Revenue Streams
by Ted Southard · 05/15/2010 (8:04 am) · 1 comments
Been a while since my last blog, and there's quite a bit to talk about...
Foremost in my mind all the time is Epic Frontiers. My last blog talked about going social with Facebook and Twitter (not too much of a feed right now), and my plans for launching an early alpha. Shortly after posting that, there was a bit of a shake-up in the team, with a few people going followed by a few people coming on board (and recently a person coming back, which is always a nice feeling). Additionally, there is the requisite bug-stomping and zone prep that I want to finish up before opening up the zones to everyone else.
Also taking up time is my new part-time tech job, and a paid game contract I'm doing on the side. Both take up significant amounts of time: The p/t job will take anywhere from 5-20 hours a week, though I'm working on getting a steady 20 out of it so I don't sweat the bills so much. The game contract takes, well, whatever it takes. Some days, I'll put no work into it (like today), and others, I do some death-marching on it from 8am 'til about 2am (usually when I'm stuck on something suitably simple to solve). And then Epic Frontiers gets as much as I can put into it out of the rest of the time that I don't spend with family, friends, and my girlfriend (who brings a fair amount of work home herself, which works out well for us). Oh, and there's a few other things, but I'll get to that in a minute...
You would think that that kind of balancing act would drive me nuts, and it does here and there, but only for a few minutes at a time. I'm finding that setting expectations for things like my p/t job helps to stabilize the juggle to a large extent, and all of these tasks become another exercise in time management at the end of the day. My Wednesdays are largely blocked off in the evenings for the team meetings so I make sure I get together with everyone and check in on their status and communicate, especially if a week is busy enough to disrupt the usual stuff. Mornings become p/t work in Manhattan with me getting home around 2-3 and sitting down to do work or get some relationship time in, and weekends and late nights are a mix of Epic Frontiers, my social life, and some new stuff I recently started doing: Tools.
The previous tool I talked about working on, the Magnitude Editor, is done, and I have some paperwork and marketing screenshots and blurbs to do up, but other than that, it's ready to go. Anyone looking to generate large datasets involving combinations of data would be keen to give it a look-see when it arrives in the store, as it can be a significant time-saver for your needs.
You'll probably be able to make out a bit of my new path editor, tentatively named pathBlazer, in the preview image portion of this blog. It's a bit early to show it off but, like the Magnitude Editor, it was born of a need that I have and a niche that I saw needed filling. In this case, T3D's workflow for paths left a bit to be desired, and so I sat down and started banging out some small tools for streamlining and automating some parts of the process. Also, I wanted an excuse to be able to make my own toolbar in the editor :P After one and a half days of work, the functionality is mostly done, and I just need to add in a few more snazzy features to it, and then finalize the GUI and write up the manual. As of now, I'm still on the fence as to whether pathBlazer will be a standalone tool, or be bundled up with a number of tools and enhancements I have planned for the T3D editors- namely, the terrain editor...
I cut my teeth back in the day on coding plugins for trueSpace, including two rather successful plugins named trueScape and... trueScape 2 (ta-da!). They allowed Bryce-like real-time heightfield editing with a corresponding view of the resulting heightfield in 3D. Version 1 was pretty simple, but version 2 brought something like eight times the features, with upgrade pricing being the difference between the prices of the two versions. It was a great deal. And version 3 was simply crazy- by that time I was working on an early form of Epic Frontiers an wanted a tool that would allow me to procedurally "bake" and work with the heightfield of an entire world within the application, and then export that out. Unfortunately, there were changes to the SDK that were made which turned many third party developers away, including myself, and changes not made to the SDK that were needed to realize the potential of the tool. Eventually, they were bought out by Microsoft, and then dumped.
So the source code for these projects languished on my hard drive for a while as I pulled my plugins from being sold (they just weren't making money anymore), and focused on Torque development. All well and good, but apparently, I just can't stare at something without ideas popping into my head on how to do it better, and so now I'm back in the tools business. Mostly, it's necessity: I need these tools as well. I'm working heavily with paths on my current contract, so these tools will help take a big bite out of the time needed to create huge paths. Epic Frontiers is demanding a huge amount of time to repetitive tasks such as terrain painting and sculpting that, frankly, I had worked on ten years (at least partially) ago when working on trueScape v1 and v2, strataScape (a terrain strata creation tool), and trueGrass (a placement tool- and nevermind the naming conventions), and so now I'm blowing some dust off my older code, revamping it with my experience over the years, and creating some tools for T3D.
This is all in the name of revenue streams, mind you. Sure, Epic Frontiers is my first and only, but being a business, and having done the conference circuit, I have found a niche, and it is the same niche I occupied in the trueSpace space. With the money coming in from these and the game contracts, I will hopefully be able to gradually shed the mortal coil that is my p/t tech job and get to this game development stuff full time. I mean, hell, Epic Frontiers got a small spot in the CD of a book already (a few screenshots and description- but that still counts!), and I'm getting contacted for work from people who need games done (unfortunately, I can only really handle one contract at a time right now, though my team can handle several art projects and we also have web development capabilities, plug-plug). Something must be going right, and when something goes right, you'd be wise to follow it...
The next blog will have eye-candy from both Epic Frontiers and the tool development I'm doing, I promise!
