If you are a frequent or at the very least casual visitor to my site, you have noticed that I have totally revamped it in many different ways.  I changed the splash page and added some elements that I thought were missing.   One of the main things I wanted to tackle was adding a simple way to navigate to all the sections of my site.  Also I made sure that the theme of the site was something relevant to my latest pet project FlickEm.  I also upgraded my blog which is running on WordPress.

My old game portfolio was rather dated and was built into my blog and really needed a serious upgraded.  So I decided to make some huge changes by giving it its own page with a great deal of eye candy using jQuery.  I also made sure that it was more organized and relevant to the information that I was trying to share with viewers on each game and category.

But one of the main things I really wanted to do was get a very mobile friendly version of my site.  So, I looked to the jQuery mobile framework for this.  And so far the blog section is complete, now I need to get the main page nav, and portfolio integrated.  This is going to be very tough considering that I have a lot of large images that wont really scale well on mobile.  But I think with a little work I can get it just right.  Besides, if you are working on mobile devices, shouldn’t your public face show what you are capable of doing?  Plus this helps keep me busy whilst I work on getting a full time gig.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

I couldn’t  believe it.  I was truly stunned when the news broke in with….“Steve Jobs…dead at 56″ I had no words.  Steve has made such a large impact on how I look at my life, my career goals, and the true meaning of quality and innovation.

The word genius is thrown around far too much these days, but if there was anyone that truly deserved that moniker it was Steve Jobs.  Look, everyone knows I’m an Apple fanboy, I have never tried hiding that.  But the main reason is because they have vision, and they just get it.  Or more to the point, Steve had vision, and he got it.  I think the world lost a true visionary, andI will go as far as say he was our generation’s Thomas Edison, Howard Hughes or Henry Ford.  People like this don’t come along very often, and when they leave, they leave a large hole.  Steve is going to leave a very large hole at not just Apple, but the tech world in general.  I do worry about an Apple without Steve, but hopefully he has made an such a mark on Apple that they can go on without him.

There were some that called him Arrogant, prickly, pushy, and hard to work with.  I like to think of him as driven, unrelenting, and one that inspires greatness, not just in himself, but in others around him.  The world is a better place because of him for many reasons.  Even if you never owned or used any products he created, you have been touched by those inspired by him.

In The Club SOLD

Its official, Upgraded Studios finalized the sale of the intellectual property  ”IN THE CLUB” to JNJ Mobile (Mocospace Mobile Network).  In the Club was Upgraded Studios first HTML5 based mobile social game, and funded using Mocospace Mobile Networks HTML5 Mobile Game Developers Fund. We figured that this was the best move after Frank Wallen made the decision to leave the company.  Frank was our director of technology and the driving factor behind the core technology of ITC.   Finding a replacement for him to keep the game moving forward was going to be rather difficult, so we decided the best move was to sell the IP to Mocospace.  We love the guys at JNJ Mobile and we know they will do great things with the game and our rapidly growing user base.

What does this mean for Upgraded?  Right now I’m not sure there is an Upgraded Studios anymore.  So moving forward I’m looking for opportunities and if anyone out there has anything special, like a job offer, or seed funding, Im here….call me.

Post FlickEm

After a month of waiting on FlickEm sales, and just some much needed time away from it all, Rudy and I got back together in San Diego.  We talked about what we might do next, besides continuing our search for a full-time paying gig.  Most of our conversations revolved around the fact that we got to the iPhone app thing way too late.  By the time we got there there, the market was entirely fished out.  There were just too many games released every day to stick out, and as we all know, there is no formula for success, so that meant that every game was going to be a crap shoot.  We just couldn’t afford to keep making games at the level of quality that we did with FlickEm and hope that one would take off.  We just didn’t have that kind of money or time.  We needed to hit the jackpot on the first pull of the lever and that only happens when you either are new to something and corner the market, or you create something for someone else.  If we were going to continue on, we needed to get into an area of gaming that was low barrier to entry with a guaranteed return on our investment. Then by luck we read about MocoSpace Mobile Network’s Mobile Game Developer Fund.  We contacted them, and then we pitched them a social game called “In The Club” at the end of March.

Time To Upgrade….ed

Shortly after we left Xaviant, one of the things Rudy and I did was plan to form an entertainment company called Upgraded Studios.  We had this plan way back in August or September of 2010, but we didn’t pull the trigger on it for two reasons, one was we couldn’t get any funding, and the other was starting an LLC before you had a product that makes money was too risky.  The California franchise tax board is no joke…trust me, and the last thing we wanted was to pay over $800.00 a year for nothing.  So we went the partnership route, that way if we didn’t make a dime, we wouldn’t have that expensive franchise fee, and upfront expense.

So while we waited to hear from MocoSpace about whether or not “In The Club” would get the green light, we went to look for a some programming help.  One of the things we knew for sure, there was no way I was going to be able to code this game by myself, like I did with FlickEm.  We needed to bring on an experienced programmer that had knowledge of database and web programming.  So, after thinking about possible fits, we talked to Frank Wallen about joining our merry band and he accepted.

