Making lemonade...

Well today is my birthday and I thought I would take a moment to reflect on a tough year.

My long term contract died at the start of the year and the expected increase in hours I had planned on from my backup job failed to appear. Budget issues.

Around Memorial Day my wife was diagnosed with colon cancer. Our savings disappeared in a matter of hours for her initial care. From there the bills just piled up.

Only a few weeks later, my best friend, a person I have known and respected for over 50 years died even as doctors were telling his family that he would be out any day and back to full strength by Christmas.

Since then I have been fighting a continuous battle to keep my finances together, to keep my wife’s spirits up, to teach her classes, to teach my classes, keep my game business going, and to stay focused on what needs to be done -- day to day. The problems of TorquePowered just seemed to fit the general tenor of the year.

I have found much more strength than I thought I had. I have stayed calm, and done what needed to be done. There have been some slips, but I just work through those too. I got my game website built, recruited badly needed artists, worked on whichever project needed the work at the time. When nothing needed my time – I slept.

I don’t particularly see things changing much in the new year. Stress continues, my wife had an allergic reaction to her chemotherapy two days ago, and if the nurse had not been amazingly quick to react she would have died. As it is, she has a wonderful tale to tell, and I still have someone to kiss good night at the end of the day.

My company moves ahead, we put up our second game – this one created by one of the students I teach. We have several others that we hope to release in the Christmas season. I don’t expect PC Gamer or GamePro to feature any of them on the cover, but they were fun to make, and they are fun to play.

My goals for the next year of my life?

Make more games. Make good games, games that are fun to play, that are colorful, challenging and that I can be happy to say I helped make. I plan on getting more of my students work up for others to see. Many of these games use Torque, but we have a number of different gaming engines we use. We focus on what will do the job with the least additional coding. There are enough distractions in game development and learning to hit your deadlines is a useful skill for any student to learn. It is also good to plan your projects so that you have reasonable deadlines to hit.

We continue to improve the website and in the coming weeks I hope to flesh it out a lot more. You can check it out - www.pariahgames.com We are simple now but we are expanding.

One of the offshoots of my research into cancer was the discovery that persons who visualize defeating cancer have better outcomes. One of the primary ways to do that appears to be through games.

So I have decided to turn a portion of my time to the creation of a MMO game that will allow cancer patients to work with others to defeat the menace. It’s a fantasy game and the names are changed slightly - to make the game more fanciful and less dire. I decided to adapt the Ryzom engine to the task. The company currently holding the IP on it made it Open Source. They provided the engine compiled, and all sources, their complete set of artwork and only requested that people come up with new storylines, terrains and focus. I think my project does that in spades.

I already have the engine and servers done already running on a test server. My students have offered to help in any way they can. (Who says today’s kids are self-absorbed?) I only need to create the terrains and modify some existing character’s features and abilities to begin generating something that should do the trick. A stumbling block is all that work has to be done in 3D Studio Max. But I’m sure I’ll find a way around. I plan on making the MMO F2P and hunt for a suitable server provider if it takes off. Money will be strictly by donation. I am still looking for additional artists, audio people, level designers and coders for the MMO and to assist in getting the next generation of game developers started with the right visions and the right work habits. Who knows? We might even make a bit of money along the way...

This year life handed me lemons.
I like to think of this as my making lemonade…