Sunday, February 21, 2010

OMG but time does fly...

Well, it has been a very eventful 7 months... First, my gig at Examiner took up MUCH more time than I thought it would. I guess the first day should have been a preview of what was to come - I came into the office at 9 AM and left at 9 PM. For a while there releases were taking a VERY long time - up until midnight a few times - but since December they've been very reasonable, mostly taking place during the workday where possible. I guess that's one thing I can look at postively. :)
On the down side, we've had a lot of shakeups in the group. First, we bought a company called NowPublic in October. Their management team became our management team. This isn't usually a terribly bad thing, but let me put it this way. NowPublic was a $10 million company. Examiner is a $100 million company. The NP management style is still a little on the nascent side and, honestly, with my having come from organizations like HP - they don't have a management style. They hire contractors and delegate tasks, but there's no employee development, no interest in the employee - because they're contractors. Unfortunately they inherited a team of 12 developers who are employees (well, for now). *sigh* Beyond that, my manager, the VP of Technology, was let go a couple of weeks ago. It was a bit of a blow to morale for the group because all of them had been hired by her and she was one of the original employees of the company - nearly a founder. Morale's been pretty crappy since her departure.
In the meantime, I am once again looking at making the Otto Von thing viable. I've put the iPhone apps on hold (temporarily) while I explore a couple of other ideas. I've published a game on Facebook called Secret Agent - East vs West. It's a spy game set in 1985 using Social Game Studios framework. Yes, you did read that correctly. I actually FINALLY published a game! It's been slow to get adoption, but I haven't really been advertising it strongly. I'm thinking that my work on the other game currently under development will be stronger and more viable. It's a feudal-era Japanese game called Daimyo. The goal is to try to conquer the different regions of Japan and become Shogun. It's coming along nicely, but once again I'm running into personal skill limitations. *sigh* A continuing theme. I've posted up a request for some help from both a UI Designer and a Web Developer on gamedev.net (link posted here). If you happen to know of anyone, please let me know. I'm looking to share profits on this - just need to get some people who can do a little of everything.
Anyway, it's all starting to come together. Slowly, albeit, but hopefully it will be picking up momentum in the short-term. I hope I can look back at this post and the 7 month gap and think - "wow, that's when it all turned around". *fingers crossed*