Plan for Justin Mette

Cyclone
The biggest news of the year for 21-6 has to be that our first Cyclone is finally available for purchase! For more info, visit www.21-6.com/cyclone.asp. From cradle to grave, the process took about 6 months and included everything from developing a reusable 2D engine to getting a good publishing deal (and everything in-between).

Cyclone was developed in just under 3 months using C++, DirectX, and the OGG/Vorbis SDK. Much of that time was spent building a re-usable 2D game engine for our future games of this nature. The team consisted of a designer, a programmer, and a sound engineer. The artwork was created by the designer, programmer, and a little help from a friend (on the user interface skin). One of the biggest challenges in developing the 2D engine was getting it to run well on really old hardware - which allows for mass distribution.

The other side of this project consisted of finding a publisher and getting a good deal. Since it is our first published game as 21-6 Productions, we stumbled a bit in this arena, but ultimately decided to launch with RealOne Arcade. Real Networks supplied a complete Beta test (with 1000 testers), a tech-test on old hardware configurations, a 60-minute demo wrapper, pirate-protection (via their RealOne Arcade client), and finally they provided a great deal of marketing materials like an instructional video all of which we did not have facilities to provide on our own. Unfortunately, it took about 10 weeks to go through the whole process and get the game out on the shelves.

Feedback so far has been very positive for the game itself and on opening day (October 4th), the Cyclone demo was downloaded around 8200 times! The only area of difficulty so far has been in the requirements for the RealArcade client because a surprising number of people don't want to install any product by Real Networks. The good news is that in January, Cyclone will be published on other sites and the requirement for the RealArcade client will therefore be dropped.

The most rewarding part of the project was to actually ship a game of our own design. Honestly, the level of satisfaction we all feel cannot be overstated. Everything from morale of the team to popularity within the community has exploded this last week and it's all due to the release of Cyclone.

IndieGamesCon
In other news, GarageGames has asked us to present a one-hour session on Remote Team Management this year at the IndieGamesCon. This is obviously a topic very close to our hearts because we have been dealing with related issues for almost a year now. We have started working on the presentation and have some great sub-topics in mind including Communication, Legal Issues, Organization, and Choosing a Team. If you have any suggestions on what you would like to hear about (or read about afterwards) on this topic, please feel free to send email to justin.mette@21-6.com.

Project X
Cyclone finished development back in July and we did not skip a beat in starting development on yet another game. We have been doing our best to keep this project under wraps, so we won't say much other than we decided to use Torque! If you are coming to the IGC this year, there is a good chance you will get a sneak peak. I know "what a tease"...