The only game related stuff I’ve done in the last month or two has been business planning related. Since I’m the only one who needs the whole plan I’m using a personal wiki on my computer for the planning. It’s great at the moment as it’s very informal, and if an idea pops in my head I can quickly jot it down so I can focus on other things, safe that the idea is recorded. These personal wikis are great for any non-linear document, and I only wish I started using them earlier.

The other business related thing I’ve been doing is more brainstorming of business names. Since I’ll be operating on-line I’ve made it a rule that whatever name I own must also have the dot-com web address available. I’d also prefer it if I didn’t have to tack an extra word like “Games” on the end, like having to register randomnoungames.com because randomnoun.com is already taken. I don’t particular mind having something like “games” or “studios” at the end, but it does make it longer and it also limits me to using the business name in one area; if I decide to branch out to do a bit of consulting on the side I’d probably need a second name.

Unfortunately I’m bad at picking names. I spent ages trying to decide on “Trapper Zoid” for example. A good name needs to be memorable, relatively unique yet identifiable and spellable, represent something about you that you want to project to others. And on top of all that it needs to something you can live with for a while without you hating it.

My current plan is to register half a dozen or so dot-com address (already done) and then sit on them for a couple of months while I finish up my studies and set things up. During this extra time I can mull over the names in my subconscious and try them out on random people until I get a good feeling over which name I like the best. Then I’ll register that one as my business name. I’ll also have a few backups which I think are almost as good in case something goes awry when registering.

I’ve currently got three names that I think would be workable. However an issue has cropped up: while I like all three names and think any of them could be suitable, they all do project a slightly different image. Ideally I’d like to pick the name that projects the image closest to what I want the business to be, however I’m currently quite flexible about that. I don’t particular need on an artistic level to make a specific sort of game; I like nearly all genres and would love to work on any of them. So it’s not as if there’s an obvious choice based on my future vision of where I want to be.

I reckon that something as simple as the choice of name I go with could shape the future direction of the business. The choice of name will shape the logo I make, which will in turn shape the coloration and style of the webpage. And since I’ll be spending a lot of time working with that logo and style, it’s bound to have some effect on my inspiration and creativity. A certain style could suggest playful, cartoonish casual games, or it might skew me towards stylish niche indie games instead.

But then again, it could just be that deep down in my subconscious there’s a particular direction I want to go in that I don’t realise, and that my preference in name will reflect that. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? It’s an interesting question.

Once my time is up I’ll be heading back to Melbourne to the family house to crash for a month or two while I figure out what to do next. I’ll probably spend a lot of the first month alternating between holiday and catching up with stuff I’ve let slide for the last year or two, such as watching any film released in the last couple of years, ditto for computer games and checking what’s changed in Melbourne since I left it. Then I can start the next chapter of my life. I’m planning on factoring in some game development and webcomics in there somewhere, but we’ll see.

Thus I’m hoping to get this journal back up into to speed some time in late September, but I’ll probably get things really going in late October once I’ve had time to settle down. I’m looking forward to that, but until then though I’ve got a dissertation to finish. Expect my sanity to be increasingly strained in the next couple of months.

Relevant to this journal: according to my web host’s automatic billing scheme it’s the one year anniversary of the site. I’ve paid to keep this site running for another year, so I’ll be continuing to share my scattered thoughts with the rest of the world for a little while longer. But there are changes in the pipeline! Once I’ve finished my PhD studies, which I’m hoping will be the end of August, I’ll be putting some new projects into action.

First off and most importantly, I’m putting the first steps into an indie game business into action. I’ve already started with jotting down the beginnings of a business plan as a distraction break from PhD write-up. Up till now I’ve not thought myself ready and I’m still not fully certain, but I doubt I’ll ever be more ready unless I take the plunge. The exact form and function of the business is still very much up in the air, and I won’t be doing anything too rash until I’ve got a plan that passes a basic sanity test, but I feel it’s now or never and the lessons I learn even from a failed first business will be invaluable in the future.

Secondly, I still haven’t forgotten my pledge to start a webcomic this year. I’ve let my drawing lessons lapse a bit over the last few weeks due to PhD work and my tendency to injure my drawing hand (why do minor burns take so long to heal?), but I’m going to get back into this big time once I’m free of study obligations. The exact nature of the webcomic is also up in the air and the amount of time I can invest in it will have to be heavily tempered by my indie business plans, but I’ll start something up before the end of 2008 guaranteed. Expect the first notice of its existence to be posted here sometime in November or December.

