……and the rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated.  After almost an entire year hiatus, I have reopened my full website and blog.  There were many reasons  why I shut down my site and went with the free blog at blogger.com.  One was so that I could retain my domain, and keep up a link for those interested in my app FlickEm.  At the time of my shutdown last year, I had some serious medical and financial issues.  It required me to start making financial decisions that lead to me not renewing my site.  The cost of running it wasn’t cheap, as it was more then just a web page, it was also a file server and a few more things.

If you were a regular visitor to my site, you could use my blog as gauge on where I was and what I was up to.  I have never shared a lot of personal information, it was mostly just things related to work, video games, and my many rantings, musings, and alike.

Have things changed?  Yes, for now my health is better, but not the greatest.  It has improved enough for me to resume the site, and other side projects.  If you follow them, at the very least you will probably find it entertaining.

I have been busy working on an update to FlickEm now for a while and its been going pretty slow, mostly because I am responsible for all parts of the app now.  Before I was just doing design, programming, and putting everything together.  I never had to worry about Art, or Sound.  Now I have to tackle all aspects of the next update and new game mode on both iPhone and iPad.  But the good news is, even though its going slow, I am pretty exciting about some of the new features, and when I have more that I have in a state to show, Ill share with everyone.

I learned a lot from the last year or so working on mobile.  Most important is that running a business is hard.  And that there are lots of struggles for the small developer unless he hits the app lottery.  The amount of people that are making a decent living on making apps is pretty small compared to the ten’s of thousands of developers out there.  I knew this when I decided to get into it, and I told myself it was ok, as long as I felt like I was doing good work and learning something. I had a lot of setbacks, but I have been trying to stay positive and do my best at focusing on the product and not think as much about the money side of things.  Taking contract work when it comes available, and searching for that sweet gig that I feel is the right fit for me.

However, that sweet gig is going to get even harder then ever to find since the state of the gaming industry is in decline.  Its not dropping as fast as it did a few years ago, but its been on a slow and steady downturn now for at least a year or more.  Console houses and major publishers have been devastated by the down economy with no real light at the end of the tunnel.  Just like the housing market, the console game industry was ripe for the bubble to burst.

A correction was long overdue since there were far too many studios out there who’s business model was creating budget titles.   These games were mostly targeted at the consumer with lots of disposable income that was plentiful before the recession.  Sadly, as peoples disposable income shrank, so did the market for those budget titles.  This was due in part to more savvy consumers who wanted to get the most for their money.  The blowback from this condition was that many Dev houses, who’s entire business model was based on the budget title strategy literally disappeared overnight.  THQ was heavily hit by this, causing them to shutter the majority of their studios.  This hit me personally since I was working at one of those shuttered studios in 2009.  And the last time I checked, their stock was down under a dollar, which is far from the 30 dollars it was at when I worked there.  It would seem that the days of creating a profitable console game that sells less then 500,000 units are gone.  The industry is becoming a smaller, hit driven business with less studios, and a greater divide in income disparity.  The same thing happened to the film industry in the late 60s and 70′s with the death of the B-Movie, and rise of Blockbuster.

With the closing of so many studios,  a great majority of developers have had a hard time getting jobs and many have left the industry for good. Others like myself turned to mobile and casual games.  Facebook startups seem to be really popular right now, but I worry that historically social network trends change so fast and so wildly that long term,  focusing a product reliant on another product isn’t really sustainable long term.  The internet consumer is fickle to say the least.

For the console industry to bounce back, we need to stop training consumers to expect more without raising prices.  We have to train our market to understand that quality costs money.  We need to back away from these pricing wars or accounting gimmicks (free to play) where there are no real winners.  And yes even the consumer is a loser when there are less and less choices because developers cannot sustain a living wage.  Everyone in the game industry knows what the problem is.  The costs associated with creating quality games keeps rising every year, yet we are so scared of losing market share that we don’t raise the price of the product to keep pace.  Instead we rely on the hit driven system where the barrier to entry is so high that only a select few can get into the system.  If things keep going this way, I don’t foresee a future where the consumer has lots of choices. Instead consumers will be plugged into groupthink where everyone is playing the same 4 or 5 titles.  This will lead to more sequels, and less creativity.  Where risk taking is almost impossible, which ultimately for the consumer is a bad thing.

