Realizations and Level Setting

I had a bit of an epiphany lately that I think is worth sharing at this point. I am following someone on Twitter who's handle is @HobbyGameDev (his G+ is +Chris DeLeon (HobbyGameDev)). It was through the work Chris has been doing that I've started realizing that maybe I've been looking at Otto Von through the wrong lens. In particular, am I truly committed to making Otto Von a "going concern" that could provide a career for me - with all the associated risks - or is it more of a "hobby".
I think the answer that I've been leaning toward, at least presently, is that it's more a hobby than a career. Would I like to do Otto Von all day, every day? I think I would probably say "not really". Not that I like having a job and I would love to work for myself rather than someone else, but all of the uncertainty around being an actual indie developer may be more than my risk-averse situation allows for at present.
When I think about doing that, I realize there are some prerequisites, skills, and connections I need that I don't have. First, I would need several months worth of savings available to really take a stab at doing this as a career and right now I have several years of negative savings available. It's been a very rough year financially. In all honesty, we weren't really able to afford to send my daughter to Waldorf for as long as we did, but we've finally figured it out. It's also a great time for her to transition out as she's going to be starting middle school next year.
Secondly, there are definitely some skills that I don't have (some very well documented here), nor do I have connections with people who DO have those skills. Or, rather, have connections with people who have those skills and are willing to do this kind of thing as a partnership with profit sharing. Maybe I just need to find some HS students who have tons of free time and lots of drive. Regardless, it's been challenging and while I can put out some apps, they're not going to have the kind of polish and "oomph" that I'd like them to have. Will they be "good enough"? Probably. Will they provide the kind of income I need to make this a career? Probably not.
So, given that Owen Goss (of Streaming Colour Studios and Milkbag Games fame) did a survey a couple of years ago and learned that the average lifetime income from an indie game is $1200, I would need either a TON of games out there, or I would need to be better than average. And that's the mean, which means that 49.9% of games earn less than that. And that would require a lot more games.
So, what does all of this mean? It means that I'm not an indie trying to make it in the bigger world. What I really am is a hobby developer enjoying what he does.
Happy coding!

Facepalms

Before the holidays, I was really focusing on OttoJotts by trying to finish up what were a dozen or so tasks that needed to be finished before I could release the game. I had determined, based on the lack of response I was getting from my artist on a separate project, that I should focus on something that I had a lot of control over and had made some good progress on completing. After I broke everything down that remained to be done, I found that I had a month or so of work left on OttoJotts to finish it off. I blazed through several different tasks, had to create some new ones, but overall was making some good progress on it. Then the holidays happened.

Catniss in Nutcracker

The Thanksgiving to Christmas period at my house is one of lightly ordered chaos. Catniss has several performances of The Nutcracker with the Colorado Ballet during that time and the spousal unit sings professionally as a caroler for different functions. Toss in a couple of illnesses and the whole time is just ridiculous. I was certain I wasn't going to get much done over the break so I didn't really even bother. And then for Christmas I received Call of Duty: Ghosts, so I had at least a campaign to complete before I could get back to anything. Then it was January and I joined a CoD clan and then we had a clan war and then... Long story short - nothing really happened on OttoJotts from November through January.
When I tried to get back into it, though, I found it more and more difficult to get back into the groove. I found plenty of opportunities to procrastinate and not work on OttoJotts at all - including finding some data from fiksu.com about iOS 7 adoption (you need to check out that site). Given that adoption rates are around 82% for iOS 7 and I've been having trouble getting OttoJotts to draw properly in iOS 7 (something changed in the basic UIView stack I still don't understand), it put even more of a downer on wanting to work on it. Plus, I had something else potentially brewing at the 9-5, so my motivation was a little more depleted than I thought it could be (without being completely disinterested).
BUT (and it's a big but), that's when things started heading south. The "something else" dried up and I started feeling like the 9-5 isn't going to be terribly viable for much longer (which suxors hardcore). Suddenly, without really feeling like I was up to it, I decided that I need to get back to doing what I should be doing, even if I didn't feel like it. I started checking out what needed to happen with OttoJotts and just couldn't, for the life of me, actually open up the project. I'm just a little burned out on it. It was supposed to be a pretty quick little app that would go into the App Store and then maybe make a buck or two. Instead, it's turned into months and months of continuing development that don't quite seem to be going as well as I'd hoped. All of the backend work is challenging for me (I'm a front-end - but not UI - guy). While there are still only about 80-100 hours of work left on it, I think I'm going to put it on back burner while I reinvigorate with something else for a while.
I thought I had been recharging a bit by playing some other games and taking some time off, but I think it's had the opposite effect. It's put new and interesting distractions in my path to getting anything done for real. Unlike some acquaintances, I haven't hit it big on the App Store and can't just semi-retire at the moment. Until then, it's nose to the grindstone no matter how distracted I want to be.
It's not that I don't love doing this - I do - but it's that I just find myself in the same position over and over again: unable to complete some portion of the game because I lack some skill. I need to either acquire said skill or find someone who is willing to help - and unfortunately I haven't found people who are likeminded about doing this. Or I do and they totally flake. *sigh* As a result, I have a hard time being motivated to work on things.

