Tag Archives: business

Not-so-Free Agent

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There’s a hole in my schedule, Dear Liza, Dear Liza.

For the first time in years, my game development time is entirely my own.  Today was the first day of business since late 2001 on which I did not have a time obligation to a consulting client.  Feels weird. 😉

Having made arrangements with our largest client to take a short hiatus (while we weather the vicissitudes of App Store reviewers), we did have an interesting quasi-game project penciled into the schedule.  Unfortunately, as happens all too often in this industry, as we were warming up the fountain pen, the prospective client proved to be yet another “tire kicker” not actually serious about having the project produced professionally.

So, this means that…

You, yes you, can retain a professional game developer with more than 30 years of industry experience to design, program, or consult on your project.

Currently, I am actively working on Windows, Mac OS X, and iOS projects, with C++ and Objective-C code, though my abilities range far beyond those.  I have particular knowledge of quality control, artificial intelligence, and traditional games.  For more information [serious inquiries only]: seelhoff@sophsoft.com

Of course, I am actually reveling in having the extra development time for Digital Gamecraft projects, starting with Demolish! Pairs, for which there will be a number of announcements in the coming days and weeks.

The only thing (and the real point of this post) is…  I need to get used to having all of my time for these projects.  At the moment, I still habitually kick into time management mode, making sure that I stay on top of everything that needs to be done for each client.  For now, I suppose, I am my only client.  That works. 🙂

2013: Year in Preview

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Happy New Year!

Digital GamecraftWe at Digital Gamecraft have emerged from our two-week “break” into a new year with a fresh sense of optimism, renewed productivity, and an almost overwhelming prognosis of much greater success in 2013.

There are three major factors that play into the very positive outlook for this year:

  1. We had a strong finish to last year, with a large number of product updates shipped and a significant stabilization of our development platforms and processes.
  2. Despite officially being “out of the office” during the break, I actually fell back to my love of game programming, hence Demolish! Pairs made fantastic progress.
  3. The first day back in the office saw us ship another major update to Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition, adding another 20 games (to be published very soon).

After a certain amount of adjustment during 2012, we are not making any changes to priorities for the new year.  However, we did map out our course of development for the foreseeable future, and just seeing the project list is fairly exciting itself.  We have four brand new game products to launch within the next six months, as well as a new web site project and a productivity application.  Of course, success begets success, so new clients are also contending for SophSoft, Incorporated game development resources.

Personally, I am resolved to both read and write more; my desire to spend more time programming games is handled nicely by the facts in the above paragraph. 🙂

So, here’s wishing all of you a great deal of success (however you choose to define it) for the coming year, and a nice recovery for the game industry in general.

2012: Year in Review

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Overall Performance Grade: B

Digital Gamecraft / SophSoft, IncorporatedDespite being in the middle of our two-week break, I decided to take a short hiatus from the warm tropical sunshine (actually, the snowfall outdoors and a space heater in the office) to do a performance review of this past year at Digital Gamecraft and SophSoft, Incorporated.

Major Events

#10: FreeCell Plus 4.10

We released a maintenance update to this popular collection of 8 FreeCell Solitaire games (plus 4 bonus games) on October 16, for both Windows and Mac OS X.

#9: Most Popular Solitaire 2.10

We released a maintenance update to this top-selling collection of 30 Solitaire games (plus 13 bonus games) on October 12, for both Windows and Mac OS X.

#8: Goodsol Solitaire 101 version 2.12

We released a maintenance update to this collection of 101 favorite Solitaire games (plus 34 bonus games) on September 25, for both Windows and Mac OS X (after the earlier release of GSCI 2.10 on July 3).

#7: Are you kidding me?

During August and September, we experienced major failures of systems running (in order) Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, while development continued (mostly) apace.  All systems were restored, development processes were optimized, and this Gamecraft blog was improved.

#6: Action Solitaire 1.50

We released a significant upgrade to this arcade Solitaire game on May 15, adding 5 more games for a total of 75 games, for Windows (only).

#5: Preparing for Mac App Store Submission

Starting in January (and extending into March), we published a 6 part article, plus introduction, giving a most detailed listing of guidelines and pitfalls associated with submitting a product to Apple for inclusion in the Mac App Store (for OS X).

