And another year flies by...

This is more or less a recap on the blog I wrote last night on the DigitalFlux Entertainment site, but a little more Indie-centric.

Recapping last year, I have to say I was slightly disappointed. The economy sucked pretty hard, and hustling for money left me with less time than I would have liked for a lot of things, and with very little money for the time that I did have. I got engaged in August to the most wonderful girl. I picked up a pair of game development contracts and then a part-time tech job, which then imploded three days before Christmas (oh, but do you want to come back and work a quarter of those hours? Yeah, I realize that it makes it negatively profitable for you, never mind). And then Torque went down, which lead to phone calls with said clients, who were understandably worried. And then queue up the host of life-issues that pop up only when you don't have the money or means to shrug them off...

I really only complain about that part in parenthesis- it chaps my cranberry something awful for some reason ;)

As all of that stands now, three weeks into the new year, the situation is much improved. I'm getting married at the end of next month, and money is tighter than an over-done Botox job. I contract full-time on the above-mentioned projects, in addition to developing tools and continuing work on Epic Frontiers (whose zoning code is now done in PHP and hosted on my site). And Garage Games is back up and running.

And that's not a bad place to be, considering last year. So, that said, where the hell is DigitalFlux Entertainment headed?

1) Contracting: I need to eat and pay rent, and so I've become quite the workaholic, banging away on contracts until the wee hours of the morning many more nights than is healthy, but hell, things need to get done! And now that Garage Games is officially back, my clients are much happier and more relaxed about the future, which means that my future as a contractor is also happier and more relaxed.

2) The GG Community: With more time being poured into contracts and game development for both myself and others, I'm intending to give back to this community, which helps me quite a bit when I'm stuck in a jam. That means updating resources with my own knowledge (like WebKit- which I'm not done chiming in on yet), responding a bit more in the forums, and even blogging more (because I know how much you love to hear my mouth- no? Muwhahahaha!).

3) The DFE Community: Part of the transition to concentrating full-time on development and contracting means that I'm making a more concerted effort to be visible as a brand. The new DigitalFlux Entertainment Facebook and website pages are available (the website is still being worked on- there's some IE viewing issues) now, in addition to the Epic Frontiers Facebook and website pages that have been up since last year. There is also a store integrated into the DigitalFlux site now, where I have a number of free content packs for developers, and where I will soon re-post a texture pack I was selling and put up a small puzzle game for sale (for a dollar! yay!).

4) Epic Frontiers: Development has slowed in recent months with the artists on the team being siphoned off by art school and the high levels of work involved in that. Luckily, they are available for occasional paid work that I'm able to farm out for my contracts but, unluckily, they don't have the time for Epic Frontiers. Once I'm back from the honeymoon in early March I have some plans to put into action about this in order to get content flowing into the game, but until then it's going to be slow going.

5) Tools and Content: With the Magnitude Editor in the store here and selling, I've already planned for the next version of it. The next major version will be standalone, written as a Flash app in Actionscript in order for people to use it in dual-monitor setups, and also for those who use engines other than T3D. As a matter of policy, upgrading pricing is simply the price difference between versions, and over the last 10 years of selling tools, I've found this to be pretty fair for those who have invested in earlier versions of my products, and there's probably a minor revision to throw at the T3D-based one before version 2.

Beyond the Magnitude Editor is pathBlazer, a path-editing tool that will integrate into T3D and allow for much easier placement and control of large paths (it's cutting its teeth on 500-1000-node paths). It's going to get its own blog in a few weeks, but suffice it to say that it's a pretty cool tool to have if you find yourself working with lots of path nodes and need a better way to create and place them, and it's being designed with very easy installation in mind.

While all of that gets done, I'll also be working to release additional texture packs. Being an avid traveler, I always make sure that I come back with at least half my photos consisting of texture references. Some of the lower-resolution textures are available for free, but there's a few hundred photos waiting to be converted into texture packs with diffuse and normal maps. Of course, there are free sources for textures- I use them too, but where I intend to compete is packaging up normal and detail maps and having them ready to just drop into the game. That means having a materials.cs file ready to drop in so that that saves you typing time, but if time is money, then spending a few bucks to save a few hours should be a no-brainer when it comes down to it. And if you have ideas on what would help sell you on texture packs, I'm always willing to hear them.

6) Conferences: Unless someone wants to fly me out and put me up, which is doubtful (yet welcomed!), I'll be staying local to the East Coast this year. For those who are also out here on the East Coast, I will probably make some of the smaller conferences, though a lot of the ones here in New York are ridiculously overpriced (no, I don't want to pay $800 for a single-day conference where the only subject is "monetization" and panelists actually refuse to answer questions on the subject). Nonetheless, as in the past, I'll probably write about the conferences that I do attend. And for those who have never been there: Go to GDC out in San Francisco. It's mind-boggling, and if you put yourself out there even a little bit, you'll meet tons of people. I routinely lose my voice on the floor after about 3-4 days of talking to people.

So there you have it: DigitalFlux Entertainment's yearly plan for world domination! Tell your friends, and don't forget to go like my pages on Facebook!