Thirdly, I’ll be revamping this site. It’s been pretty stagnant in form for the last few months. I need to devote a weekend to working on improvements, but that’s something I’ve been putting off until after my PhD’s completion which keeps dragging on much longer than I expected. I also need to put thought into which direction to take the journal in terms of content. Most weblogs out there are focused on a particulr subject, but I’ve been rambling on about everything that interests me, which is nearly everything. I dabble in game development, programming, drawing, vector art, small business fundamentals, composing music and who knows what else. Consequently I’m not particularly good at any one of them, so I’m not sure if my postings here have value over a specialist experts blog on a particular subject.

I’m thinking it might be a good idea to convert the focus of this journal into more into a series of articles about my journey into areas I’m unfamiliar with, such as starting my own small business or creating a webcomic. I’m not sure whether this may be instructive as I’m fully expecting to unwittingly be making a ton of mistakes along the way, but it should be enlightening, informative, or at least better than an empty weblog.

All of this will need to wait until September though, as I’ve got a dissertation to finish.

At the moment I’m fairly busy trying to finish up my studies, and what with winter being a pain on my creative energies I probably won’t have anything insightful to add until spring (in the southern hemisphere). Once everything has been wrapped up I’ll have a holiday period with loads of free time, so I’ll be able to put some thought on where to take this journal (amongst other things). Until then, this site might lie mostly dormant for a while.

Part of this has been due to the tutoring and lab demonstrating I’ve been doing the last couple of months, but that’s now all but over bar the marking. It’s been a pretty good run, although I felt I didn’t have as firm a grasp of the material as I’d hoped. Fourth year subjects are always a bit like that; I prefer first or second year where you know the subject well enough to focus on the actual teaching methods rather than understanding the material yourself.

The tutoring ran on a one week on, one week off basis, which meant every other week I’d have time to focus on my own thesis write-up. But the weeks on tended to be dominated by the teaching, and on the days where I’d take a three hour lab class in the evening I wouldn’t have energy to do much more than watch DVDs or sleep.

Plus there’s always winter to factor in. My metabolism always seems to switch into hibernation mode when the weather gets too cold. It didn’t help that the season just seemed to toggle from a particularly warm autumn overnight; the maximum temperatures seemed to drop by 15 degrees Celsius.

The upshot of the winter months is that if I’m not careful I tend to spend the bulk of my time daydreaming or idling surfing Wikipedia or TV Tropes for hours if not days at a time (TV Tropes is particularly bad for this). Sometimes hours seem to pass me by without me noticing them go. It’s a dangerous habit to get into, and it’s something I’ll need to force myself to break if I’m going to get anything done.

This week I’m going to attempt to break the winter slump by forcing myself to remain active and productive despite a lack of energy, even if this just involves writing posts for my blog like I am now. It beats passively reading wiki pages!

I’m also going to spend a little bit of time putting in some preparation work for my webcomic project. To recap: I’ve pledged to myself to start a webcomic some time this year as an outlet for improving my own drawing and writing skills. I tend to idly doodle cartoon while I’m watching DVDs, but without some project to give me direction I haven’t really improved much in the last couple of years. Due to my lack of focus the last week I’ve churned out dozens of pages of sketches that are all pretty terrible, so I mean to start putting some of that time into actual improvement.

I’ll also start posting more entries here about webcomics in general to help me put my thoughts together. Part of my problem at the moment is that I haven’t made up my mind what kind of webcomic I should be aiming for. I’ve got a bunch of conflicting goals, desires and time constraints for this. Putting some time into writing this down will be a good way to put things into focus.

I?m currently trialling out a piece of Mac software called ?MacJournal? to see how it goes. It?s basically a word processor for journals, with organisational abilities like folders and tags. It?s pretty lean but it?s the sort of thing I need for organising small articles and other documents. I also have a paid copy of VoodooPad, a personal wiki software, but that?s more useful for my own reference notes and less so for complete documents.

MacJournal also has the capability to interface with WordPress blogs, or at least it claims to - this post is my first test to see how well the system works. If this seems to go smoothly, I?ll start typing up more of these things off-line rather than in the WordPress editor. And I?ll strongly consider buying a licence to MacJournal in a few days time.

Edit: Additional

Well, looking at the entry above it seems like it gets through smoothly enough, but something is eating up my apostrophes. I’ll have to see what I can do to fix that next time…

I didn’t bother going to see the torch, as it’s not exactly super important to me. Given this is Canberra, it’d be attended by a mix of Chinese nationals and supporters (we’ve got a big multicultural mix here), combined with the protest groups for Tibet or Falun Gong that seem to have permanently camped outside the Chinese embassy. I doubt there’ll be any violence, but the whole show just doesn’t seem like my kind of thing.

