What to do?

Here i am working with me mate Paul, trying hard to come up with our net job.

What do we do next ?

We want to be successful obviously, but how. what is the best way to go about this....

I'll update this Blog with more info when we have some sort of conclusion. Maybe ill try to include the discussion or parts thereof.

It's Holiday Season

And in about 40 minutes it will be Xmas day.

Hope everyone is having or going to have a wonderful holiday full of cheer and fun.

I will enjoy myself tomorrow watching the family open their presents and cavorting in their new clothes i am sure.

Till then i have been going through the threads in the XNA forums. I just don't feel liek answering many of the questions. They seem to be adequately answered by others already and ones that have not, the person has probably found the answer already. The other types are the ones that ask amazingly wide ranging questions, like.. How do i write a game. Those questions have whole articles answering them if those posters cared to google game writing. Though this does bring me to the idea of writing an article or serires of articles of my own.

I think it would likely be different, but different enough to make it worthwhile i am not sure.

Guess ill wait and see.
Good night and Good luck.

My Good name is in question

So on the XNA games front, so many people have just aribtrarily used any artwork they find, even the copyrighted stuff. So Microsoft and therefore all the people around them are a little paranoid i guess.

Well from my experience with these dealings, they have always been very minor affairs, a piece of artwork from here, a piece of music from there etc. Once found out, these offending games are removed from the service till they have been fixed.

In my case my WHOLE game is copyright of Scott Christian Sava. He even sponsors my web page. Sooo why would anyone really seek to actually ask me if the copyrighted stuff was ok to use? It's not like i can't lie to them, haha! So what was the point? I would suggest it is to make it so people who were unsure can now safely review my game, without hurting their copyright brains. And don't get me wrong, copyright is a royal pain in the butt!

I obviously answered that i do have permission, nd i could also be lying. Sooo, no idea really how to deal with that one. Maybe i shouldn't bother. It will all be as it will be.

So now i have done the prelimary web page at www.sorcerygames.com/dreamland.html. So this is a big win, especially as i am not well (suffering from a migraine yesterday). So getting anything done is a big win. Hey, i even reviewed 3 games today. Two of which were worth commenting on.

Laters all, Happy holidays if i don't get to post again before Xmas.

Peer Review & Game updates

So my game has entered Peer Review.

The dragons den ? I don't know.

It has been quite soem time since my last game went through the Peer review process. Now i put the game into Playtest of course, in fact i did it twice. I had exactly two responses and they were both from the same nice person, Even if his username was Dip slit. Thanks mate whoever ya are. Made me not feel completely ignored. And being ignored is one of the reasons for this entry to my blog.

I have been partaking in a thread that is talking about which games should be reviewed and ways to make it easier to find people who are active, or more active in the XNA community. I believe that you get back what you put into it. Or will in the end. However there are people that just put their game into review and have never talked on the forums (ok, ya have no need to do that really!). Mainly though, they have not reviewed or playtested anyone elses games at all. so the thread went onto the fact we could ignore the crap trying to be pushed onto the service (i do anyway, i don't need a thread about it :O). So for these people i do not review their games. I leave them to someone else. Hey, i do my time, you should do yours etc.

I do have a current issue though. I pass games that are sound, and ones that do not excite me much at all. But on those more mediocre games i never post a comment. One saying, 'Hey look at me, i reviewed a game'. So i guess my community score will suffer. Now i thought i would change this behaviour, but i cannot. I review a game and pass it, and have no fondness for it, or it's success. So why would i wish the seller well ? I would not be being entirely thruthful if i wished it the best, i just wouldn't mean it. Not that i hate it or anything, cos i never pass those at all. So where does one draw a line in commenting. Mine is simple, if i like the game i comment. simple as that.

Now something new that came up was i found a game last week that came into review. I downloaded it to review it and then discovered the poster had exactly 2 posts to his name... He had also not partaken in the Playtest. So i decided instead of ignoring the game thread. I would post what i thought. Feeling like the OP should know why i am not going to review the game. Well i got told off by someone with a high and mighty postal score. Someone who must be feeling pretty good about themselves after telling me not to say such things. But isn't information useful. I am sure this person had no idea people will be up in arms about his none community interaction.

