I really am quite the disgruntled employee at times. It seems we’re seriously short staffed again with one shiftrunner sick and another who just quit, and we’re supposed to be reopening Chelsea again this week. How irritating. As a result of this, I’m working during karaoke time this week — most heinous. We also had an instore quit because the manager kept hitting on her, thankfully he won’t be around much longer.
I am not a mother duck/hen/goose/whatever. *glare*
Cara, William and myself went to see Opeth play at the Palace (formerly Metro) on Friday night. The performance was most triumphant. As time of posting interested parties can find a video of the performance on YouTube, although unfortunately the quality is extremely lacking and doesn’t nearly do them justice. For reference, the song in that particular recording sounds like this on the album. The support band were quite good, the venue was quite reasonable and not overly crowded, and the late night KFC after the concert was most enjoyable.
Next up for concerts is DragonForce in October.
Tropic Thunder was quite good, and we had the most unusual experience after seeing it of candle-lit dining in Nandos due to power failure. Fortunately for us they were already mostly done with preparing our food, and we’d long since escaped from the cinema (out of which many people were streaming).
That is all for now.
//ADENDUM: Some random guy taking photos at the Opeth concert got a shot of Cara and I that you can see here (full gallery). As usual I look terrible. Ah well.
Monitor #2 appears to have a dead pixel, stuck on red and very near the centre of the monitor. How irritating.
So, I’m way overdue for an update, and although I’ve been working away at them I’ve fallen way behind on the personal projects mentioned and hinted at in previous entries on this blog.
I’m still not really great with people, but I do feel like I’m a little better than a used to be. Certain friends insist that I’m really better than I think I am, but personally I tend to think I do a pretty reasonable job with friends but still manage to be near useless with strangers, which obviously is fairly useless for making new acquaintances. I am still trying to work on this, but I’m really not good at letting go of the safety net that established friends provide and trying to talk to people who I don’t already know.
My arthritis (in combination with some old running injuries) is playing up lately, which is pretty painful and sort of puts a cramp on trying to go out and be social, although I’m trying not to allow it to effect me too badly.
Anyone who was particularly interested by my previous entry should probably also check out The Casual Games Manifesto.
Anyone who is active within the games industry will recognise that there are still many creative titles being produced. It is firmly within this niche that I wish to establish my own business. I wish to sell to those who do not wish for but desire an excellent product, and who do not neccesarily need what I sell, but will none-the-less pay for it because they desire products of such a level of quality.
As previously mentioned, I’m planning to use MochiAds to earn money from the Flash games I’m working towards. I like how the system works and I already know it’s reliable - John Hattan uses it and apparently makes a decent income off his own games. I’m taking the opportunity however to mention some of the other possibilities for making money with your Flash games which I’ve also considered.
The first is relatively similar to MochiAds. GameJacket is a brand-spanking-new service which places ads before or during play of Flash games in much the same way as MochiAds. Like MochiAds they will also host the Flash files for you, although unlike MochiAds there system is set up in such a way that you must host the files with them; the file you ‘release into the wild’ (distribute online) so to speak is a wrapper which displays an ad and then retrieves your game dynamically from the GameJacket servers. The advantage of this is that you therefore guarantee any updates will be available everywhere the game is played. I’m actually going to give this system a try by releasing a couple of very small and rough games without any branding just to see how they go - unless they perform unexpectedly well they’ll just be fire-and-forget releases which don’t receive any updates or maintenance.
Secondly there’s the option of sponsorship; essentially someone (Armor Games for example) pays you to be the ’sponsor’ of the game, usually involving display of their logos. I’ve personally elected not to use this option due to the fact that they’re often a once-off payment rather than a potential stream of income, and because I want to build brand awareness for WGA rather than for a sponsor company. If you can produce a good quality game the payments for these sort of offers can sometimes be quite large however, and many companies are willing to offer non-exclusive sponsorships, so this option may well be worth consideration by others.
My other option (which I will actually be using as well, but won’t be attempting to rely on) is release through Kongregate, who pay developers a portion of the money earned from ads displayed on their page around the games. They also offer cash prizes to the most popular weekly/monthly games, but this is of course not a reliably obtainable source of income. A game containing MochiAds will not show it’s MochiAd advertisements when shown on Kongregate due to a deal between the two groups, so I will be releasing my games using both of these systems - there’s no harm in giving my games a shot at winning those Kongregate prizes, and they may still earn some ad revenue from the site.
Another option I won’t cover here is the upsell - a Flash game can be used to entice people to pay to download an improved stand-alone version of the game. I will also be attempting to use this and will cover it in significantly more detail in future.
Ok, so it would seem I’m way off target. I do have some posts waiting to be published, but I don’t currently feel ready to do so and in the meantime I’ve missed the weekly or fortnightly update goal by a long shot. I’m also way behind with getting WGA up and running, to which I have the new slight complication that the group I was planning to buy my art from are probably closing down and going their seperate ways. I am fortunately in a position where this isn’t a significant setback, but it is still an irritation.
I’ve been getting back into my music properly again recently, which has been good, though due to on-and-off mild sickness my vocals have been even worse than normal lately.
For now that is all. In spite of the futility of such attempts in the past I’m attempting to establish something closer to a normal sleeping pattern (although in my case the established times are really just when I go to and get out of bed) than my current mess.
Updates soon - for real this time.
Oh, lastly, I recommend the band Red, especially to those of you who appreciate Linkin Park.
This seems like an appropriate time to post some goals and thoughts about what I want to achieve during the next year.
A good place to start would probably be with Weapons Grade Awesome, which I mentioned in the previous post and is responsible for my choice of name for this blog. Weapons Grade Awesome will be the name of my new indie games website, where I intend to release games for online play and/or download. My current goal is to have at least 3 small games online by June this year and more (perhaps some slightly larger ones) available by the end of the year. The first will be a simple gridlock game, to be followed by a minigolf game. Both of these initial games will be playable online as Flash games and aim to gain revenue through MochiAds advertising at the beginning of the game, and each will be in the format of a single play per day game where a new challenge is generated daily in order to draw regular traffic to the site. The minigolf game will produce 3 different difficulty levels daily for players to attempt to progress through and will also unlike the gridlock game feature a deluxe version players can download for a small fee which will include additional gameplay modes and a map editor.
I also intend to improve my music related skills this year. I’ve been letting my abilities with the guitar slide a bit and I’d really like to start pushing myself again. I also intend to put a real effort into improving my singing as much as possible, and will be focussing on getting a bit more “grunt” into my voice. My other music-related goal is to finally form a band that actually gets beyond the planning stage, and to hopefully write/play/record some cool music.
Apart from the above the big area in which I’d like to improve is with my social skills. As some have pointed out to me recently I do tend to be pretty withdrawn, and this is an area in which I feel I can improve and hopefully let people a bit closer.
Thanks for reading.
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