Blood on the Ceiling...

So the bad luck from the day before the conference seems to have worn off, and I've spent the last two days with my laptop up in the Garage Games booth, grabbing everyone who comes close enough to show them Interrogative and the other features Epic Frontiers has to offer. Between those manic bouts of salesmanship (or what passes for my version of it), I've been chewing the rag with a number of the other devs at the booth such as the guys from Broke Ass Games, Sickhead Games, Paul Dana, folks from the Garage, former Garage folks, other old hands from the GG community (you know who you are and know how my head is swimming right now), and random people that probably walk away from me wondering why security doesn't have a larger presence on the expo floor.

My throat is sore... My schpeal is polishing itself up, and I find myself having chance encounters that are very advantageous for me and my team. I've also received some kudos from people very important to me in terms of the game industry regarding Interrogative, if not Epic Frontiers. Oh, and Mike Perry interviewed me today. He kept it short because I forgot to take meds, and he wasn't sure what was going to happen (kidding Mike!). Overall, it's been a great experience.

So, you're all tuning in for more "lessons"? I think the biggest one is that you should be here. Yeah, it's a bit of money- I've been unemployed for five months now, so it's not like I don't feel the burn with all these conferences. But it's worth it. I'm walking over to booths and people remember me from the last conference even though we didn't talk directly. I've bumped into people whose books I'm intending to buy and wound up having great conversations with about indie game dev and even Epic Frontiers. I've talked to people high up in all sorts of big name development houses- and gotten their cards. I'm even coming across students and indie artists interested in working with me on my project. 38 business cards the first night, 24 business cards yesterday, and 18 today. I've written a half dozen email addresses down as well, as well as information resources given to me from some of these contacts to help further my project along.

GDC is a friggin' networking gold mine.

Another lesson is one I repeat a lot: Put yourself out there. Network until your throat is sore and you start stumbling over your schpeal. Have a schpeal. Shake hands with everyone close enough to grab. Say hi to people that aren't immediately in handshake range. Make eye contact with people beyond that range. Walk around so you can extend all of the above ranges. Go to booths. Even the press booth. Drop cards off. Tell jokes. Be Nice(!!!). Fake it if you have to, especially when the day wears on and everyone's tired. Be excited. Like people. Friggin' work at it and be open to opportunities.

A lot of the guys I see in the booth here are guys I see at other conferences and who are visible on the forums. They're all working hard at it, drumming up business for themselves, making contacts and plans, sharing ideas, making friends. If you find yourself thinking that you don't need to do that because your idea is the best and you'll show everyone, then my advice is to go find a nice quiet spot in a forest and become a hermit. Human history has shown that interactions like these are what promotes innovation.

In other news, someone has come out with an NPC chat middleware. And it's not me... I found their booth while walking around, and I have to say that I was pretty happy when walking away. And why would I be happy after seeing a product looking to unseat the uniqueness of what Epic Frontiers has? Well, because for a company like that that obviously had funding and enough money for a booth- my product is better! Muwhahahaha!

Seriously: You can't tell me that a text-parsing engine that reads from text files and does all the things that Zork did is better than my scalable, database-driven, and flexible model. I was a bit shocked at first, but then I made a decision that will probably make a few of you happy, especially since I got a nudge from Jeff Tunnell regarding it as well (and Jeff speaks wisdom)...

Yeah, Interrogative will be bottled up and sold in a generic form to those looking to create Player-NPC conversations in their games. And since the functionality applies to single-player games, I guess I'll have to make some alternative data-source formats available besides SQL as well. So there you go. Happy? :P

And no, I have not thought of pricing or the feature set it will have (thought it will definitely have what was shown demoed in my YouTube video) or a release date, but there will not be source included, for obvious reasons. My decision was made today, and it's as much about having food on my plate as showing that company-that-must-not-be-named how you really do Player-NPC chat functionality.

And yes, other decisions have been made about other things that will not be talked about yet.

So look there, the blood on the ceiling you see? It ain't mine ;)