Kickstarter and Stoic in Austin, TX

Today, I am in north Austin, behind the Pour House on Burnet road, at Stoic's game studio. They are in the process of making a game that is funded, in part, by the PEOPLE that want to buy it. The team reached out through Kickstarter and are hard at work.

I was asked by an old friend and colleague, Michael Morlan, to come in and interview them for their fans, and I really had no idea what I was getting into. They are super smart, super tight, and super focused. In fact, I'm pretty jealous.

They are a super tight, small team (right now, I'm sitting on a couch in the middle of a single room with 5 Stoics and 2 others shooting film and recording audio. Their lead artist is explaining the "look and feel" of the game on camera. The room might be 20x20. It literally is a converted goat shed. Yes, a lean-to. Super bad sheetrock and painted exterior siding as a ceiling. They have a small window unit A/C that's cranking its best against the Texas heat. Small. Indie. Driven.

I love small teams. I really love small teams.

Their group funded themselves by their savings originally, and are continuing to do that, while the funds from Kickstarter are set to only be spent on the game and prizes.


I've never interviewed a game team before; this has been really interesting! My role is essentially to move the team through a standard set of questions, but the fun part is following up interesting answers to dig deeper. Michael made a good decision when he asked me to do this, because I'm just as much of a game geek as I am a game developer. It's been GREAT using my experience to ask additional questions that I *hope* that the viewers will want to hear about. C'mon, Michael, leave those answers in! I'm not on camera or on audio; I'm just feeding questions to the team.


The release location or date of the video hasn't been decided yet, but I'm sure Stoic will get it up on their site soon after it is edited. Or their Youtube channel. Or their Kickstarter page. I'm not gonna give any details away, because that's their thunder. It has been a pleasure being part of this, not only because they are so nice, but because they are so HONEST with their fans and so open with their information. They are open kimono and I respect that greatly. Only success can come from this. Openness is the only thing that allows for complete creativity; hiding information and keeping knowledge private are the death knell of an organization, IMHO.


These guys are going to be successful. Their fans are going to be happy. This is raw game development. Like I said... I'm jealous.


Go guys. Make Austin proud.

[UPDATE: The final interview is located here: https://vimeo.com/59067231]

Overtime burnout

When I got my new gig at FastPath Learning, I was HIGHLY suspicious that I might have to work overtime, no matter what was said during the interview process. So far, we've had a few days here and there, and who cares about that? Not me.

Even now, we have a big deadline coming up, and a little overtime is happening, but it is NOTHING compared to the craziness of doing everything you and everyone on the team can to release a Game of the Year title. Man, the work to do that is insanity.

Well, it's been 8.5 months since I jumped off the commercial game train and into this world of "gamification." I cannot believe how my life has changed for the better. Spending time with the wife, kids and family is fantastic. My friends that I knew and hung with before I entered the game industry (it'll be 20 years in November) have been put through the ringer as I entered one crunch project after another. Right now, I'm trying to find ways to get involved with them again. It's a slow road and I am sure that those friends that saw me go into the breach are pretty hesitant to trust me again.

Yes, a LOT of the crunch was me driving myself to so the best I could, whether it was to start a company or to make sure that we could feed some babies.

At some point it's workoholism. And on another level, it's trying to prove that you have what it takes. Trying to "save" the company and other people's jobs has been a part of it as well. I'm sure these are only a small fraction of the factors involved in creating this insanity that is the requirement of creating fantastic work in the game industry.

I think there must be stages of withdrawal from this amount of crunch. For me, I have a few highlights / plateaus that I can try to describe:
- Complete disbelief that there was a job outside the traditional game industry that would be interesting and fun. Not to mention that it's teaching reading skills to kids.
- Skepticism about whether the job was real.
- Trying to accept that I really COULD leave after 8 hours.
- Assuring the family that I would, indeed, be home after a reasonable hour. And that I would get to talk to the kids EVERY day, instead of coming home while they are asleep.
- Starting to realize that I would actually have free time
- Becoming really selfish with my free time
- Balancing out free time with time the family needed
- Getting to the point where everyone in the family wasn't "desperate" to spend time with me so I could start figuring out what I wanted to do with my free time.
- Realizing that I needed to do ALL of the things I had been "putting off." My honey-do list is about 10 years out of date.
- Taking the time to actually get some of that done.
- Soul searching to think about how this has all affected me.
- Sharing this experience with close friends and then... here.

Now, I'm feeling like normal life (at least as it applies to me) may be closer than ever.

There's still a long road to recovery. If you are / were in the game industry... What's YOUR story?

Digital Footprints

For years now, I have been thinking about "what are my kids going to do with my presence on the web after I die?" Morbid, but whatever.

Ideas are a dime a dozen and the only thing that makes them have value is to actually DO something with them. I want to give this idea to the universe in the hopes that someone actually does something with it.

Imagine a FREE service that crawls through the internet and pieces together all of the things you put out there and puts it in a chronological order like a timeline. Of course you could cull out the things that aren't "your" but you get the drift. It should be smart enough to cull out repeats and distinguish between your work and others. I have tons of other details that should be there, but really... I am just trying to plant the seed so someone else will make it BETTER.

Digital Footprints. Please. Someone. Make this.

Today at 12:54pm CST is the 1st Anniversary of my 1st Facebook game, Fantasy Kingdoms. Play it @: http://ping.fm/LjA77

Fantasy Kingdoms rates in "This Week's Most Explosive Facebook Applications"! Check it out!: http://ping.fm/f4YHg

Today Fantasy Kingdoms hit its all time highest MAU and DAU numbers on Facebook! http://ping.fm/srtPS I love our team!

Fantasy Kingdoms is the 13th growing Facebook Game in the last week! STATS: http://ping.fm/YXWGZ PLAY: http://ping.fm/mGmQD