Jason Della Rocca steps down

The Executive Director of the IGDA resigns.

This week, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) announced that Jason Della Rocca, its long time Executive Director, will be stepping down effective March 31. This will be just after the conclusion of the 2009 Game Developers Conference (GDC) this year.

Under Jason’s leadership over eight and a half years, the IGDA has grown massively (2900%), from 500 to 15000 members. More importantly, and understandably omitted from the press release, he took the organization from a fairly directionless group of early game developers (of which I was one) to an association that actually has significant relevance within the game industry.

You can read about Jason’s reasons for departing in this post on his personal blog. (There are lots of comments there, too, as well as at this Gamasutra article.)

I had the opportunity to work with Jason Della Rocca back in 2005 when the State of Michigan proposed legislation restricting game sales in the state, and I testified before a Senate committee, on behalf of the Detroit IGDA chapter. I saw Jason’s passion first hand, and his (and the organization’s) guidance and assistance was especially helpful. (Nevertheless, the legislation passed anyway, but then it was ruled unconstitutional, as expected, and ultimately cost Michigan an extra $182349 in restitution for industry legal fees. They should have listened to us.)

Good luck in your new endeavors, Jason!

Global Game Jam Detroit

Local developers participate in this international game event tomorrow.

At 5:00pm tomorrow [Friday, January 30, 2009], the Global Game Jam begins. It will last 48 hours, ending at the same time on Sunday (all times local). Since the event is worldwide, it covers many different time zones, and the first jams, in New Zealand, will begin in just over half a day from now.

The IGDA Detroit is providing/sponsoring one location for the Global Game Jam. Dozens of developers will converge on TechTown in Detroit to participate. These will be some of the more than 1750 people who will take part at one of 53 locations in 23 countries around the world.

There is still room available at Global Game Jam Detroit 2009, and it is open to everyone. The cost to participate is only $25 (to defray food costs); click the link for details.

What is a Game Jam?
In a Game Jam, participants come together to make video games. Each participant works in a small team on a complete game project over the course of a limited time period, usually over a weekend. With such a small time frame, the games tend to be innovative and experimental. The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is the first of its kind: a game Jam that takes place in the same 48 hours all over the world! The global Game Jam will start at 5:00PM Friday, January 30, 2009 through 5:00PM Sunday, February 1, 2009, (all times local). All participants in the Global Game Jam will be constrained by the same rules and limitations, with each time zone having one distinct constraint.

In addition to the start of the GGJ, there will be a chapter meeting for IGDA Detroit from 5:00pm to 8:00pm (also at TechTown, 440 Burroughs St., Detroit). Even if you are not planning to participate in the game jam, come hang out a while (for free) with other game developers. I plan to be there; how about you?

Chinese New Year 2009

I think that this finally brings the 2009 New Year celebrations to an end.

It is time to really get 2009 started properly now. One way to help one focus on goals is to make those goals public, so here goes:

  • Increase product development significantly (by rearranging priorities),
  • Develop at least three major products/updates for Goodsol Development (for Windows and Mac),
  • Release three more projects that have been in development (for several years) internally,
  • Establish baseline marketing and measurement techniques (on which to build), and
  • Move business operations toward a paperless office environment.

Yes, these five goals are quite ambitious but also realistically attainable. One major release every two months (on average) will keep us very busy, but the roadmap for these is already established. Our development projects are all very different and should be enlightening. The Goodsol projects are building on the technological improvements of last year. Finally, the marketing and business plans have internal support and should, ultimately, improve operational efficiency.

By the way, we could still use a few more beta testers for the upcoming version of Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition. Anyone interested can email me directly at beta@sophsoft.com, and I will forward your information.

On the personal side, I will keep my exact goals to myself, but I have been playing competitive soccer and am pleased to be back ice racing again this year. I am currently second in points (in class A1) after having a disappointing day in which I suffered not one, but two DNFs (Did Not Finish) due to peeling tires off of the wheels. It has been a nearly perfect year for ice, so I will be repaired and back up in Chippewa Lake this coming weekend for eight more exciting races.

More ice racing pictures should be forthcoming.

Happy Birthday, Mac!

The Apple Macintosh is 25(ish) today.

On this date back in 1984, Apple Computer “introduced” the Macintosh to the public with its famous “1984” television commercial, aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII.

Although this 60-second spot, directed by Ridley Scott, only ran once (OK, twice), officially, it is considered an advertising masterpiece and is probably one of the most viewed commercials in history. For more information, see its page on Wikipedia.

You can also watch the commercial itself on YouTube.

The Apple Macintosh was actually introduced on January 24 (two days later), but on Saturday I will be ice racing with MIRA (Michigan Ice Racing Association), so we celebrate earlier. (My car this year, a green Ford Contour, is so fast that a camera could not keep up. Yes, that is really me.)