#4: Pretty Good MahJongg 2.41 / ME 2.02

We released an update to this definitive collection of MahJongg Solitaire, tile matching, and puzzles, which contains 55 games and 300 layouts, on September 25, for Windows (PGMJ 2.41) and Mac OS X (PGMJME 2.02).

#3: ISVCon 2012: Success!

The company attended the inaugural ISVCon conference (renamed from Software Industry Conference) in Reno, Nevada, and I presented Quality Assurance for Small Software Publishers and also spoke on the How Games are Different panel.

#2: Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.40

We released another major update to this largest collection of Solitaire games for Mac, adding 25 new games for a total of 400 games (plus 60 bonus games), on November 27, for Mac OS X 10.4/Tiger through (current) 10.8/Mountain Lion (after the releases of PGSME 2.30/2.32/2.33/2.34/2.36/2.38 earlier in the year).

#1: 30 Years in Business!

In January, our company celebrated its 30th ANNIVERSARY, making us “The Most Venerable Independent Game Developer in the World.”  (It may be a bit of hyperbole, but we have been doing this since well before many “indie developers” were even born.)

What Went Right

Digital Gamecraft has remained a full-time independent game development company for the 18th consecutive full year (stretching back into 1994, as Sophisticated Software Systems). Some internal projects, including Demolish! Pairs, have made huge strides, and we have multiple iOS projects poised to release early in 2013, while maintaining our expertise in Windows and Mac OS X platforms and adding others (to be announced).

Product development was really solid for the entire year, and our strong association with Goodsol Development continued, as evidenced by the numbers: 18 SKUs published (plus two quiet updates), 16 closed beta versions, 6 internal (alpha) versions, and 3 more updates pending release.  That is a SKU/update shipped about every 8 calendar days, on average, not at all bad for a small company.  A new development/release schedule for Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition is more efficient and working well (so far).

What Went Wrong

The heavy release schedule of various Solitaire games on multiple platforms took a toll on the resources (mostly time) available for other projects, compounded by the several weeks of hardware and system failures and recovery, so Demolish! Pairs was delayed (again) until early 2013.  Marketing efforts are nascent as well.

Despite the improved release schedule, desktop sales have not lived up to expectations, based on results from previous years, so some rethinking and second-guessing has taken place.  In particular, the division of effort between (tried and true) desktop development and (less reliable) mobile development (for lower price points) is a matter of some risk.

Final Evaluation

On balance, I awarded a grade of B for overall performance in 2012.  Although specific tasks, especially the intention of shipping a new Digital Gamecraft product, were not fulfilled, the entire year was fully productive and reestablished forward momentum after a disappointing 2011.  This also takes into consideration progress on a number of projects that do not (yet) figure into the published release schedule.

We are capable of an A+ grade in 2013, so that is clearly the goal.

Are you kidding me?

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Where Gamecraft has been recently.

As regular readers will have noticed, this blog has spent a little time offline, and even more time without new content, although even occasional browsers will see that it now has an exciting new look.

In the past two months, we have had crashes of our most important Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows systems (in that order).  These were significant setbacks in and of themselves, but when a microISV is producing at full speed, and roadblocks are encountered, something has to give.  In this case, this Gamecraft blog was one of the casualties.

The initial Mac OS X issue was a terminal hardware failure of the primary development system, but it was compounded into a major problem by Apple’s ill-advised deprecation policy, since no new replacement hardware would run the version of Xcode and build tools we use to support all of our Mac customers.  (Say what you want about Microsoft, but they treat developers way better than Apple.)  We finally resolved the development issues by obtaining and installing old server versions of OS X in Parallels, but we are still screwed out of being able to properly test under Lion, Snow Leopard, or Leopard without buying old used equipment.  [insert appropriate expletives here]

The Linux (Ubuntu) issue was a bootstrap failure on our web server caused by a power outage during a major upgrade (and assisted by the new procedure of displaying update text and requiring user input to continue, without which the window of “opportunity” would have been much smaller).  Once it became clear that there was not going to be any reasonable way to recover/continue, it was not too bad rebuilding the system, and a little bit (including the entire database for this site) survived intact without requiring restoration.  Unfortunately, the server configuration (i.e., the hard part) was not fully recoverable, so that took some time to get working (and is still not completely to my liking).

