So, here I am, fresh faced from the Develop Quiz and absolutely determined (more than ever before) to make my dream a reality.
Maybe it was hob-nobbing with developers such as RockSteady or Splash Damage or having a chat with the living legend that is Ian Livingstone. I don’t know, but what I did know is that once I returned “back to reality” my mind was most definitely elsewhere – focussed sharply on our goals.
Our team finished top of the bottom half of the table (so that’s, 11 out of 20!) and we considered that a respectable finish – we made a couple of silly mistakes in certain rounds that probably cost us a top half finish, but considering our opposition we have to be happy with that, and we were. The bar was drunk dry of lager, the place eaten out of food, so yeah, I think Id consider that a result! The ONLY problem (if you consider it a problem) is that this has given me a taste of the industry and I want more. Not just in a “sipping” sort of a way, but more in a “guzzling” sort of a way! That’s all well and good but it’s REALLY difficult to focus on the day job with these thoughts running about in my head!
So, what else is occurring? Well, we have recruited an additional Developer to the team, Matthew. Matthew is a really good “catch” for us. He is an experienced C++ coder who will not only speed up development on our projects, but I am sure will be able to guide us a little too in the world of C++ and getting our code up to scratch and optimised. So the team is now 3 developers strong (Liam, Matthew and myself), one designer (Chris), an artist (Phil) and a musician (who is sort of sub contracted – an old friend who has musical fingers in many pies!). I feel like this is a winning combination and we can now crack on and actually get some work out there. It’s growing increasingly obvious to me that Project 2 – the “secret” project is going to be completed first as in theory it has the shortest development time of all our projects. Liam and Matthew are working on that, and as soon as there is progress to report, TSA will be the first to hear about it.
With the growing team and in turn growing amount of coordination required it raises questions in my head about my role within Adarakion. Whilst coding is my passion (and always will be), I find I have less time to code and devote more of my time to looking after the team, organising conferences, trying to “direct” as much as possible. I see myself perhaps more as the “face” of Adarakion than I perhaps envisaged all those months ago. I do enjoy that role (again, perhaps more so than I thought I would) and want to continue to do that, whilst very much keeping my hand in on the code side. Also another role I need to keep myself firmly position in is that of “leader” – not in a “you do this”, “you do that“ kind of a role, but more of a “keeping the team informed” role. This may sound trivial but with any team it’s good practise to keep everyone involved and on the ball so they know what is happening who is doing what, and of course, where everyone is at.
My main focus on the code side of things is still the Blast! port (and will be for the foreseeable future). Progress is (still) being made slowly but as I say, with all the other bits and pieces I am finding myself involved with it leaves less time for the work on Blast! I’m offsetting this “lost” time by actually scheduling my work. I knew there would be a time when I had to succumb to being organised; I just didn’t think it would happen yet!
With this new organisation I have been giving some additional thought to raising finance for Adarakion. Obviously (I think I can speak for everyone in the team at this point), we would all like to get paid for doing what we do. Whilst none of us have any specific industry experience this makes things a little tricky to achieve in so far as we can’t just walk into Activision and make our demands so this leaves us with several options to consider:
1) Get a project ready for deployment and charge people to download it.
2) Get a project ready for deployment and talk to publishers
3) Approach venture capitalists.
4) Something different.
My thoughts on point 3 are quite interesting, so here goes. What if we ran it a little like a club and charged a yearly “membership” to be a member of Adarakion. This would entail paying a one off charge and then all the games we release in that period you automatically get access to and can play. Obviously we would need a reasonable portfolio to begin with (to make it worthwhile) but if we could guarantee 2/3 titles per annum for a sum to be decided would that work? We’d offer support, beta testing opportunities, exclusive stuff too for members. This wouldn’t be to the exclusion of all others though – we would also make our stuff available for download individually too. Any feedback or initial thoughts on this? I’m mindful that we would need a nice line up initially to tempt the punters in, but your feedback on the principal of it would be appreciated? I think that in order for us to seriously devote the time we need to, to our projects, we need an income and I guess a little market research at this point wouldn’t go amiss? The charge wouldn’t be prohibitive – I’m mindful that we aren’t giving you access to the next COD here, just neat, playable retro-type games that are fun to play. I haven’t chatted this over with the team at this stage; I’m really just thinking out loud and doing a little impromptu market research!
As ever, your feedback would be invaluable so feel free to comment here or drop me a PM – thanks in advance.
Right, back to the real world drudgery of work. Until next week peeps.