By the way, in Super Bowl XVIII, the underdog LA Raiders (still sounds wrong) defeated the Washington Redskins by a score of 38-9, so the Mac ad was somewhat more exciting than the game.

A Brand New Day

The theme of this Inauguration Day is change for the better.

At this moment, President Barack Obama has just taken the oath of office to become the 44th President of the United States. This historical moment really ushers in 2009, so it is an appropriate first post for this year.

Note that the new President now officially works from a home office (the most famous one in the world), as I and many independent software developers do.

For my part, I have worked to change my priorities and schedule to further reduce the number of distractions and focus primarily on actual development tasks. I am now setting aside two days per week during which I only do development, barring emergencies. Of course, through today, there have been more minor emergencies than not, but I will persist nevertheless.

I am looking forward and aspiring to great things in the coming months and years.

Festivus (and the rest of 'em)

The end of year holiday season is in full swing!

Today is Festivus, or as my friends and I used to call it as children, Christmas Eve Eve. I will definitely be airing grievances during the feast, and my current feat of strength (of will) consists of keeping most of the annual disappointments out of this post. Actually, if we seriously followed this Festivus tradition, the holiday would continue year ’round; nobody pins this head of household.

A busy week for celebrations (a.k.a., “Seven Holidays for Seven Days”):

  • Sunday: Winter Solstice (7:04am local time)
  • Sunday: Hanukkah began at sunset
  • Tuesday: Festivus
  • Wednesday: Christmas Eve
  • Thursday: Christmas
  • Friday: Boxing Day
  • Friday: Kwanzaa begins

On Friday, our social soccer club also has our annual friends and family soccer game. (Since somebody actually asked: We are playing indoors at Lansing Indoor Sports Arena, and definitely NOT outdoors.)

We officially left the office last Friday for a two-week break, but unofficially I have been working extended hours every day since then. I will either quit for the year or collapse soon. In either case, I wish all of the readers of this blog a…

Happy New Year!

Thanks for your support in 2008.
Signing out until 2009.

RIP: Majel Barrett

The voice of the Star Trek computer passes away.

Yesterday, Majel Barrett, wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, died at the age of 76 after a battle with leukemia. For those unaware of her career, she played the recurring roles of Nurse Chapel on the original Star Trek series (TOS) and Lwaxana Troi in Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG). She was also the voice of the computer on the Enterprise in ST:TNG, which is my connection to her (though we never met).

I share credits with Majel Barrett on Star Trek: The Next Generation, “A Final Unity”. I was the lead programmer for the project, and after we made the (risky, at the time) decision to ship only on CD-ROM, it was decided that the game should feature voice acting from all of the stars of the series. Unfortunately, the management at Spectrum HoloByte only counted seven actors in this group, failing to consider the voice of the computer, for which they were going to use a generic voice actress. I suspected that fans would notice the different voice, but after my wife pointed out that they would also notice the absence of Majel Barrett (or Barrett-Roddenberry) in the game credits, I went and argued the point, successfully. The computer in our game found its proper voice.

It may be interesting to see where the Star Trek universe goes from here.

For more details (and pictures), see these articles from the New York Daily News and NBC Los Angeles.

In other news, Deep Throat, the key informant in the Watergate scandal, also died yesterday, perhaps having lived long enough to see something he may have never expected in his lifetime.

To end on a positive note, A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, was published 165 year ago today. I celebrated by watching the TNT version, starring Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Picard on ST:TNG, including in the aforementioned game.

And Tiny Tim, “who did NOT die,” lives on to this day…

Curmudgeon Day recap

We celebrate the day after the Big Thanksgiving.

Last week, we recognized Curmudgeon Day for the umpteenth time. This important holiday, which officially started a year before anybody saddled it with the phrase ‘Black Friday’, is celebrated by staying home and doing whatever you want, and simultaneously avoiding the non-believers, most of whom are stupid and/or dangerous and, as was proven this year, some are just plain evil.

Today is the fifth consecutive year I have blogged about Curmudgeon Day here, so those new to the faith can find more background in my postings from 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007.

This year, staying inside on Curmudgeon Day was a given, since the holiday fell right in the middle of a huge cold. We had several guests for our Thanksgiving Day celebration, which we call “Big Thanksgiving“, but one of them was not my voice. Still, we all enjoyed Big Thanksgiving, so named because we have a sort of open door policy for friends and family and always cook enough food to comfortably feed those who may attend. Instead of only board games, this year we also broke out the Wii to play some Boom Blox (4-player competitive), which spilled over into Curmudgeon Day (along with the necessary cleanup).