The Windows issue stemmed from a (poorly timed) decision to upgrade my primarily development system to Windows 7 prior to public release of Windows 8 (a.k.a., Windows Ugh).  I almost always do clean installations, rather than upgrades, for my Windows systems, but the above issues suggested to me that I should do a 32-bit upgrade to minimize the disruption.  What I did not know is that in the interest of “security”, Win7 no longer supports the domain controller we have been using internally for many years, so the upgrade could not sign in, so it could/would not access the user information for my account, so the Start menu, registry, and other user-specific settings were all gone.  Result: All of the program files were installed, but the products ranged from working if manually launched to completely unusable.

After all of this, as a side note, everybody in the office experienced a tenacious respiratory illness that interfered with productivity as well.  (I would draw a parallel, except that only in the physical world was a virus involved.)

So, at present, all of our systems are back in working order.  We used the opportunity to improve our Mac OS X development process, including the introduction of code signing to support Gatekeeper, and the builds are running on a faster machine (which almost counterbalances the slower virtualized system).  Likewise, we ended up maxing out the Windows system memory and installing Windows 7 (64-bit) from scratch, giving better performance all around (except for the few old 16-bit tools I still used, which no longer run).  For the web, we decided to build a better blog (first) and then devote appropriate attention to our other sites, which, frankly, had been mostly neglected.

In the meantime, of course, we have remained steadily engaged in development, producing several new game versions and upgrades, as well as progress on a few new products, so expect a number of announcements (many after the fact) soon.

In the future, we will be utilizing the new and newly rebuilt development systems to full capacity, producing new and updated products for a multitude of different platforms, including (primarily) iOS, Windows, and Mac OS X.  Our new web sites will (also) be announced here as they are published, and we have plans to begin publishing game reviews for both Indie and AAA titles.

Please be sure to subscribe to our feed.  Thanks!

Software Marketing 101

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An outstanding resource to online marketing

logoI admit it: I am not the best at marketing.  This is why I am always looking for resources to help me learn more, get better, and ultimately sell more software.  On my system, I keep a large list of bookmarks to pages I need to read, and the ‘marketing’ folder includes, literally, scores of links to pages from DP Directory.

If you, like me, can use all of the marketing resources you can find, you will find their encyclopaedic Software Marketing Glossary very useful.  [In fact, I recently created a new ‘Resources’ category for it, on your right, beneath the blogroll.]  However, there are also more than one hundred articles about online marketing on the site as well.  Specifically for game publishers, they also provide a game press release writing and submission service (which has been used in the past for some of our games, and will be again).

DP Directory is a small company run by Al Harberg, who has decades of experience in the field and provides personal service to clients.  I first interacted with Al through the Association of Software Professionals, where he often dispenses advice (freely) to other members, and I first met him in person at SIC (now ISVCon) 2000 in Tampa.  Interestingly, I recently stumbled across a DP Directory mailing (to our company) from the late 80s, which shows that Al is not new to this game.  He actually offers a service whereby you can Rent Al’s Brain and tap (almost) directly into his many years of expertise.

This week, Digital Gamecraft has begun realigning some internal responsibilities [see opening sentence], and our prospective Director of Marketing/Business Development will be starting her transition by reading the DP Directory website, plus a couple of marketing books originally recommended by Al Harberg.  I am very hopeful…

Preparing for Mac App Store Submission

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Making a Mac OS X game project suitable for MAS

If you currently have a Mac product and have not already done so, you may be considering submission to the Mac App Store (MAS).

In the upcoming series of posts, I will be detailing the process that we went through to get Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition, and some of our other game products, successfully submitted to MAS.  There were a number of rejections along the way, as the App Store Review Guidelines [note: requires Mac developer agreement], while extensive, are not comprehensive (nor are they 100% consistent, as we had some products accepted and others rejected with identical behaviors).

Over multiple submissions, and fewer rejections, we developed a submission checklist which I will detail roughly (some items are specific to our games) in these upcoming posts:

We have had product in the Mac App Store since launch day, more than a year ago.  If you already have a game that runs on Mac OS X, it makes sense to make the several modifications to get it into MAS, another channel to find customers.  However, in our experience, it is not a viable substitute for direct downloadable sales.  The channel is not (yet) the primary ‘go to’ location for Mac software, although the availability of Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) only on MAS should shift more customers.  Additionally, there is the same downward pressure on pricing (towards free) seen on the iOS App Store, sales are lackluster, and (of course) you are giving 30% directly to Apple.

