September 2014

September 24, 2014

Dark Acre Year Three Report

THE DEAD YEAR

Check out the Year Zero, Year One, & Year Two reports.

Major Events from Year Three

Detailed chronicles of Year Three can be found on the pages & posts of this website.

FACTS & FIGURES

Financials

All values in Canadian dollars, year total/monthly average (previous year)

Year Three was a big earner (theoretical) despite lack of new output, and the move from a big city to a rural community cut overall costs in half. Sales of existing products were predictably low due to lack of any serious marketing efforts. This is all in line with the original ‘06 business plan projections.

Considering that I did almost no work for the entire year, this was a pretty good paid vacation.

As with the end of Y2 I still find myself in dire need of publishing something worthy of a serious marketing push. This is a “pre-hit” condition for any independent creative, so it’s not a source of discouragement so much as a fact of life.

Results

Primary Game Projects:

Year Three has been the worst year for new commercial output with zero completed projects.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

1. Played All the Videogames

I couldn’t have possibly taken a better vacation from reality than I did, at least from the perspective of being a videogame developer. Immersed in both Call of Duty and World of Warcraft I dedicated thousands of hours to understanding the appeals of two of the biggest commercially successful videogames in history, and had a lot of relaxing fun doing it.

2. Continued to Not Read Twitter

Apparently there’s been some very serious problems with certain egos on Twitter. I only found out about it when it managed to gain some exposure in real (read: non-gaming/blog) news publications, so I went out and checked some of the social network timelines of the major players. After spending a few hours sifting through various threads and links, I realized that the only place the war was raging was in those tabs of my web browser, so I closed them. It’s horrible, certainly, if people were attacked in real life, but the whole thing seemed pretty ridiculous on all sides. From an objective viewpoint it looked just like a bunch of egos clashing and tossing gasoline on each other’s fires.

My takeaway was a deeper interrogation as to why self-promotion of any individual ego matters at all in game development. Isn’t the message or product more important than who made it? And if an individual opens themself up to the anonymous firehose of hatred that the Internet provides, shouldn’t they expect to get blasted? Why attach your sexuality, politics, or face to an endeavor? Who cares? It makes no sense to me.

I saw timelines of developers filled with hours and hours of engaging with anonymous burner accounts and wondered what drove them to do so. Isn’t it just like trying to stem the incoming tide with walls of sand? Ultimately futile and a massive waste of time? I’m just glad I had the wherewithal to disengage from that tarbaby ages ago.

As said last year, “taking Twitter seriously is a high road to hell”, and this still seems to ring true.

WHAT WENT WRONG

1. Didn’t Work

I’ve only recently recovered the vestiges of my work ethic that was blown to bits at the start of last year. It’s coming together nicely with several hundred words written per day, both fictional and game development-related. The amount of time spent with 3DS Max and other visual asset pipeline tools is paying huge dividends, and the overall quality of production on Child rises daily. Whether this level or productivity could’ve been reached without taking almost an entire year off will never be known. I don’t regret not working, but at some level it’s hard to completely ignore the time lost.

YEAR FOUR

This is the year of The Child. It may not be released within the next 12 months, but there will be no production distractions whatsoever. A playable version will be available to first-run testers before the year is out. That’s all I’m willing to say on the matter, so if you’re interested in receiving production updates if and when they happen, watch the usual channels.

Once again you have my deepest gratitude for following along this journey of solo independent creative development. With so much positive happening in the first couple of years a down year was inevitable, and here’s hoping the momentum gained will carry the production to fantastic new heights.

Here’s to another year of tilling the hard soil of the Dark Acre.

Never give up. Never surrender. Unless of course you run out of food. Then maybe re-think the strategies.

2014.09.01 – 2014.09.30

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