While we were warm and comfy inside, the original inspiration for the holiday, avoiding the braindead crazies that roam the earth on that day, was reinforced in a tragic fashion. Jdimytai Damour, a 34-year-old Walmart employee, was trampled to death by the more evil elements of this group. One story about the murder appears in today’s Los Angeles Times. The event makes me sick.

Last year, I mentioned that Snopes has debunked the myth of “Black Friday”. This year, it should be noted that all of the focus on purchases the day after Thanksgiving is nothing but rubbish. I mean to debunk the idea that sales on this particular day are meaningful. The media wants to use sales traffic as an indicator of the economy, and ignorant retailers want to project one day sales volumes over the whole holiday season. The basic and obvious problem with that is the deliberate manipulation of the numbers (via prices), which is not scientific in the least. When Galileo Galilei did his (possibly apocryphal) experiment at the Tower of Piza, the balls were both dropped at the same time. He did not have one person throw the 10-pound cannonball downward and another simply drop the 1-pound weight, and then exclaim, “Aristotle was right!

The fact of the matter is that these “doorbuster” (literally, it turns out) prices skew the sales numbers into meaninglessness. There is no way to know whether (or how many of) these purchases would have been made at regular prices, and it does not take into account the actual profit on these loss leaders, so called because the profit is likely negative for the particular item, just to lure (cheap) shoppers into stores. Some reports have indicated that the actual number of “bags” is lower this year, suggesting that shoppers are primarily buying the heavily discounted items and not too much else. (Who wants to browse during a mob scene anyway?)

I suggest that high traffic on a shopping day with huge discount items is more likely to indicate a poor economy and holiday season, where people are looking to buy at the lowest possible price and may not otherwise purchase these items at all. My supposition is supported by the fact that all major retailers are reporting sales downturns, except for Walmart, which advertises based on discounted items (translation: cheap Chinese crap). It is said that one feeds the family first, and then worries about principles, and this tends to reinforce that idea. (Full disclosure: I have never myself stepped foot in a Walmart store, on principle.)

For many years, one principle that I have oft stated seems an appropriate closing here:

Avoid buying the least expensive of any particular item or service, because the primary consideration in producing that product was likely cost rather than quality.

A little bit of History, Part III

A Shareware Venture

In the early years of my company, I had (finally) purchased my own computer, a Commodore VIC-20, as well as the experience of two unsuccessful attempts at selling my own games, ShackJack and Gremmaray.

In addition to the games I tried to market, there were many other games designed, started, partially completed, and/or finished. Among these was a version of Pac-Man on the VIC-20 that went further than any other clone in replicating the look and feel of the original. Of course, the Commodore 64 (released just two months after I bought my VIC-20) had taken over the market and the prospects for selling my games had dimmed considerably, so much of my focus was on the development of games for my own enjoyment.

After high school, I took my third professional programming job, a full-time position that involved dBase programming, as well as some management responsibility. This curtailed the time I could devote to my game development efforts somewhat, but I continued to work on various game projects in the evenings. (It was also during the time on this job that I met and married my wife, which also had an impact.) In this position, I first heard about this concept, “shareware“, where one could try software for free before buying, and the idea of marketing my games via that method crept to the forefront of my plans.

In late 1987, I left this job for financial reasons. (Technically, according to the unemployment office, I was laid off, since my paychecks were significantly in arrears.) One benefit of that difficult situation, however, was that I was in possession of an IBM-compatible “luggable”, with 640K memory and two 5.25″ floppy drives, when the separation occurred, and I was able to retain that equipment for a seriously (i.e., more than 180 days) delinquent bonus payment. On paper, the computer cost me about double what it was worth, but a cash payment would not be forthcoming, so I “accepted” the in kind compensation.

While I did some consulting work to pay the bills, I worked primarily on two games: a chess game that had a decent, if unspectacular, computer AI, and a DOS rewrite of the earlier Pac-Man clone. Both of these were written for CGA systems, which meant that the latter product did not have as nice colors as the VIC-20 version, but the higher effective resolution provided for better detail.

A few few months later, when I got an interview at Quest Software (developers of Questron), my ability to show and discuss my fully working and playable Pac-Man clone helped me secure my first professional game programming job. While there I played a significant role in the development and release of the PC version of Legacy of the Ancients and was the primary programmer for the Apple ][ version of The Legend of Blacksilver. Those were exciting times (with lots of interesting stories… for future blog posts), but development of my own products ground to a halt.

In early 1990, the writing was on the wall for Quest Software, telling of its imminent demise. While I worked crazy hours trying to complete a near impossible task (yet another story), I realized that I needed to start planning what to do when the company closed. I (virtually) dusted off the Pac-Man program, added some (minimal) marketing and documentation, did more serious playtesting, and generally took the software from playable game to releasable product.