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.

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.

Leaving Xaviant

Its been a year now since I departed from Xaviant LLC in Atlanta, and Its a good time to look back at what has transpired in the last year.  I have to admit that I really was apprehensive about a lot of things.  I knew that the economy was bad and it was only going to get worse for years to come.  The video game industry got a huge wake up call in 2008 about whether or not it was really recession-proof.  There was a huge shift in how it did business and what types of personnel they were looking for.  Finding a game job at the level I was at was going to be tough no matter how hard I looked.  It was going to require me to make a move to somewhere I probably didn’t want to move to, or couldn’t afford.  I had enough of moving, the nomad lifestyle was really getting tougher to do as I got older.  I wanted to have a home, friends, and something solid I could look back on, and that was hard to do when I was living in a different town and working at a different company every few years.  Basically I was tired of the lifestyle I was leading and wanted something more stable.  I was under no illusion, I know that the days of working for the same company all your life and getting a pension were long gone.  That now most people would not only work for multiple companies, but have 2 or 3 different careers in their lifetime.

I stuck around in Atlanta for the remainder of my apartment lease.  It was two months I had to stick it out, then I needed to start making some decisions.  During this time I spent some time looking into finishing FlickEm and getting that released, and I also checked out a lot of different jobs at various companies as well as head hunters.  Rudy and I, who also got let go from Xaviant wanted to do a few projects together, so we got together a solid business plan, but after a month of work on it found out that when it came to mobile, there wasnt a lot of investors looking to spend money on app developers, or development without solid 100% guarantees of immediate return.  Basically if we were going to do this, we needed to do this on our own dime, get some success, and maybe then someone might look to invest.  I know that seems pretty backwards of how it should go, but when you think about the risks, I think its smart of them to do.

Leaving Atlanta

Neared the end of my stay in Atlanta, I sold just about everything I owned, and got the rest to basically fit inside my Mustang.  Yeah, that was no easy feat as I had a lot of stuff, and most of it I just bought brand new including a lot of furniture.  Thats a story for another time.  When the 19th of October 2010 hit, I packed everything in my little black Mustang and made my way back to the only place I could really think to call home and that was San Diego.  Probably not the smartest thing financially, but you know how that goes.  I wanted to be closer to my son.  I wasn’t thinking of living somewhere I could do things cheaply, but where I was most familiar, and called home the longest.  The trip back was rather uneventful, but I did find myself missing Atlanta and the friends I left behind there.  Plus Rudy decided to stick it out there until his lease was up which wasn’t for another 6 more months or so.

When I got to San Diego, I didn’t have a real plan where to stay, thank god Gary let me stay with him, but that was fraught with a lot of problems, mostly with his roomates.  I had pinged back and forth between some friends and other places but I never had a real solid place to call my own which really put a kink in things.  I could go in depth with this, but I will say that there were a lot of long nights worrying about living arrangements for sure.  You never really appreciate your own place until you have lived with other people.  I was like Saddam Hussein, I never slept in the same place much.

The first thing I did when I got to San Diego was get a storage area for all the stuff that was packed in my car, and a Post Office Box so that I had somewhere to forward my mail.  Then I kicked it with Gary for a few days just getting acclimated to being back in San Diego.  I also spent some time with Austin.  But for the most part I needed to get my act together and get to work on FlickEm.  First that would require me to ditch my iMac and buy a laptop.  This was a pretty hefty expense, but I knew I was going to be very mobile and needed a piece of equipment that was going to best help me do that.  Rudy, eventually followed suit after he saw how successful that strategy was.  Basically, my office was wherever I could plugin my laptop and get on the internet.

The old saying goes, sometimes you have to look back to see where you are going.  So I have been looking back at old blog posts today trying to get a sense of where I have been to better help me know where I am going.  I think in the last few months I was thinking everything would be rather simple, that If I was just given enough time I could figure out what to do like some kind of math problem.  But the truth is, you really have to set a course, and try your best to follow it.  Sometimes its the course corrections that you need to make along the way that will discourage you.  But thats a good chance for you to look back, see where it was that you came from, and how far you have really come for perspective.