My favorite captain

All of this said, I have about 4 games that are in various stages of completion. If I can just get ONE of them done and out, I think I can make enough to either hire the people to finish the others or perhaps attract enough interest to get people engaged. And then I'd have a small group of games earning a little money in the store for me and that might be enough to get the ball rolling. Which would be totally cool.
So, I am once again ditching my current project (OttoJotts) for something else - for now. Hence the facepalm (to left). It's been a rough few months and I am not at all motivated to do this, but I am motivated to not be dependent upon a salary. I'm not thinking of quitting any time soon, but going to work when you don't have to makes the trip a whole lot easier and more pleasant. And THAT'S the goal - to have the flexibility to do what I want to do when I want to do it. Don't we all?

More Mayan Madness and Inspiration

So it's been a while since I've posted. Unfortunately in the weeks since then I've had a hard drive "almost" fail, a Time Machine restore TOTALLY fail, the hard drive FINALLY fail, and lots of restore pain. In short, it's been a hell of a few weeks. But now I'm mostly back to normal (well, the laptop is) and running again.

19 Aug 2012 in Long Count

I've been working on the Long Calendar app for the past few days. So far I've added a lot of better graphics to it so it looks better than it did before (see picture to the right). I think it's starting to look a little better. I wasn't planning on working on the glyphs until I had completed everything else, but I'm actually really close now. I have two remaining bugs. For some reason the Haab and Tzolkin calculations are incorrect. I'm guessing I messed something up when I fixed some +1/-1 problems earlier. And BCE dates aren't working correctly right now. Again - I think I managed to break them at some point during development.
One thing I'm not doing much and need to be doing a lot more is the unit test. Xcode 4.2 integrated a unit testing framework into the system, which is awesome. I need to spend some time really beating it up and understanding it a lot. With this applet I feel that it could be beneficial (it would have caught the changes that broke the calculations), but I'm also pretty far down the path. I've got a set of tests that I do whenever I make changes, so I'm not totally out of sync with current development methodologies, but still feel that with all of the agile experience I have that I'm not being "true" to the methodology by not doing it for my own projects. Especially since Apple has done the "right" thing by encouraging developers to do it. Next project I must do it.
Regardless, things are starting to come together with this. I expect that I'll be able to get this completed this week, I hope, and get it into the AppStore next weekend. Earlier would be better, but there's a lot going on right now - lots of swirl and lots of stress.
On a good note, though, I spoke with a friend from my HP days - Cooper. He works at Microsoft right now and I was in Seattle last week and rang him up. He's one of the most talented engineers I know (perhaps the most talented). He's also one of those people who is completely committed to whatever it is that he's working on at the moment. He inspired me to work on things that made me happy when we worked together. We actually started talking about starting our own company before MS offered him riches that would make Solomon blush. But it's Coop who really encouraged me to dream bigger and work harder to achieve those dreams.
I've sort of lost sight of that in the doldrums that are everyday development. It's easy to forget the why of what you're doing in the day-to-day of doing. What do I want to have? The ability to be with my family when and where we want to be. To be able to provide for them while not being beholden to a time clock at a wage-slave job. To not be a sarariman. As you probably know, I have a 9-5 at Comcast. The "job" is good - challenging to be certain, but I'm well-compensated and enjoy working with my coworkers. But it's not what I want to do in the long-term. Before I got this job I told my wife that I wanted my next job to be my last one - that I would make this Otto Von thing work come hell or high water. And what's happened in the 2.5 years since I started at Comcast? Not a whole lot. I've managed to learn a lot but at same time waste a lot of effort not focusing on the end goal.
Talking with Cooper has really re-focused my energies on that end goal. I was reminded of the possibilities we had back at HP. Of the things we talked about doing and the places we'd go. Of the games we'd write and the lives we would change. Of the paradigms we'd create with our innovation. We'd be the Nintendos of the game world. And that's gotten lost.
So, here we are in August. What will the next few months bring? I don't know, but I do know that I'm reconnecting with those "halcyon days of my youth". I'm remembering WHY I'm doing this and why I need to make this more than just a hobby. It just takes a look at my family and a chat with an old friend to bring everything back into focus with a clarity I could scarcely recall. Almost like a haze that slowly dims your vision. Over the years it just seems fuzzier than it used to be. And then you clean the haze away. Now I just need to keep the haze away.

