Plan for David Myers

I just wanted to start off by saying that if you haven't yet read Joe's .plan, you should. It's a good read.

Now, where to start? If you don't know who I am (which is unlikely, as I think I usually only get about eight people reading my rare .plans, and they are all friends of mine), I co-founded 21-6 Productions and helped make Orbz. I really enjoyed putting Orbz together and seeing people react so positively to it, from my wife to GarageGames at that first IGC to strangers at MacWorld. I had the privilege these last few years to work with some pretty damned smart and creative people at 21-6. However, lately I've been feeling more and more like I needed to take a step back, collect my thoughts, enjoy life outside of working a little more, and then start over fresh. And so that is exactly what I am doing.

Although there's still a little bit of paperwork to deal with, I have essentially left 21-6. That was a tough decision to make, but I feel good about it. I'm still really excited about making games and eventually working fulltime for my own studio, but I recognize now that I need to do that on my own terms. Although the plan right now is to ramp up my new studio Lumpy Games over the next few months, I'm in no real hurry. Instead of jumping right in and starting on a new game prototype and building a new team, I plan on taking my time and collecting my thoughts.

The first step in collecting my thoughts is to start an almost-daily journal of sorts - Mad Rantz. Yes, I too now blog, gawd help us all. Let's hope that it doesn't become just another vanity site like so many blogs that are out there right now. If you're looking for someone to blame, I say blame Danny Ngan. Like a few others here, I also have been following Danny's blog. And I recently started following Pat's blog, also, so maybe you can heap some blame on him, too.

Like Jeff Tunnell mentioned recently, I believe tools such as news aggregators and sites such as Bloglines are going to be integral to the user experience on the net. I'm still coming to grips with the various tech that is available and how it can be best used, however. For instance, the concept of a team blog sounds great as a marketing tool as your team works on a game. I'm not sure how useful it would be as a means of communication between team members, though. Although I am hoping to build a mostly local team for LG, I know that I will have at least some remote team management to deal with again, so figuring out how (and if) we can use this stuff seems important.

So, that's about it for now. As opposed to my semi-annual .plans here on GG, I plan on posting very regularly on my blog, so if you get a chance check it out every once in a while and see what you think. Feel free to drop me a line at my new e-mail addy (dave@lumpygames.com) if you find it interesting.