Mr.Sharps.Com

Today I had the great fortune of attending a truly inspiration presentation!  The Seattle Area’s chapter of the Interactive Digital Software Association (Basically a professional society for game developers) held its monthly meeting.  The topic of the session was a post-mortem of the development process of Land of Legends by the game studio Tiny Hero.

Just a little bit of background.  The presenter, Scott Lance, was the studio’s only full time employee.  As such, he played the role of game developer, producer, and executive.  He was working with a very talented team of part-timers (another dev, artist, ui designer, and sound guy).

It was an excellent presentation.  The topic of indy game development is something near and dear to my heart.  I have a similar background to Scott’s in that most of our professional development is on .Net web apps.  As such, he decided to develop the game using managed DirectX.  So, a lot of the issues he ran into, I could empathize with.  I was also amazed at how much outside of coding he considered.  He talked about user experience, business deals, and staffing issues.  It was interesting to see how he fared quitting a cushy profession full-time gig to develop his own game. 

All things considered, I can really say that the final product was awe inspiring.  To keep it feasible with such a small team, he chose to do a simple turn based game with all 2D art.  Also, the 2D art looks fairly simplistic, but polished.  However, as simple as it may have looked to a game who is used to picking up $50 games from Best Buy created from 50man teams with multi-million dollar budgets over 18monts to 3 years, completing the game and making it commercially viable was no small feat.  It took the one full-time developer 2 full years plus roughly 15 hours /week for all of his contractors to get it done.  With no real source of income except loans from an angel investor, none of the contractors were paid, Scott ran up a substantial debt.  Now that it’s done, it their publishers marketing efforts work, the optimistic projection of sales is 10,000 copies.  At $40 adds up to $400,000.  That doesn’t sound to bad at first, but once the publisher gets their cut, he pays of the contractors, and repays investors, he stands to ‘optimistically’ earn about $22,000.  Two years, $22,000.  That’s chump change.

It’s kinda sad that after all that, there won’t be the magic Hollywood ending.  It will never be the blockbuster Christmas title.  He’s not going to get rich and most likely most gamers will never hear of this game.  Even if they do, they’ll probably play it for a month as a novelty then move on to the next hyper-marketed title from one of the major publishers.  But to me, Scott Lace is a hero.  It was never the guy who made the big mass market thing and all the money that got my attention.  It was always the small guy who did it before it was cool only for the passion of doing it.  Fanning’s Napster and Frankel’s WinAmp not the Apple’s Ipod/Itunes/Music Store.  Carmack using Doom to show the world that modern game development was to be done in C++.  Del Tha Funkee Homosapien creating an independent record label and creating a buzz on the internet instead of making a radio friendly album.  People that are willing to sacrifice for their art, whatever it is.

Links: 

Tiny Hero:  http://lol.shrapnelgames.com/

Seattle Sputnik:  http://www.igda.org/seattle/

Somehow, Jay-Z's 'Fade To Black' tour flick ended up in my movie queue.  With nothing better to do, I threw it into the Dvd player.  I was pretty much thinking I'd skim through it, skipping most of the concert scenes (who really wants to see some dude walk back and forth and scream over a beat anyway) and watch a couple of the behind the scenes moments.  I walked away awed, inspired, and a little envious. 

First, the movie is wonderfully edited.  It shows a good amount of footage, but uses it to tell a story of his musical career and the making of his final album.  All of the concert footage is from a show he did in Madison Square Garden, NY.  As this was his farewell tour, just about every major artist he worked with (from Pharrell, to Mary J. Blidge, to the Rocafella family, to Beyonce) showed up to support HIS show.  Between the guests, pyrotechnics and guests, enough was going on on stage to make it an interesting performance.  After listening to him go through roughly 10years of material, you can't help but question whether not he is the best rapper of our generation (Ok, you could easily make a good arguement for 2Pac, but Biggie?  May he rest in peace, but two hot albums?).

The behind the scenes footage was inspiring.  Having pretty much memorized the Black Album, it was awesome to see the variety of talent and personalities he worked with to put it together.  Each time a producer would play Jay-Z a beat that would ultimately make the album, he'd get this focused look.  He's know for never writing down his lyrics.  Watching him lay a track in the studio gives you a new appreciate for his music.  I really have no ambition of being a rapper or a performer, but seeing someone at the top of their game, no matter what it is, makes me want to strive for perfection in the things in my life.