Off-topic: "Microsoft" questions in interviews

I've been seeing a bit of traffic around the net these days about the so-called "Microsoft questions" and whether they provide any value (most recently I think I saw this on a blog). The questions most often raised is "shouldn't my code speak for itself?" and "what could this possibly tell you about me?". The answers are - "no" and "a lot". Let me elaborate.
I've been on the hiring side of the table for over 15 years. I've interviewed several dozens of people and hired only a handful of that total number. Did I pass up very qualified individuals? Yes. Did I make what I think, even in retrospect, were good decisions? Yes. The reason is that I picked individuals who answered those "Microsoft" questions well. Not always correctly, but well.
The reason behind the "Microsoft question" is to find out how someone thinks. I couldn't have cared less if the candidate got the right answer. Rather, I was looking to see how that person thought and approached the question. One of my favorites was the following:

Sherlock Holmes is looking for a new Dr. Watson. You are placed in a room with 3 light switches. Down the hall is another room where Holmes is sitting with a single lamp. One of the 3 switches controls the lamp. You can't disassemble the switch and can't see or hear anything outside of the room.You can play with the switches as long as you want but when you enter the room with Holmes you must tell him, with 100% certainty, which of the switches operates the lamp. How do determine which switch controls the lamp?

I love this question. But why? Because it requires the person to think creatively and "outside the box". I don't really care if you get the right answer. I want to know how you think. I always ask my candidates to think out loud so I can understand what their thought process is. How are they attacking the problem? Are they finding the obvious and hidden information in the question?
I was a Windows developer for several years and one thing that I learned pretty quickly was that if you didn't want to just make another version of Word with the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), you really needed to find alternative solutions. MFC didn't always do things in ways that you thought it would. It often required some creative solutions to make the MFC do what you wanted. If someone approached the problem above with a straight-forward approach they'll fail. Same thing with MFC (or any other technology for that matter). Which means they'll get stuck easily and need some help. Which means that I or one of my leads would be spending a lot of time trying to teach this person how to solve problems, not just work through the hard problems of architecture and design. Just today I was talking with a friend about his experience in Drupal and the same thing came up. You can't always rely that things will work as advertised and sometimes you need to get your hands dirty to solve the problem.
The hardest thing I ever did on Windows was override a common dialog. If you're not familiar with these, suffice it to say that they are provided by the framework at a very low level in the system and that, while they provide some override functionality, what I got asked to do was not part of the traditional customization flow. I got some of the problem solved with some straight-forward work but it took some pointers from a senior developer to lead me to the final solution which required not one but two different class overrides. It wasn't just something I could Google (even though Google didn't exist yet). The final result was a small thing but it made the product manager happy and I learned quite a bit about how Windows messaging worked. Would someone unable to approach that problem above have been able to solve it? Possibly, but it have been far more challenging - and time-consuming. And for those people who just give up on the Sherlock Holmes problem they would have come back to me saying it was impossible (even though it apparently wasn't).
My wife's workplace has something of a mantra that there was one qualification you had to have and the rest they could just teach you (theirs was financially-based). I follow that same kind of mantra, but it's around creative thinking. If you can think creatively, you can usually work your way through or around almost any obstacle that pops up from a development perspective. Sometimes the answer is "can't be done" but if you have more than a hammer in your tool bag you'll have a lot of options to try before you come up with that answer. And that's what I like to see - meeting needs creatively and growing my developers.
So are the "Microsoft questions" important? The answer has to be "yes". They show that while you may not have the skills, you have the mindset to attack problems from a variety of directions. It shows you're tenacious and don't give up. That you have a variety of ways of framing a problem. To me, they're not just important - they are pretty much the entire interview.

PS - If you're interested in the answer the Sherlock Holmes problem, just post a comment and I'll vet your solution or send you the correct answer.

