John Law stuck it to me:
Today... has not been my day, and it is only 10:36AM =)

So I woke up late for starters (too much late night coding), I got ready then jumped into my car. I leave the driveway of my apartment and head down the hill to Route9. Just like any other day, listening to the radio, yawning(gah.),getting ready for another day of work.

I get to the bottom of the hill, and catch out of the corner of my eye.

-A white car in a driveway
-A white car in a driveway with blue stripes
-A white car in a driveway with blue stripes and flashing lights

So, in a seamless motion I

-signal right
-turn off my radio
-pull to the side of the road

Officer #150 steps out of his patrol cruiser and gives me the ol'; "Licence and Registration". He informs me that I was speeding "Oh?" I said. He continues to inform me that I was going 46 in a 30, and that "Local residents have been complaning about people driving too fast." He then procedes to write me a $100.00 speeding ticket and bids me good day. I collect my documents and put them back, thinking; "This is EXACTLY what I needed to complete my morning =D".

Hooray 20 - BI City Ordanance!!!!

So now I need to pay a $100.00 speeding ticket.

As well as whatever my insurance company decides to surcharge me for the rest of eternity.

What's that I hear you say? Contest it?

I thought about it but decided not to for several reasons.

1. I was clearly in the wrong
2. It is not worth my time
3. The less I see of officals the better IMO

Now I am left wondering...

If bad things come in threes(OMG SUPERSTITION!), what else is gonna happen =D


But now on to some different stuff:

I have been in a... oh how to word it... 'haze' lately,
I have steadily been losing faith in the ability for the small indie game developer (and his choice followers(employees)) to turn enough of a profit to keep food on the table and a roof overhead, it seems the numbers just don't work.

Why you ask?

-Good games, are VERY hard to design
-Development of said 'good games' takes long periods of time
-Salaries(for employees is HIGH (cant really pay somone under 30k to 40k and that is the low end))

Lets look at it this way...

Asume I was paying my team of five people 30k a year salary (for 8 hours a day 5 days a week) and we could develop a game and have it ready to be sold in one year.

30,000.00 * 5

Salaray alone, is 150,000 a year

if our game is selling for $30.00 a copy, we would need to sell at least, 5000 copies to break even.

Now if one took out a loan (for 150k) to pay said team, there are a few possibilities.

-The game gets finished and is a rain-maker (yay rich =D)
-The game gets finished and makes some profit(yay profit =))
-The game gets finished and breaks even (yay no profit =|)
-The game gets finished and 'flops' (yay debt =/)
-The game never gets finished(runs out of money, etc) (OMG BIG DEBT! :()

The only two of these seem purposeful, one is sort of a waste of time, and the last two put you seriously into the red.

How many indie games sell 5000 copies? I guess it depends really, though I would BET that it is not common for an indie team to develop a title that makes this much.

Developing on Faith:

This is what my team is currently doing, we are developing this game for free, in hopes that it sells and we get profits from it. But in the mean time it requires that we have day jobs/etc. to survive, this unfortinetly means we cannot spend 8 hours a day on the game, making it take even longer.

In this case we sacrifice time, for finacial stability(which is a must unless you want to end up begging for quaters on main street).

In the near future I will need to decide the direction of EDI Games, weither we are to remail a Faith Developer or become paid employees. A lot will depend on the success of Morning's Wrath, if MW sells a lot, it will provide our startup capital (at least enough for slaries for a year). If MW flops (doesn't make enough for it to seem worth while) then we will either remain Faith Developers, or give up entirely, depending.

For many members of the MW team, they want MW as a great resume piece so they can break into the big games industry, though they wouldn't mind being part of a small indie studio as long as the pay was sufficant and consistent.

So the success of MW will decide many fates, the time is rapidly approaching when MW will be released so, I guess we will find out soon =)

Oh, by the way:

We have all but decided on droping Voice Talent Recording for MW, after some critical evaluation we decided that given our current state and what we have to work with it would not be benefical, for a few reasons.

1. Lack of professional voice talent
2. Lack of professional recording equipment
3. Lack of development time as a whole

So given that, if we did voice recording it would be Bad to Fair voice recording. Faced with this reality we looked at what impact that would have.

- Game with text value:+1
- Game with good voice value:+2
- Game with bad voice value:-1

Thus, the only way your game benefits from voice talent is if it is GOOD voice tallent, everyone I have spoken to has told me if there is one thing they can't stand it is bad voice acting in games.

So given that we are fairly sure we cannot produce good voice acting (be it the talent or the equipment or both), then by having it we would...

-Have to push out our internal deadline more(it takes wicked time to record post-proccess and integrate all the lines)
-End up with a game that is worse than a game with simply text

So after anaylasis of the situation, no matter "How cool it would be to have voice acting in our game", chances are the end user is not going to find it cool if it sucks, and there is no point in spending time on somthing that the user isn't going to love.

So, unless somthing magical happens, there won't be voice acting in Morning's Wrath.

wow, long post =D