In light of my new job, I felt it a prudent time to launch an online blog. Whilst considering this blog, I also realised that I wanted to draw a line under all previous game development projects and pursuits and start afresh with the knowledge, ideas and enthusiasm just two months of working in web 2.0 has given me.
To this end I went through my GoDaddy domain manager and looked through all the domains I owned, a pertinant reminder of every project I’d thought up, bought a domain for and then never really got round to launching or pursuing. These domains included “indieSpring”, an idea from last year which was to produce an online site for indie developers to get together, aggregate their blogs and content, advertise their games and network to collaborate and help one another through the minefielf of independent game development.
My first instinct was to use Drupal to produce that site. Shortly thereafter I thought it a far more sensible idea to actually start a blog aimed at spreading knowledge and the indie gospel -myself- before trying to convince everyone else to! And so I grabbed Wordpress, hooked into Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and Feed Burner (after all I am a web 2.0 geek now, I need to know how things work!) and had myself a nice blog I can update and send photos to from my iPhone, pings out notifications over Twitter and Facebook upon posts, and generally is quite cool if bog standard to most blog savvy folks.
My next dilemna was what to do with the bits of game design docs, the snippets of code, the half finished games and ideas, concepts and thoughs that have accumulated across a number of projects and under a lot of different names in the last 6 years I’ve been thinking about making my own games. Well, I decided to gather them all into a big zip folder, print what was appropriate and take it as a starting point for a fresh, new initiative which can benefit from a new name, spangly new site, a decent level of funding (thanks to my job) and a better level of experience and comprehension about basic business and product development methodology. Rather than suffer the same problems of seggregation and comparmentalization of online content I’ve already grown sick of, I’m calling this new initiative “indieSpring Studios”.
So I’ve got a shiny blog, and a new logo under which to develop my first title. Strangely, flicking through those printouts and that zip folder I decided to go back to one of the first games I developed. A small, colourful fun game titled “chainWorks”, developed on TGB a couple of years back. The games format lends itself to a casual click and play game on PC or Mac, but even more so to a touch interface such as the iPhone. Cue Torque on iPhone announcement and a very, very happy developer.
And so indieSpring’s first title will be the redevelopment of chainWorks. I’m 90% sure I’ll be using TGB once more, and 100% sure that this time I’ll properly document and plan the games development and feature set. No screenies just yet, but when they come they’ll be big, shiney and explosive!
For now I’ll thank you for reading this somewhat indepth account of my recent past, and leave you with a grab of indieSpring’s new logo.
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