New OttoJotts UI Ideas

I was in the shower today getting ready to pick up Cathy from a birthday party (no, not that one - we unfortunately missed that one *headdesk*). This was not her cousin Zavi's party in Laramie but my best friend Dan's son Matthew's 6th birthday. It was at Chuck E Cheese's and now that I've wasted far too much time with off-topic over-explanation, let me get back to the point of this post - user interface ideas for OttoJotts.
So while I was in the shower I began thinking back to the days when I used to play Jotto and what usually had to suffice for Jotto sheets when we'd exhausted our supply. We opted for legal pads, a ruler, and a pen. So this made me wonder - what if I made the UI look like a legal pad (or at least just lined paper) and then had all of the buttons and letters be handwritten? I think it might be "retro", but I think retro is hip these days (it's so hard to tell sometimes). PLUS, it's something that I, with my limited graphic artist skills could likely pull off. That was a definite benefit.
I think it would be very cool to have a slick UI like, say, Words with Friends, but I'm just NOT a graphic artist. Been there, done that, got my wrist slapped. I may just need to accept my limitations on this particular point (not that I ever thought I was a graphic artist). What does this mean for Alpha 4? Absolutely nothing. I'm sure I'll find ways to try to derail myself from actually working on code and work on the cool new UI, but it needs to wait until Beta 1. The alphas are all about functionality; betas are about polish. So that's kind of the thinking for, say, April. And I've got a cool idea for the badges, but that's later as well.
I guess we'll see how well I can keep this "shiny new toy" on the back burner. I've actually managed to get most of the friend and game creation code done and in, which was surprisingly smooth. There's still a lot of hardening that needs to happen, but I think that once I get into that mode it will be straightforward to do pretty much the same thing to every file. Plus, I need to make the code a little harder to exploit, which I hope I can get done with a minimum of fuss. Let's just hope I can keep up some of the focus here to make this project FINALLY successful.

Alpha 1 Released!

I went home over lunch (the spousal unit is "not well") and decided to take another stab at the installation. I cleaned everything, rebuilt, and sent it back to her email address. When I unzipped everything and dragged it onto her iTunes it seemed MUCH happier - my icon showed up in her Apps list, which was nice. When I click "Sync" it all installed happily and life was looking much brighter. When I ran it on her iPhone and it actually WORKED, that was great (and it connected to the website to get the word list), life was FAN-FREAKING-TASTIC!
I've packaged everything up and sent it out to my alpha testers who will hopefully be able to install it and test it. And I hope they'll be able to read the help screen. In the interest of just getting the alpha out the door I opted to punt on the scrolling help image. It's a placeholder anyway and I couldn't see continuing to hold up the alpha to make it work when it wasn't going to be in the final project anyway. The existing solution is less-than-optimal, but it's also temporary.
In the meantime, my game is now out in the wild. A momentous day for Otto Von. W00t indeed.

Prototyping new game

So I've taken a bit of a hiatus from Daimyo, but just briefly. I'm working on the prototype to a new game that I'll reveal when it's done. I'm going back to Objective-C for iPhone work and, honestly, it's been a bit of time since I worked on anything about it. Good thing is that things are coming back a little faster than I thought it might. I need to get back to some of my reference books, though, because I want to do something that's not really "standard" now (of course). Overall, though, it's coming along nicely as a prototype. I didn't actually think I'd be able to knock this out as quickly as it's been going.
Also had fun checking out an interview with Natalia and Keith at Imangi studios. Ready Set DC did a profile on them and it was quite nice to read about some folks I've been following on Twitter because, well, they're awesome but also the kind of people I could see hanging out with on a Friday. :) The link to the article is here.
So, things are progressing well with the prototype and Daimyo is after that. I think that the weekend may see the completion of the proto, which gives me a week or so to actually knock out the product and get it in people's hands. Then it's off to make the pay version (the proto is of the lite version) and then, maybe, get it up on the App Store.
So, there ya go.

Wowsers

So today was pretty much going to be shot, but I never realized how shot it would be until I now reflect on it. First thing is that today was Cathy's last day as a Kindergardener! YAY! She is officially a first grader starting in August. Whew. :) The graduation was sweet and precious and memorable. Good thing I was able to capture it with pictures and video. She was "knighted" into first grade and her first teacher, Mrs. Reinhart, was there to see the last of the students she shepherded in pre-K move on to first grade. It was bittersweet at times, but it was a great time.

We then went to lunch with the family of one of Cathy's best friends at La Fiesta. GREAT food - I highly recommend it. Everything was very fresh and it was quite filling. We ended up bringing home some of the chip dip...

