Mostly Workin'

Well I know I say it all the time but honestly there is not a lot going on today. Work is pretty average, I think because most people are on vacation for Christmas. Yesterday was pretty eventful because we had a usability testing session all day for the game I just finished up. Well it's not actually finished but it's about 95% there because we are shipping it out for Alpha review on Friday.

I will be honest when I say that I was sort of bummed yesterday after the usability testing because a lot of the people did not care for the game as much as we had hoped they would. Not so much the work that I did, the graphics, and so on but more about the rewards in game.

Unfortunately this is par for the course and is something that does happen quite often when you are designing games. You also cannot take it 100% as gospel when it comes to a group of about eight people playing the game. All of that aside it is still great feedback and gives us some time to make some adjustments and potentially hit the ground running when it goes into the market.

This game is one of the few games that are not licensed that come out of my game studio so it has a lot of eyes on it. We are trying to prove that we can make a good game that has legs to stay in the market for a long time without leaning on the crutch of a million-dollar license.

Whether this game sets the bar or not I still strongly feel that this is a challenge we are all able to meet head on. I think most of the games that are done that have these million dollar licenses are actually almost dead in the water half the time we get them out the trend has fallen on its face. It makes it extremely difficult to earn that revenue back in a short amount of time.

Any-Who

Anyway enough about that, most people that are not in the industry either do not care or do not fully understand what I am referring to most likely. That is okay friends and family as well as coworkers know right where I'm coming from. I just want all of our games to be successful.

Not only does it make our studio look great but it makes the shareholders extremely happy. With the majority of us that work at the company being shareholders as well, you can imagine how happy it makes us to see our 401(k)s and stocks in general increase when we have great games and market share.

So yeah, that is about all I have to rabble about today. It should be another good day. We have a meeting to go over the usability testing from yesterday and determine our plans.

The weather is still decent and most of the crap is melting but only just in time for what the weather guessers are predicting will be here in a couple days; more of the white stuff, ugh!

Photo: A pawed critter has been snooping around in the front yard it seems.