats not what I wanted to talk about.

What I wanted to talk about, is my realisation this week where my real motivation lies. See, this whole court thing has made me think about why I get involved with things and what really interests me. I came to the conclusion it is about the act of creation that interests me. But even further, its the act of creation on a personal scale that interests me.

Let me clarify this a bit.

If you consider the games industry, you can see that there are developers of all different shapes and sizes and working practices. From large corporates like Ubisoft and EA, to tiny devs like Tom and Russ from Sickhead and to some extent GG itself.

What I've realised throughout this whole contract, is that I dont really care about the "big business" aspect of development or life. I like the connection with real people, I like the creativity of the small team. In effect, I realised that my real love lies in working for the likes of Sickhead or GG rather than the machinery of the likes of EA.

Thats nothing particularly unusual I guess, most of us here I think would prefer that. But think about the world and people in general. Most people seem to have that outward gaze, where they seek attention and acclaim, they seek to "get bigger".

Personally, I'd rather have a small group of coworkers and customers which we provide with absolutely heart-felt products to, rather than be more bland and pander to the mass market. The key then comes in knowing the size of that small core of fans and to fix your team size to accomodate that within your own budgets etc.

I think for the next few weeks I'll take a break from the puter, let the brain calm down a tad, while Thomas is away in Thailand I can relax a bit and not feel so bad :) then we'll start in on finally shipping our products. Air Ace is likely NOT going to be our first product out. Too many issues to bother talking about, but we're well along the way to turning over its sister product, which I'll talk about when its ready to go beta :)

I guess I just wanted to reconnect with the community here at GG and say that I hope you all appreciate the human aspects of this little indie community, because it can easily get misplaced. The fact is, I'd rather spend my time talking dev with lone developers than trying to big up my products in some huge push for extra profits. Sometimes you have to appreciate the humanity of your work as a value in itself. The fact that guys like GG exist, even if we dont agree always, at least they are real people and not a corporate face.

.Phil.