After that was a visit to Dr. Edvin Manniko, an optometrist. When Waldorf looked at her readiness for first grade they noted that she seemed to be having some trouble with focusing her eyes on near objects. The good doctor confirmed that she was far-sighted, so we need to get her some glasses. They also recommended some therapy to help her eyes focus better and more consistently. There's a possibility that she'll be able to do without the glasses if the therapy goes well. It seems that I may have experienced a little of this myself growing up but managed to get through it. Apparently only 12% of farsighted people get through college without corrective lenses. I might be part of that class of individuals. Then again, maybe I just like being special. :)

On the way home from the doctor I got soooooo incredibly sleeeeeeeeeppppppy that I almost had trouble driving. We made it by early evening, but I was so wiped I practically passed out once we got in the house. And then I very quickly forgot that I was supposed to go help teach Taekwondo this evening. Whoops. :( So I called to apologize, but that doesn't make up for spacing it so badly. Yes, it was a long day, but still I'm disappointed in myself. :(

Now it's about 20:00 and I'm exhausted but mentally still focusing okay. I'm going to finish up the profile summary changes and get those checked into git. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I did finally get some SCM (software configuration management) going and am running git to track revisions. I have to say - it is damn fast. I'm very happy that one of my former co-workers at HID found it. Otherwise I'd be stuck with Subversion or CVS or something crappy. :) We used Mercurial at Maptek, but I knew that git was a bit more favorable over Mercurial from my HID days. And Linus Torvalds uses it, so that seems like a good endorsement to me. :)

Anyway, Cathy will be starting at Franklin Friends next week. Just a couple of days a week as we can't afford to send her full time. I just think it will be very difficult to get a lot done when I don't just want to sit Cathy down in front of a TV all day but I also can't afford to spend all day playing with her and getting nothing done on Samantha/Wizards. :( It's a bit of a conundrum, but I hope that her friend Ashley will spend a lot of time over here playing with her so I can get things done. *sigh* We'll see, I guess. Best laid plans and all that. With Franklin Friends I at least have two days a week where I'll have the house to myself, so to speak. :)

More to come later, I suppose. Hopefully the next few days will be very productive and I can get spells and inventories worked out. Hasta for now.

Conundrum

I've been thinking about something that I need to make sure I address. The trouble is that I don't have as much information about deployed App Store apps as I need. Here's the conundrum.
I Wizards/Mages/Samantha players can purchase items that will "buff" their characters. In particular, they can purchase artifacts and mana gems (mana gems replenish a portion or all of your mana pool). Of course players can use up their mana gems (one use per gem), so they may want to purchase more. But how best to handle that? I could, when a player purchases the mana gem pack, provide some local data about the transaction completing. Then I need to worry about jailbroken phones where they can remove that transaction data. So then what? What options exist for ensuring that players are only allowed one use for the purchased app?
This is where I'm hoping that someone else may have some ideas about dealing with this. I believe that addmired (makers of iMob, iKnights, iVampires, and Girl Wars) has managed to address this. I don't believe that I get notification of purchases so I can't trigger off that somehow. Honestly, I'm at a bit of a loss and I'm having trouble finding out how others have addressed the problem (if they have).
Something else that I need to think about is that I don't want to have 500 different expansion packs available for the game. I may have a couple of "artifact" packs that allow you to pay different amounts to get different types of artifacts. For example, you can but the $1.99 artifact pack that gives you some low-power artifacts. Or you can buy the $4.99 pack that gives you some more powerful artifacts. I think it would be a choice of which artifact from the list you want to get, but since you could buy the pack more than once (and thereby acquire more than one artifact from the list), I still need to address it.
Hopefully someone has some ideas I can explore or knows of a blog where someone posted up this issue and their resolution. Thanks!

IGDA Leadership Forum

I got an email a couple of days ago from the IGDA (Int'l Game Developers Association) about their upcoming Leadership Forum in Nov. They were looking for proposals for sessions, so I thought I'd send in a submission about agile and game development. By the time the session rolls around, I should have two games under my belt and about 10 years of experience with iterative development. :) 

I would have to pay my way out to San Fran, but it might be worth it. I think I have enough United miles to make the flight for free, which would mean that I'd just need to pay for the hotel. That would be a reasonable thing for the benefits of speaking at that event.

I got a confirmation that they received my submission and they'd get back to me in about a month. I'll post up as I find out more. It's not quite as prestigious as, say, GDC, but it's a great start and should open doors to other venues. I spoke to several speakers that made the rounds at the VCDC conferences several years ago and they all advised me to get into it. So I'm only 9 years late to the party... :) With this one perhaps I'll have the opportunity to speak at others and get more and more people as enamored with iterative development as I am. :) That would be cool.