Foremost in my mind all the time is Epic Frontiers. My last blog talked about going social with Facebook and Twitter (not too much of a feed right now), and my plans for launching an early alpha. Shortly after posting that, there was a bit of a shake-up in the team, with a few people going followed by a few people coming on board (and recently a person coming back, which is always a nice feeling). Additionally, there is the requisite bug-stomping and zone prep that I want to finish up before opening up the zones to everyone else.
Also taking up time is my new part-time tech job, and a paid game contract I'm doing on the side. Both take up significant amounts of time: The p/t job will take anywhere from 5-20 hours a week, though I'm working on getting a steady 20 out of it so I don't sweat the bills so much. The game contract takes, well, whatever it takes. Some days, I'll put no work into it (like today), and others, I do some death-marching on it from 8am 'til about 2am (usually when I'm stuck on something suitably simple to solve). And then Epic Frontiers gets as much as I can put into it out of the rest of the time that I don't spend with family, friends, and my girlfriend (who brings a fair amount of work home herself, which works out well for us). Oh, and there's a few other things, but I'll get to that in a minute...
You would think that that kind of balancing act would drive me nuts, and it does here and there, but only for a few minutes at a time. I'm finding that setting expectations for things like my p/t job helps to stabilize the juggle to a large extent, and all of these tasks become another exercise in time management at the end of the day. My Wednesdays are largely blocked off in the evenings for the team meetings so I make sure I get together with everyone and check in on their status and communicate, especially if a week is busy enough to disrupt the usual stuff. Mornings become p/t work in Manhattan with me getting home around 2-3 and sitting down to do work or get some relationship time in, and weekends and late nights are a mix of Epic Frontiers, my social life, and some new stuff I recently started doing: Tools.
The previous tool I talked about working on, the Magnitude Editor, is done, and I have some paperwork and marketing screenshots and blurbs to do up, but other than that, it's ready to go. Anyone looking to generate large datasets involving combinations of data would be keen to give it a look-see when it arrives in the store, as it can be a significant time-saver for your needs.
You'll probably be able to make out a bit of my new path editor, tentatively named pathBlazer, in the preview image portion of this blog. It's a bit early to show it off but, like the Magnitude Editor, it was born of a need that I have and a niche that I saw needed filling. In this case, T3D's workflow for paths left a bit to be desired, and so I sat down and started banging out some small tools for streamlining and automating some parts of the process. Also, I wanted an excuse to be able to make my own toolbar in the editor :P After one and a half days of work, the functionality is mostly done, and I just need to add in a few more snazzy features to it, and then finalize the GUI and write up the manual. As of now, I'm still on the fence as to whether pathBlazer will be a standalone tool, or be bundled up with a number of tools and enhancements I have planned for the T3D editors- namely, the terrain editor...
I cut my teeth back in the day on coding plugins for trueSpace, including two rather successful plugins named trueScape and... trueScape 2 (ta-da!). They allowed Bryce-like real-time heightfield editing with a corresponding view of the resulting heightfield in 3D. Version 1 was pretty simple, but version 2 brought something like eight times the features, with upgrade pricing being the difference between the prices of the two versions. It was a great deal. And version 3 was simply crazy- by that time I was working on an early form of Epic Frontiers an wanted a tool that would allow me to procedurally "bake" and work with the heightfield of an entire world within the application, and then export that out. Unfortunately, there were changes to the SDK that were made which turned many third party developers away, including myself, and changes not made to the SDK that were needed to realize the potential of the tool. Eventually, they were bought out by Microsoft, and then dumped.
So the source code for these projects languished on my hard drive for a while as I pulled my plugins from being sold (they just weren't making money anymore), and focused on Torque development. All well and good, but apparently, I just can't stare at something without ideas popping into my head on how to do it better, and so now I'm back in the tools business. Mostly, it's necessity: I need these tools as well. I'm working heavily with paths on my current contract, so these tools will help take a big bite out of the time needed to create huge paths. Epic Frontiers is demanding a huge amount of time to repetitive tasks such as terrain painting and sculpting that, frankly, I had worked on ten years (at least partially) ago when working on trueScape v1 and v2, strataScape (a terrain strata creation tool), and trueGrass (a placement tool- and nevermind the naming conventions), and so now I'm blowing some dust off my older code, revamping it with my experience over the years, and creating some tools for T3D.
This is all in the name of revenue streams, mind you. Sure, Epic Frontiers is my first and only, but being a business, and having done the conference circuit, I have found a niche, and it is the same niche I occupied in the trueSpace space. With the money coming in from these and the game contracts, I will hopefully be able to gradually shed the mortal coil that is my p/t tech job and get to this game development stuff full time. I mean, hell, Epic Frontiers got a small spot in the CD of a book already (a few screenshots and description- but that still counts!), and I'm getting contacted for work from people who need games done (unfortunately, I can only really handle one contract at a time right now, though my team can handle several art projects and we also have web development capabilities, plug-plug). Something must be going right, and when something goes right, you'd be wise to follow it...
The next blog will have eye-candy from both Epic Frontiers and the tool development I'm doing, I promise!
About the author
Employee Eric Preisz
GarageGames
One piece of advice that I would give to someone doing contract work is not let yourself become the bottleneck. Try and find jobs where you can do a small portion and then share or sub the work with other people. Or you can do the work yourself and hire someone to grow the business.
I once took a job where the guys growing the business were the best people to work on the software and that was a big mistake. There was no one available to grown the business and win the next job.
That's one of my lessons learned.