Of course, as this was supposed to be his farewell album/tour, a lot was done to really showcase Jay-Z as a man on top of the world.  From the screaming fans that hung on to his every word, to the parade of musicians, each at the top of their game, who served as mere supporting cast for his big night, to his insight on the music biz and watching others come up, this going out party put even Jordan's final shot as a Bull to shame.  So I guess this is where the envy comes in.  It's a rare individual who will ever attain this level of success and adulation, and a painful realization that, chance are, I won't be one of them.

But I won't rule it out just yet.

Jay-Z now joins John Carmack, Justin Frankel, Shawn Fanning and few others on a short list of people I truly idolize.

Ok, this one's hella late, but better late than never.

Lets be real:  There really aren't too many good reasons to visit alabama.  But at some point in my life I would like to visit all of the states in the USA.  And new years '05 had all the right ingredients. 

1.  I'm bored at my parents house.  Most of my friends are out of town.
2.  No plans for new years
3.  My sister left her brand new Civic at my parents place.  At some point, she's going to have to make the trek back from Birmingham to pick it up!

Roadtrip!  I buy a plane ticket for the reverse route from Birmingham off of Southwest airlines and I'm off.  It was about an 11hr. drive.  My parents urged me to split it in half, but were amazed when I called around midnight and was like, "I'm here". 

So yeah.  If I'm going to do Alabama, I'm doin' it big.  A little shopping(come on, I was with my sister), Steak dinner, and of course, all the motorsports stuff she could tolerate.  First, we checked out the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum.  It was hot!  It had a lot of vintage race cars and bikes, but me and my camera gravitated towards the cars.

Afterwards, I'm like, 'Steph, is Talledaga around here'.  She tells me, 'nah, it's a pretty long drive'.  Luckily one of the staff members at the Museum overheard us and mentioned, 'actually, it's just 45 minutes up the street'.  The tour of the legendary Nascar track was the Bomb!  Even Steph liked (don't front Steph, you know it was hot).  A little tour bus took us around the track.  The 30-degree banked corners are crazy.  Supposedly, you have to drive a minimum of 70mph just to prevent your car from sliding off.

We finished the weekend with a steak dinner on New Years Eve.  Thanks Steph for being such a great host

Ok, it's been a minute since I've posted.  This time around I am going to make an honest effort to use my space as a gallery for my Photo club work. 

I love photo club!  We meet about once every six weeks and share pictures we took based on a theme selected by a rotating member at last month's meet.  Its great to meet and talk with really smart and artistic types with absolutely no interest in my computer geekdom.  Plus, it's a great tour of seattle bars (we meet at a different one each month).  Friends, Beer, photos, and scrabble (we play after photo sharing.  Hence our club has also been referred to as ScrabTo or Phrabble Club.  All the three letter acronyms of my world don't count, so I'm at a severe disadvantage), what else could I ask for on a Monday night.

That said, I'm adding my sumbissions to the last two meetings (slow shutter and clouds were the themes).  Let me know what you think.

It's official.  The Zulu shield my mother brought back from South Africa is mine.  The full story:

My mother goes to South Africa to work with one of her students.  While there, she brings back a few art pieces and artifacts for everyone in my family.  For my father, she brings back the shield in question.  I visited my parents in August and saw the shield.  My father didn't think it went with the decor of their new home and didn't want it.  In an otherwise perfectly neat house, it was laying on the floor behind the couch.  I promptly requested that it be sent to me as my birthday present in November.  My mother happily agreed.  In October, I reminded my mother of my present, and she informed me that my father stopped hating it and might want to hang it somewhere, so they were keeping it.  Now, in late December, a good half year after the piece was imported, I returned home, only to see the shield in THE EXACT SAME SPOT ON THE FLOOR. 

I figured that now is the time for me to stand up.  For the lovers of African art and culture, for the lovers of good interior design, and most importantly, the lovers of free stuff :)  That said, I waited until the parents were blissfully off sleeping and seized the work.  It's mine all mine baby!