Have a great Easter!

Wiki Madness too!

One of the things that I'm loving about the wiki is that I'm able to post up ideas as I have them without having to have a notebook around or anything. I can just head over, type up some concepts/capture some ideas and then close it out. There is so much that will take time to flesh out that it's nice to be able to take a few minutes when my schedule permits to add to it. And because I can add a hyperlink in articles I write to non-existent articles I can quickly find the articles/concepts that I haven't yet documented. It's really helping me figure out what still needs to be worked on and what's mostly complete. And, whatever I work on now becomes the basis for the wiki for players of the game. I have to say that I think it was perhaps the best idea I've had in a while. :)
Now that I'm done preening, it's back to work. ;)

The Waiting Kills You

As I mentioned in a post last Monday, I had finally gotten some kind of feedback from Apple about my application to the iPhone Developer Program. I had a status message of "Company Documents Needed". I sent in the requisite paperwork. And then I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And the weekend came and went and still I was... waiting.
So this morning, one week after I sent in the documents originally, I decided that maybe the fax got lost or I was too quick to submit them or the fax wasn't legible or something! I decided to re-fax it again today. So now I sit around and
wait.

Development Processes

One of the things I wanted to post about was the process that I'm going to be using with Otto Von. I have always been a big proponent of agile methodologies, so I plan on implementing that kind of process with my company. You can read my posts over on my software development blog for more information about the whys and such, but I think that it tends to provide the best mechanism for making gradual yet complete improvements to a code base. It's easy, especially as an independent developer, to get lost if you try to work from a full feature list - you'll get some things partially done before you start working on something cooler. And in the end you'll end up with only part of the software done and that part is less than satisfactory.
There are some things that need to be sorted out in advance. For example, in Project Samantha I'm considering a lot of the game play design - how do things work together? what kinds of values will I use for various attributes? what kind of role does random chance play? But these are all parts of a user story about it. In the trivia game, for instance, I can plan the timing of the answer period and the number of points independently of how many questions make up a game. Or what format the question data takes. So those separately are user stories, but the vision and the interface of the various subsystems needs to be laid out a little more in-depth before I begin.
The main problem with 'agile development' is the tendency toward cowboy coding. In this case, I use it pejoratively to denote the "just get started" mentality - without vision, the coding ends up being no better than a prototype. And that's not the plan - I need a high-quality, high-value game at the end of this. That, or become a joke with the App Store crowd.
I've found some templates for game design that I've been using for some other project ideas I had. I'm going to be putting Samantha in that template so I can start play-testing the systems as well as capture some of the "cool" ideas I've come up with. :) That, and it should provide some kind of hint about how much work this is actually going to be. I may need to delay some things for an update (like things for higher-level players in Samantha). I may need to just dump some ideas outright (too much to handle). I won't really be able to make those calls and figure out what's really going to be in the "release plan" until I have the subsystems described.
Normally the user story would be very high-level and it acts as a token for a conversation to be had between the developer and the customer/designer. In this case, since I'm both, I'm planning on capturing the "conversation" in the story itself (or in the design docs). Ideally I would be either the designer or the developer, but it's a one-man show, so some accommodations needs to be made. :)
I'll post things up as progress is made about how well the process works/doesn't work and what kinds of adjustments I think need to be made to my base process. In the future, when I'm making money hand-over-fist and can afford to hire actual developers I'll be able to look back at this as the early definition and trial by fire of the process. Yeah, about that...

Quick post

I just checked the Apple iPhone Dev Center and it says that my application is in the following state:
Company documents needed
. Requested documents must be received to proceed with enrollment
I've sent them in (Monday), but I'm guessing that this is the standard message they post until they've actually processed the documents.
Regardless, I think things are still moving forward. Better than the "If you've already applied, we're processing your application" message it used to have. :)

Wiki?

I've added a Wiki to the Otto Von site for the products that will be coming out. I'm going to be putting things up there about game play and systems as well as general help files. Project Samantha in particular may be a very complex game on some levels, so rather than embed tons of help files, I'm likely just going to add some brief help and a provide a link to the Wiki so people can look up things there. I can't imagine there will be too much help needed for the trivia game, but Samantha has the potential for some dizzyingly complicated components.
Anyway, the link's above if you're interested. There's some regular Otto Von stuff (like articles about the company) up there right now and more will follow later.