On April 22, 1990, I released Pacmania 1.10.

That was a Sunday, and one of those discount computer shows was happening just a few miles away. At the time, most of the tables were for either cheap import hardware or floppy disk vendors, three different kinds. The first type were media vendors who sold inexpensive blank diskettes, the second type were software vendors who profited from selling preloaded shareware disks, and the third was a hybrid type who would sell the blank disks and copy software onto them from their “library” as a service. It was the latter two types that were of interested to me.

I went to this computer show (paying admission!) armed with a couple dozen green 360K floppy diskettes, each containing a copy of Pacmania, and I walked up and down each aisle distributing them to every vendor who wanted one. I then returned to the office and had my own private “uploading party”, spending several hours posting PACMANIA.ZIP to every BBS in the area (which was dozens, at the time). Exhausted, but excited, I drove home as a bone fide shareware author.

The first registration arrived Tuesday morning, the earliest any registration could have been received; it was from a woman who I knew (only) through the local bulletin boards. Unfortunately, the software was not quite as successful as this great start suggested, but it did earn me some money. The standard registration was $10, while the preferred registration for $15 bought a diskette, and the commercial registration (for $30) bought a diskette for every version released. Looking back, though, perhaps I can claim a pioneering role in the concept of micropayments, as the documentation provided for the following:

“Finally, you may register by sending us a US Quarter for each and every game ever started on your copy of PACMANIA.”

There was only one bug ever reported in Pacmania, although I had seen, but could not replicate, a very rare graphical artifact. (As fate would have it, though, I found a typo in the documentation when I reviewed it to get the above quote.) Windows has advanced beyond being able to properly run a DOS game that writes directly to the CGA hardware and PC sound chip, but when launched on a supportive system, the game still holds up pretty darn well (if I do say so myself).

Pacmania 1.1 also received some media recognition. In 1994, it was featured in the book, Fatal Distractions, written by David Gerrold, subtitled, “87 of the Very Best Ways to Get Beaten, Eaten, Maimed, and Mauled on Your PC“. On page 38, he say “Pacmania captures most of the charm of the original game. It’s also one of the most playable Pac Man clones we’ve seen.” Screenshots were used (with permission) in a 1995 book on game development, and the May 1995 issue (#130) of Computer Gaming World featured it in a column about shareware games. This was all 4-5 years after the game was released!

Although my first shareware venture did not make me fabulously wealthy, it did actually present several opportunities and valuable learning experiences.

Next: Part IV: Brushes with Destiny

Mission Accomplished!

The Association of Shareware Professionals emerges victorious.

For more than 20 years, the Association of Shareware Professionals (ASP) has worked to promote the “shareware” marketing concept, as well as the professionalism of those (primarily independent) developers who create the software. From a practical standpoint, some of the goals have been to encourage (among publishers) the usage of shareware marketing to sell software, and to advocate for the acceptance of shareware software with consumers.

On the usage side, one ASP members used to use the line, “Someday all software will be sold this way.” At this point, that vision is essentially realized, as most commercial (mass market) software products have evaluation versions to try before buying. Whether or not the word “shareware” is used, that is what this is.

As far as acceptance is concerned, the word, “shareware”, was the answer to a bonus question on QuizBusters, a broadcast television program (in its 20th season on the air) that is a version of high school quiz bowl competitions (or a trivia game show, if you prefer). I submit that this constitutes mainstream acceptance.

Here is a partial transcript of the questions on the Hartland Eagles vs. Charlotte Orioles episode, aired last weekend (and viewable via the link):

[MODERATOR is Matt Ottinger, the show’s host, and CAPTAIN is Cooper, the Hartland team captain.]

MODERATOR: …on these types of “wares”. First, this term is used to describe intangible programs, in contrast to a computer’s solid components.

CAPTAIN: Software.

MODERATOR: “Software” is right. This term, not to be confused with “freeware”, is used to describe software that is free to try.

CAPTION: Trialware?

MODERATOR: Not “trialware”. No, it’s rhyming: “Shareware“. “Shareware” is what I needed that time.

[Note: Not only was “trialware” incorrect, but it does not pass the spellchecker. “Shareware” does.]

So, as the departing Chairman of the Board of the ASP, I declare that the “shareware” portion of the organization’s mission has been accomplished successfully.

Nevertheless, over these years the Association of Shareware Professionals has grown into one of the most valuable community resources for independent software developers, as well as for the vendors who provide services to them. For a mere $100 US per year, one gets access to numerous resources, including access to the (very active) private newsgroups where one can ask and receive help from industry veterans who have dealt with the same issues and can give sage advice.

If you are in the software industry and are not a member of the ASP, Join Now!