distributedlife

Alright! The year that is 2009 can be seen the following ways: 4 seasons; 12 months; 26 fortnights; 52 weeks; 365 days; 8,760 hours; 525,600 minutes and 31,526,000 seconds. I won’t work out how many clock cycles there are. You can do a lot in that time. These are my plans, some aren’t really time based or limited while some, in the end, are directly related to time and effort. All are dependant on the wind not changing as I pull a face.

Buy at least one house

I’ve been neglecting buying a house for a while and its high time that put a solid backup plan in place in case every single one of my ventures fails. Thankfully the market is looking pretty good at the moment. Anything I buy would be for investment purposes and my current rental agreement with my brother is sweet. I don’t really care where I buy as long as I could stand to live there.

Travel overseas

It’s been five years since I travelled last and my feet are well and truly itchy. Some say there is a cream to help with that. I’m looking at Thailand and India which are two countries with economies worse than ours but enduring some tumultuous times. Spain would also be nice so I could visit a friend. I suspect where I go will be driven by the season I choose to travel.

SocialTacit

Get the first proper version of SocialTacit out the door and let it stew for a while. See what works and what doesn’t and then visit it again. I like SocialTacit so far and I’ve got a feature list the length of my arm but I want to see value beyond our own experience before I implement too much.

Auspex

Auspex is the first product we will actually release with the immediate intention of spinning money. The only reason why SocialTacit gets the Guernsey first is because it is nearer to completion and I would like some practice deploying to production solo before I screw it all up with a press release and server not found errors.

Auspex is a useful tool, but whether it is useful at the right price remains to be seen.

Firestorm

Firestorm is the next product on the cards after Auspex. All of these products are developed concurrently. Firestorm will be the first game to use Auspex to ensure a quality balanced and importantly, fun game is delivered.

Firestorm will also be the first game to make use of the GamingKudos achievement system. GamingKudos needs at least one game to get moving and prove its abilities.

GamingKudos

There is no surprise if you are reading this from top to bottom that GK is the other big ticket item that we intend to finish this year. If you are not reading it in order, surprise! GamingKudos isn’t a complicated system. It just needs to be tested extensively. That is where it will take the most time.

TwentyZeroNine

You’ve already started experiencing some of this. I wanted to push myself creatively this year and in ways in which I am not as strong as I would like to be. Those two directions are photography and writing. Both of these are immensely useful in the game industry with the former going towards ambience, lighting and composition and the latter towards, interesting and entertaining storylines that don’t make you physically ill when you play the game. I’m looking at you Gears of War 2.

Writing and Photography are also my backup plan in regards to IT. I have chronic back problems and sitting down for 18 hours a day isn’t the best medicine. So I needed a backup plan that was both creative, something I wanted to do and had less sitting time than testing or coding.

TwentyZeroNine is broken up into the following components; each one a division of the year and the frequency of work.

365 Self Portraits – A picture of myself every day for a year. I have to press the button and it has to include some part of me. The goal here is to force me to use the camera and continue to come up with shots and ideas. The continual use will help me get better at lighting and composition. I am not very photogenic so this should be difficult project indeed. Fun though. My flick page is here.

52 Stories on Music – an idea based on Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs. I write a different story each week about a song I truly love. The introduction link is here and you can read all about it. Each one has to be out by Sunday. There is no word limit.

26 Drabbles – harder than it looks, a drabble is a story of 100 words exactly. I’ve also introduced this as a separate post and you can read that here. I’ve only done one so far and it was quite difficult. It really forces you to get to the crux of your point very concisely. Something I currently lack in my writing.

12 Short Stories – Once a month I write a short story. No more than 7,500 words and no fewer than 1,000 words. Arbitrary limits but bounds to work within. Short stories, like drabbles, force oneself to remove all content that does not directly relate to the story. I guess one could say getting to the point. These come out on the last day of each month. I will put out a pdf version when I release these for people who like to read them offline or prefer a printed version.

4 Novellas – slightly more ambitious are the novellas. These are stories that are between 17,500 words and 40,000 words. I like these. There is enough space to write a story with more than one plot. I can explore and be a bit flowery if need be without worry about word limits.

1 Novel – a few years ago I started writing a novel. Everyone that read it had positive comments about the style and direction. I never finished it. No Horizons and everything else were more important. I intend to finish that novel this year. It should rock in between 40,000 and 160,000 words.

An important feature of this project is that in the end, I am the final judge of whether an item is deemed completed. Unlike everything else I do, has been for commercial goals, this is purely about self-exploration, self-improvement and just being creative for my own purposes. It also means if I write pure tripe there shall be no complaints not meeting my goals. You can complain about the tripe though.

Another thing of note, the speed of writing isn’t the issue here. I can type fairly fast but I don’t need to. I worked out I only needed to put down about 6-7 words a minute for 10 hours a week to get the volume of content required for the entire project. Making sure I get the right 6-7 words each minute is the hard part. At my current rate I am writing at about 750-800 words of content per hour.

I will find a permanent domain for this project. I’ll start that in February. In the mean time you will have to put up with my writings as posts here. I will let you all know when I get a new domain and where it is.

Comics

I also intend to keep writing comics. Our goal this year is to work in a long running story behind it all to take the strip from a gag-a-day series to something, that while it has the same format, it also has a bit more meat. This is going to be hard but we have started tentatively. Stay Tuned!

Blogging

I’ll be blogging again this year. I’ve had a think about what I want to blog about and it will probably fall into the follow categories:

• Testing – ways to make it less painful and probably a good dose of bitching about the state of it.
• My graphics engine – the one I threw away. I intend to talk about the architecture of it and the performance improvements I implemented and the levels at which I looked at performance. It should be of value to someone somewhere as long as they work out how to make it look pretty elsewhere.
• Other bits of software I’ve written and never released to the public. I would like to document some of the different methods of implementation I’ve tried over the years and what worked and what didn’t work at all. Should be a laugh when you see some of the unique decisions I’ve made.
• About game development – mostly from a design perspective and some lessons learned. We’ve learnt plenty over the years and maybe we should share.
• The various products we intent to release this year. That probably should have a corpu-blog when they go live but until then I will talk about them here.
• Other things as they arise. I don’t plan to blog a lot just with some regularity.

Keep…

Reading… I am back into it and reading helps my writing. I doubt I will post reviews of books because I am not a great critique. I may do a brief, “I read this book”, “so should you” or “it was rubbish” (because you value my opinion). Who knows.

Getting in to shape… Part of what has helped my back improve is the muscle building exercises I do around my upper back muscles (rhomboids I think) and my core muscles. They were all a bit too weak for their own good. So I’ll keep this up with the hope of being able to sit at a desk for several hours without agony.

Learning Spanish… I’ll try again this year. If I end up in Spain at some point then it can only be a help.

Umm…

That is a lot of stuff to do in one year. I also intend to have a social life as well. Will I succeed? What will be his downfall? Which detour will take him too far? When will he stop writing in 3^rd person?

To succeed is to go in with the intention of success.