We Be Clubbin!

Now that we had the core of Upgraded complete, and a contract signed, we set out to create the game.  Challenges were many since a lot of us on the team were looking for full time jobs, had other side jobs, or family obligations that kept us from giving it the time we really needed to get the game done before the deadline.  We were supposed to finish the game on June 15th, 8 weeks after the contract was signed, but there was no way that we were going to write the sheer amount of code to get the game done in 8 weeks.  We were going to go long, and when you go long, any potential profit quickly turns to loss.

The game was delivered late by about 6 weeks.  And with such a long amount of time spent, it meant some of us had to make some tough decisions.  The first person we lost was Tina Hou, she got a job with Zynga, and we were very happy she got a full time gig.  Game jobs are in such short supply, especially ones in San Diego.  Then we lost Frank, and that was a very big loss, but luckily he let us know just shortly after In The Club went live.  We figured that Frank would probably not be able to support us fully while working a full time job, which meant we needed to find a replacement.  The Main reason we needed to find a replacement for him was that we were counting on gold sales from In The Club.  And to keep those sales rolling in, we would have to keep adding content.  And with Frank out, that would be harder to do, even if we brought someone on, he would have to learn the codebase, which is no easy task.  Luckily, a solution to all our problems were found for us.

Twas the E-Book before FlickEm.

Before I left for San Diego, In between all my design tests for various studios, one of the things I did was purchase a license for Corona SDK.  I got it on sale for a steal, so why not check it out and see what I could do with it.  For those that have never heard of Corona SDK, it is a platform that lets you code your game or app, in LUA and export it to both Android and iOS platforms.  Corona was a godsend because it had a lot of the features needed for FlickEm, and would require me to write a minimal amount of code.  Basically I could write the entire app in 6k lines or less, and I would only have to write it once.  If I had to hardcode FlickEm for both platforms independently it could be 6 to 8 times the code, and that wasn’t cost or time efficient. FlickEm was supposed to be a hobby project to make some extra cash, not a career.

Shortly after arriving back in San Diego I got an email from someone asking me to create a children’s e-book for the iPad using Corona.  I had never even made anything with Corona yet, but I figured it was a good starter project while waiting for Rudy to come back to San Diego and me possibly finding a full time gig.  The E-Book was called “A Visit From St.Nick” for iPad.  I did all the major coding, but I had help with some of the more repetitive stuff.  iKid Media was who I made the app for, and they released it shortly after mid-November, which was right around when Rudy got back to San Diego, but Rudy wasn’t really ready to work yet.  He needed to get settled and prepared for working, so we really didn’t start in earnest on FlickEm until after Christmas and New Years 2011.

FlickEm, Powered by Corona SDK…..and Starbucks

After I came back from Phoenix, Rudy and I set a release date of 8 weeks for FlickEm, and then we proceeded to put the hammer down.  Amazingly enough we were able to get the game going very quickly with Corona.  I was feeling more comfortable with most of the API’s and features were coming together rather quickly.  We spent a great amount of time on the project side by side at Starbucks in Mission Valley.  We did move around to other Starbucks and a few other coffee shops in the area, but for the most part we were based at the Mission Valley Starbucks, nicknamed “the dope spot”.  Im sure they got tired of seeing us, but we loved it.  Free internet, great coffee, and easy access to the trolley.  Which was very convenient for Rudy to take since he was pretty far away in Lemon Grove.  Plus it didn’t hurt that I was staying with Gary in North Park, just up the hill, so it was convenient for me as well.  Money was at a premium, and I didn’t have a lot of it, neither did Rudy.  I had enough saved up to get by with the very basics for a very short time, and that time was quickly approaching.  Now add to the fact that there didn’t seem to be a lot of game jobs out there…yeah there was some stress from expectations that this game would make us some extra money because we both really needed it.

We wrapped FlickEm on February 18th at about 2am at LeStats Coffee Shop in North Park.  We were putting the final touches in and squashing last minute bugs when we finally pulled the trigger.  I was pretty happy that we managed to finish the game almost 2 weeks shy of the deadline we set.  And we were able to do this mostly because we did a lot of the art and prototyping before we ever started coding the game.  We didn’t have to do a lot of testing and such, all we had to do was just make the game.  Of course we agreed afterwards that we should have done a lot more focus testing on the product ahead of time, but when it comes right down to it, I don’t think it would have mattered much since there was just a flood of games released on the app store by this point and its almost impossible to stand out from the crowd.  We thought hiring out a professionally designed website would help us out, but in the end it really didn’t matter, the game just never caught on.  But It had great production quality, and all the features you would expect in a top of the line iOS game.  I looked at it as my second shipped product in less then 6 months.  And considering I went almost a year and a half without shipping anything at my previous job….it gave me a sense of satisfaction.