Yay!

There's been a little bit of good news on the Apple Developer Program front. The program is what Apple uses to identify iPhone developers and how those developers distribute applications to testers and customers. It costs a little bit of scratch ($99 for standard developers) to enroll, but it's the price of admission for developing for the iPhone. Yes, the Android is cheaper (i.e., free last I checked), but it still has a while before it catches up with the iPhone in distribution.
Anyway, I signed up originally for iPhone development through my wife's Apple account (since she had an account from when I bought her an iPod a couple of years ago) instead of creating a new one under my email address. It just seemed pointless to create another one. Unfortunately, what happened was that any communications from Apple came to her email. Since she wasn't looking for them as something to keep, they ended up in the digital circular file. :(
That changed, though, when I decided yesterday to just create my own. I submitted for the Apple Developer Program again under my account. Amazingly, today I got a request for some information from Apple about my company. They wanted some kind of documentation stating that Otto Von is a real company. Since it is, that was easy and I faxed back the proof.
It's a small victory, but it's something. I had been concerned that my application had been lost in the shuffle or that Apple was just really 4 weeks behind on approvals. I'm glad that I was mistaken and things were quick to get moving. Again, yay!

Otto Von Logo Redux

So I spent some time playing with some clipart that I got from a heraldry site and created a new logo for Otto Von. It was interesting exploring Gimp again - I hadn't used it since I purchased a copy of Jasc's Paint Shop Pro a few years ago. Still, it was a good experience and I've updated the website with the new logo and made some additional changes to announce and explore the new direction.
One thing that may not be evident for some people who've known me for a while is that originally I had planned on having two companies - Otto Von Productions, which worked on business software, and Snowy Range Software, which made games. The reason was that I saw OVP as the catalyst that drove Snowy Range - without the income generated from business software sales, Snowy Range wouldn't happen. I've since modified my position such that I think that OVP really can work just on game software since the investment is pretty minimal (less than $2k on software and hardware) for mobile device game development and it's also what I originally wanted to do (write games).
So, there's a new logo on the site. There's a motto for the coat of arms - Cave Canem. I hope it precurses some great things to come. :)

Otto Von Logo

Just a quick note about Otto Von and logo. As you'll notice, there isn't one. I have an idea for one but need to find the time to make it work. I think the idea I have is kind of cute but I need to figure out how to get it to work.
Once upon a time I was in graduate school for a degree in Early Modern British History. I had to take 3 semesters of classical Latin and saw, at one point, a great photograph of a mosaic in Pompeii. A picture of a dog on a chain with the words "Cave Canem" beneath - Beware of Dog. Since Otto Von Productions is named for my late Schnauzer Otto (he passed away this December), I thought a logo of a coat of arms with him on the shield with the words "Cave Canem" as the motto would be ideal. I just need to get some time to figure out how to do it, but if I can then it will emblazon all of our titles. :)
Cave canem has been adopted by several other groups, but there don't seem to be any in the game-o-sphere, so I think I'm fine there. I may also modify it slightly to be Beware of Otto or something, but for now that's the idea.

So, who IS this Bill guy?

