Hey everybody. Ray Merkler here, long time lurker, first time poster. Founder, proprietor, and official Only Guy Who Works Here of Hindrances to Progress, a game studio like no other, for you see, I'm the only person in it and I work on my games in my spare time to grow my business when I'm not at my day job! How novel!

I've been working on my first game for a few months now, and I recently decided to try a little experiment. I just replaced my "company"'s placeholder page with a blog a couple weeks ago, and on that blog (www.hindrances.com), I'm going to talk about absolutely everything that goes on over the development of my game, with as much transparency as possible. Will it be fun to watch every detail of the game dev goings-on of someone who's never actually f inished a game before? I think YES, because I have the optimism!

This week in particular, as a kind of long-winded opinion piece, I'm taking on the issue of fledgling game devs who refuse to talk about their projects or ask people to sign ridiculous NDAs for fear of having their ideas stolen. To show that they're worried about nothing, I'm posting detailed descriptions of all of my favorite game ideas that are in my queue for future development, and issuing the challenge: "Steal my game idea. Go on. Bother to do so."

That's just this week, though. There's more in store. I'll be putting myself completely out there, talking about everything that's going right or wrong, where my weaknesses are, how I'm getting around them, what's getting done, what's not. If nothing else, popular culture has proven weak to narcissism, so at least I've got that working for me. :D

The Steal My Game Idea series will be collected together here: http://www.hindrances.com/category/steal-my-game-idea/
And the whole blog itself can be found here: http://www.hindrances.com/

Plug plug plug, whore whore whore. Hope some of you will check it out!