How doo gamedev.net? Well it's been too long and I apologise to anyone that it may have concerned for my not keeping of a more consistent journal. It was never a strong point for me; all that writing and formatting which wasn't GAME development. Still, I've found it to be an extremely valuable tool to keep track of my progress when I am developing a game, and so, it is with great humility that I return to this hallowed sanctum of geekyness and ask you fine ladies and gentlemen to enjoy, destroy and something-rymes-with-roy my bi-monthly (hah!) accounts of the creation of a new game and my sometime freelancing at whatever I can get my hands on.

But first, it seems like a good time to get the elephant in the room ...out of the room and through whatever exit will accommodate his hugeimungous ass acreage. Such an ungainly exposition will require nothing less than a gamedev.net sized tube.

For those who remember, I tried to make an MMO. It failed. In this first journal instalment of a new chapter, I will provide a short treatise on Tearsols crashing and burning, including how it ended in great justice.



A gap in the market.

Tearsol was not a labour of love, for me at least. It was conceived as a project compromise between me and my long time co-developer friend, then vacuum packed into a format which I believed held significant value. Though I did come to relate to it almost like a family member, it was more like dealing with the rebellious teenager who you've invested too much precious life force into to let it walk out of the door wearing dungarees, and nothing else. Like most informed adults, I was aware of the immense amount of work, cost, and sleepless nights I'd have to live with, but felt that if I could get that thing out the door with a reasonable set of clothes and a sensible hair cut, I'd complete two key objectives:

1) Be very, very proud of myself and the people who made it happen.

And...

2) Never have to work again.

What I'm trying to say is, I had (and still have) a firm belief that the market we were building Tearsol for is vastly undersupplied and will make a very fine living for the people who manage to tap it. The generous offers of investment I received toward the end of the project demonstrated this, and NCSoft are obviously keen to get a piece of it, which is enough proof for me. This made the ending of the project an extremely welcome break from something which began as indie game development, but rather quickly morphed into an excessively stressful and frankly bizarre pseudo business.

So objective 2 would have to wait for a while. I realised, however, upon finally closing the books on Tearsol, that I had more than fulfilled objective 1. I was immensely proud of what had been produced.

We had a game. When Tearsol was finally put to sleep it had the beginnings, the very faint beginnings, of a great game. I'm sure that I saw our work through rose tinted glasses, but it seemed to me that what we managed to produce had all the makings of a great experience. That is to say: We had done all the right things, and all the right things were being done. Granted, we were barely off the starting grid and our destination was still obscured by the curvature of the earth, but races can be won and lost in their first few moments, and the race was going bloody great right up until we stalled and gently rolled to a halt.

I had the pleasure to write three references for team members while developing Tearsol. One of those members is now in full time game development employ, thanks in no small part to the wonderful artwork he produced for Tearsol. A second found work with a major French game developer; though I suspect his 20 years of programming experience did most of the talking, I do like to think that the time spent on Tearsol and the help I provided with his side projects allowed him to demonstrate that he was capable of game development.

Personally, I learned a vast amount. Mainly from the other members of the team who were patient as saints as I muddled through code, applications, and artistic conventions which I could never have understood without their help. I wrote some 40k words in the course of documenting Tearsol, and that figure could be twice as much if I included the vast MSN verbiage and rambling e-mail correspondence about everything from service structure to dead reckoning. A tangible result of this is my truly terrible 64k word space opera sci-fi novel, which I could never have contemplated writing if I hadn't seen how easy 40k could be.

So we all had a whale of a time, and have made many friends and great contacts for life. To me, that is more than enough cause to be very, very proud of what we produced --even if it's not available for public consumption.

As for the money, well that comes and goes, but such experience and friendship is priceless. True, it won't buy a Porsche, but I'm more of an Aston Martin man anyway. Wait. Those things won't buy an Aston either?

In the end we were victims of our own success. Like lemmings, I suppose. The shining talent inside the team could only have resulted in one unfeasibly ironic result, to which I was utterly blind until the discussions about job hunting and portfolios hit a fever pitch just a few months before we drew the project to a close. Perhaps I should have tried harder to sell the ultimate goal of fame and fortune in those last few weeks as each briefly intersecting agent whirred off on a new tangent, but it felt like an empty plea when we had already achieved so much.

You can download the Tearsol source here. It does not include our licensed networking libraries.



My new project is significantly simpler, in traditional terms, but no less audacious. Stay tuned for more information once it exists.