I would certainly not recommend developing a project solely for the Mac App Store, nor eliminating a direct downloadable sales channel in favor of MAS, but with an existing project it may be worth the fairly limited extra effort it takes to be there, too.

2012: A Year of Connections

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Planning for success in the new year.

We Rock!Now that the SOPA Blackout is over, we look toward the rest of this year with great anticipation.  Although Digital Gamecraft had a rather subdued performance last year, it looks like 2012 is certainly going to be our most successful year ever!

We are (again) preparing to release our first iOS title, Demolish! Pairs, with other projects (and platforms) in the works.  Additionally, SophSoft, Incorporated, our parent group, will be continuing our aggressive development program in conjunction with Goodsol Development.

For this year, we are making a concerted effort to connect with others more effectively; this means colleagues, customers, friends, and the game industry at large.  We are continuing to expand our presence on social networks and are being not only more “vocal” (and, hopefully, prolific), but also more open and transparent.

We are now laying claim to being The Most Venerable Independent Game Developer in the World, unless and until somebody proves otherwise!

Having recently watched this interesting TED video by Derek Sivers: Keep your goals to yourself, I am going to keep the specifics of my personal and business goals to myself; however, it can certainly be inferred that the unfulfilled goals for 2011 would be among them.

That said, I did adopt and will share one resolution for the new year: “Do Things Better…”  (Thanks to Frank and Ernest.)

30 Years in Business!

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Today we start our fourth decade in the computer game business.

Thirty years ago today, January 13, 1982, I walked into the Ingham County Clerk’s office in downtown Lansing, Michigan, and filed a “Certificate of Persons Conducting Business Under Assumed Name” (a.k.a, DBA, ‘Doing Business As’) for Sophisticated Software Systems.

You can read more about how this originally came about in A little bit of History, Part I, but for just a $10 filing fee and a notarized document, I started my first company.

After some false starts, Sophisticated Software Systems self-published its first successful game in 1990.  The company went full-time in late 1994, and incorporated in 1996 as SophSoft, Incorporated.

In 1998, SophSoft, Incorporated spawned a division specifically for developing in-house game projects, Digital Gamecraft (as well as another division for non-game products in 2003).

However, it all started officially 30 years ago today!

Below are a few of our logo images from over the years, demonstrating the changes over time:

Here’s to the next 30 years!

2011: Year in Review

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Overall Performance Grade: C+

As we officially begin 2012 after taking our annual two week “break” (during which I actually worked every day), it is a good time to do a quick review of the past year at Digital Gamecraft and SophSoft, Incorporated.

What went Right

We started the year with enthusiasm and energy.  A new product, Demolish! Pairs, was designed from the ground up for iOS, the artwork went from specification to final in short time, and a playable alpha version of the product was programmed within a few months.  Internal procedural changes brought better efficiency and productivity (and require few changes going forward), and our marketing and social media efforts got off the ground late in the year.

Additionally, our collaboration with Goodsol Development passed the 10-year mark in September (and continues on).  We shipped 10 different SKUs of Goodsol projects for publication, as well as 5 more that remained unpublished for various reasons.  We ended the year strongly with another 2 products essentially finished, one of which will be published this week (while the other will remain a private bonus for beta testers).

What went Wrong

Despite the quick development of Demolish! Pairs to a playable alpha version, it did not ship during 2011, which was one of my primary goals for the year.  In fact, I/we did not manage to reach any of the three challenging goals I set (business, individual, or family).  As noted at the beginning of the year: “no excuses allowed.”  I failed to meet those goals.

Although the Goodsol projects were flowing early in the year, during the second part of the year, I (personally) got bogged down in the development and testing of two lesser features for Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition, along with the 50 new games added, and the beta test became much longer (and more tedious) than anticipated.  That was not ideal.

What went Horribly Wrong

Of course, the worst and most significant occurrence of the year was the loss of my close friend, business partner, and artist, Rick Tumanis.  That, alone, colored the whole rest of the year a little darker.  (City Pulse recently included Rick in their remembrance of 10 people who died in 2011.)

Final Evaluation

In the end, I awarded a grade of C+ for overall performance in 2011.  Looking back, although specific goals were not met and perhaps productivity could have been higher, the fact remains that we are still here and viable, several products were published, new games were implemented, and progress was made towards our long term corporate goals.  Even in light of a major setback, we still left the year in better shape than we entered it, hence a slightly above average grade.

How did your 2011 wind up?