Anyway. My game is now in peer review. I hope it goes through. Later i expect i will do an update with more questions or more ineteractive stuff in it. Depends on how many people download it to be honest. How can i change that? Some people on the XNA forums seem to think that i should just spend endless amounts of time on my games and put them up there. I did that, have done that and probably will again. But when pieces of crap sell or get downlaoeded so well why should i bother. It is a crap shoot, the recipe of the day that gets downlaoded. Pellmell, took so long to make, so much effort. So much skill in the details, and hasn't yet reached 600 downloads. How can i justify vamping that up ? Or adding to it. Oh i had plans to. More firepower, new creatures etc. But what is the point, now i have sold like 50 or something.

Man am i going on now :O I had better stop.!!

Good luck 'A Dreamland Chronicles Game' in peer review for the xbox 360.

Flow Diagrams

Well i have never really done a lot with Flow diagrams before. I always liked the idea and the lok of ones i have been involved in, or ones that are presented as usueful information to see flow etc. Never have i really had the need to create one of my own.

So for my real job i needed to create a large flow diagram showing the asset content pipeline for our in house engine and toolset. this was going to be a challenege and after two failed starts with freeware, and a shareware prorgam, that really do not do the job right. By right i mean, that you create a box node and type in some text into it. Then when you move the box node the text stays where it was, simply stunningly bad form i say!

So i ended up doing the Trial of Microsofts Visio. This is a bit of a revelation after the other tools. I also wish i had just started with this tool. It is so powerful though that i was overwhelmed at first. Though once i started to get the hang of it, it all came together. So it took me two days to come up with the diagram, but it looks amazing! I wonder if there is a way to link to it.. hmm i don't know how right now. But if anyone requests to see the splendor, then ill try to show it.

I do not believe though, that for one minute it is a pretty diagram. I mean, anyone that does these in their job or has been trained will probably look at mine and laugh. But all the essential parts are there. Maybe one day i can pretty it up, and also add more data types in.

Xmas is close now, My Dreamland game is ready to goto review, the only thing i need is to prepare the video properly etc.. I am working on that.

Also the Adventure Books for Children (5 golden coins) books are now being worked. So maybe i can either self publish or find a publisher that has some drive to do this group of books. time will tell.

Have a great holiday everyone.

Documents can be hard

I am a mood writer. I create documents best when i am in the mood. I have probably already mentioned that. When i am not in the mood it is not only hard to create docs, but also hard to get anything useful done on them.

Usually i write notes on what i would like to be writing about. These notes are always useful thank goodness when i am in a writing mood.

the last few days i have faced something slightly new to me. That is how to get onto paper what is in my head. I know the WHOLE of the Data pathway, but for some reasons cannot seem to come up with a good way of showing this, in a flow diagram form. That is my current task. Which i was failing slightly. Today i made some rpogress and decided to break down the problem into smaller chunks. This is now going to allow me to not get bogged down and do the job more easily.

I can already feel the creative juices flowing.

The General Maintenance of a Developer

Here i am working at home for a change. I have a lot of documentation to copy or create. This is an important document for my company, so i want to do a good job. Working at home allows me to peacefully just get on with it. None of those time or attention consuming moments.

But that is not the point of this post of course.

Maintenance, something that takes time away from development. This can be handled by a nice IT department if you are within that type of company, but good luck on that. Myself i am at home typing away and while i am doing that i am taking the chance to fixup a few other machines i have at home that need a service. My daughters PC for example, since it caught that darned virus it has taken me ages to fix. Now i have repaired it, it needs to do all those boring and time consuming updates. I also have a friends netbook that went squirrly after it got 1800 viruses.

So while i work i can keep going to these machines and pressing 'Continue' buttons, and it hardly disrupts my day. But if i was doing normal stuff at home, i wouldn't be able to keep monitoring them. That is all they really need.

Then after ya make sure that they are updated with spybot and avast, and hope that is enough.

time will tell. good luck on your maintenance :)