I decided that I should do something more descriptive than the obligatory "description" that's posted on my blog user page about who I am, what I've done, and what I'm doing. So, without further ado, here we go.
I'm a software developer and manager who's been doing this professionally for almost 16 years. I've been writing software since I was 12 on a mainframe at the University of Wyoming and later in 9th grade using my Commodore 64. :) My first job was at HP and I loved the company - some of the people, not so much. Regardless, it was a great exposure to how enterprises develop and release consumer electronics. I worked on TWAIN, which allowed image editing software packages (like PhotoShop) import images from scanners directly (i.e., no saving the file and opening it - you just "Acquired" the image from the scanner software and BAM! there it was in your editor). I was a major contributor to the 1.6 version of the standard and learned a LOT about corporate/business politics there. I worked at HP for 6 years and was a manager of a software quality team for a year before I left in July 99.
I left to join a small startup in Boulder called Anark. I was a lead engineer there and led two versions of the authoring tool Anark Studio. The company was funded from VC money and while I was there we had two rounds of funding (I believe). In the end, I worked there for just over 3 years and was laid off in Aug 2002 due to budget cuts (high burn rate on the VC money, I imagine). It was also a month before I was supposed to get issued new stock options - you can draw your own conclusions on timing. I also worked with Danc and others to create a new agile development process for the company. That comes into play later.
I was unemployed for about a year following that, doing some part-time work and consulting for a game development company called Saint Studios (it's apparently not around anymore). I helped them define a development process (pretty much the same one I helped create at Anark). I also led the development team in determining whether to make, buy, or re-use 3D game engines. I had a new job before the decision was finalized, but I believe they decided to make. Could be why they're not around.
In January during my year off my daughter Cathy was born. It was great, but VERY different, to be a stay-at-home dad for her first 8 months. I'm not cut out to do nothing all day but care for a small child - Susie (my wife) was a God-send during the period. I love my daughter deeply, but there were times when I hard a hard time. It's tough and I have a lot of respect for parents who can do it.
I moved to Echostar (DISH Network) in Aug of 2003. I was hired to lead the OpenTV development team - they write the E* applications on set-top boxes. In what was likely an indication of things to come, I never interviewed with or even met the team that I was going to manage and on my first day of work my boss was sick and not present. Yeah, it was a precursor no doubt. I worked at E* for about a year and did what I could to change how the team developed software. I was happy to say that by my departure we had released 3x more projects than they had in the previous 3 years combined. Given that it was only 1, it wasn't hard, but it still showed that the team was capable of doing more. And we even lost 2 engineers to attrition while I was there.
I departed E* in Sep 04 and quickly found a new job that started in Nov at HID Global. It was HID Corp then and I was hired to be the manager for the VertX development team. It was a completely different industry than any I'd been in before - physical security. Fascinating stuff and I had to pick it up quickly. Needless to say, I started seeing what could be done to improve software processes and pretty soon afterwards began proposing some changes. Then something weird happened - my manager changed his mind about my role and hired someone else to manage the team. It was a bit off-putting and wasn't the first time he'd done so, or so I was told. Very disappointing. I got assigned to work on a national standards effort for the Security Industry Association. Talk about the blind leading the sighted. I had to pretty quickly come up to speed on security and then be able to speak authoritatively about it with industry veterans. Thankfully the people at SIA (especially Monica, the director of standards) and the people I worked with on committees (especially Hunter Knight from ICS, Per Hanssen from Salient Systems, and Rob Zivney from Hirsch) were incredibly helpful and provided much-needed insights. I did that through June of 08 when I (and most of my team and management chain) were laid off.
I was then recruited heavily for a job in Boulder (I was living in south Denver by this point) with imaging Technology international and I decided to go ahead and do it. I was leading a software team developing for custom industrial ink jet printer systems. I loved the VP that I was going to report to and I saw his vision and agreed 110% with it. He and I were working closely on trying to implement his vision. Unfortunately, he left in Sept of 08 and his vision departed with him. By November management and I had determined that there really wasn't a place for me in the new organization, so I was let go. There's more on that in my SW development blog.
I was out of work for about 8 weeks when I stumbled into my latest role at Maptek. Maptek provides software to help plan and develop mining sites (like open pit mines). It's once again an industry that I know nothing about, so the learning curve is pretty steep. It's been interesting work, though, so I'm hopeful that it will lead to something good. I'm currently a contractor, but it's a 3 month contract. The expectation is that I'll be hired on full-time once the contract expires in April - we'll see, I guess.
As for Otto Von, it's one of those things that I've been working on in a variety of forms since 1997. I did officially incorporate in 2001 and it's an official C corporation. I am the President and CEO, but since I'm the only employee it's a bit of a misleading statement. I'm also the VP of Engineering, Lead Developer, and regular SW Engineer. :) So, yeah. I've laid out my hopes and dreams for OVP in previous posts, so check those for what I hope to gain from it. Mostly what it comes down to is that there are games that I want to play that no one's writing, so I guess it's up to me. I'd rather have a whole team of developers that I can guide in creating those games, but since I've had trouble getting commitments to making that happen, I'll just do it myself. And besides it won't hurt to have all the money to myself - all $1.99 of it. :)
So that's all for now, I guess.

What This Blog's About

So here is the ubiquitous first post about what this blog will cover. I own a company called Otto Von Productions, Inc. based in Centennial, Colorado (south Denver). I've changed the business over to author entertainment software for mobile devices (read "games for iPhone" :). I'm working through the maze that is Apple's Developer Program and will occasionally post up some info about that as well as posts about the games I'm writing, what the thoughts are about them, etc. so people can see the development process writ small.
I will likely keep posts about development projects in the works more private until the games are completed and submitted to Apple, but then I'll open them up for everyone to read through. I hope that it will provide some kind of help to developers of mobile software as other blogs have been to me.
Thanks for reading!