Apart from not doing anything regarding the Olympic torch, which unsurprisingly has not taken a lot of effort, I’ve been spending a bit of time thinking ahead for what I’m going to do with the website after I complete my studies in a couple of months time. I’m most likely to be wrapping up my Ph.D. thesis write-up in June, but I have not yet got anything definite planned for after that.

I’ve still got dreams of starting my own on-line game business; selling indie games over the ‘net to make a living. I’ve got plans for how I could get that up and running, but it’s not without a whole truck load of risk. I’d probably be burning through my savings pretty quickly for the first year at least. So the question I’m debating is whether I go for broke by running with the online business idea full time, head into a more traditional career path, or (my current favoured option) a blend of some type of possibly part-time employment that also allows me to run the online business on the side.

This isn’t something I’m going to decide upon very soon. I’ve still got a couple of months left before I’m done here, and it wouldn’t be amiss taking a couple of months holiday afterwards. I’m moderately astute at saving money up for a rainy day, so it’s not as if I’m going to be begging for scraps this year, at least. But it is something that now the end of my formal education is nigh I’ve got to keep bubbling around in my mind so I make a decently informed decision.

I’ve also noticed a few more trackings from Inkscape fans to the tutorial I made for Order of the Stick avatars. I’m guessing people need Inkscape tutorials. Once my PhD write-up is over I’ll write up some more (general purpose this time).

I need some practice with the new version however. And practice in general. I’m not that much of an artist really, and my cartooning really needs some brushing up.

I’ve started playing around with Inkscape 0.46 by just giving it a spin in creating a character using my old techniques:

1. Sketch out a draft with pencil on paper.

2. Resketch it using the calligraphy tool in Inkscape on a draft layer
3. Construct the figure out of basic shapes and curves (this is the long part)
4. Put in any special effects, shading, corrections and what-have-you.

This is a pretty early concept for the character “Eight” that part of one of two ideas for a webcomic that I’d like to launch later this year. I still haven’t made up my mind about the little details like colouration and accessories.

So far the process for creating this character isn’t working - not because of the final output, but because it take so freakin’ long to do. I don’t know if it’s because I’m out of practice in the whole Inkscaping, but it could just be I don’t have an efficient process. To test this, I’ll give making this character another go, but this time using a more traditional inking based approach - both digitially and on paper. I’m rubbish at paper inking and almost as rubbish at digital inking, but it’s something I should at least try to see how it turns out.

Part of the problem work wise is that I’m teaching a fourth year course (Computer Vision). Despite how good you think you know the material it’s always hard to teach a third year or above course as the material is never trivial. You invariably have to relearn things and then think about how to explain them. In my case I have to learn some things for the first time, as most of my computer vision knowledge was self-taught for the purposes of my research and I’ve focused on the areas I need.

My favourite subject to teach/tutor is second year algorithms and data structures. There’s usually an equivalent in every computer science course. It’s one of the first purely computer sciencey subjects a student will learn after getting to grips with a programming language. As a topic it’s also the sort of thing a good programmer will already need to know for their work, so it’s a breeze to refresh on the theory. You can then concentrate on figuring out the best way of teaching it to students, which is the fun part.

I’ve tutored first year introduction to programming classes too, and while the subject matter is easy the teaching is a lot harder. The problem is that if you’ve been programming for a while you most likely cannot remember what it was like when you first learnt a language, and with programming its one of these things where student go through stages where they need a flash of insight to get from “just don’t get it” to “now I do”. But if you’ve been programming for a while or from a young age you just can’t remember what the bits were you don’t get, as you’ve been breaking problems down into programs all your life. It’s like teaching early algebra to kids (something I’ve also done); it’s really hard to understand exactly why the students are having trouble because you’ve been using letters to replace numeric unknowns for as long as you can remember.

I’ve also been out of the teaching schtick for a while, so my voice isn’t up to the task. On the weeks I’ve got on, I tend to be talking nearly non-stop, and as a generally quiet individual my vocal chords aren’t geared to that kind of use. By the weekend I’ll have probably lost my voice again. Good thing most of what I do tends not to require it.

I’ve deviated a lot off my original plan that I wrote a few years back for how to get there (according to the original plan, I’d have been selling games two years ago), and now I’m in the final throes of my PhD I don’t have the time for anything major. But I can still work towards the goal in my spare time, albeit slowly.

First on my list is to resurrect the original purpose of this journal - to get some experience in managing a website. I’ve been letting this site stagnate for a bit too long, defeating the original purpose. So it’s time to reinvent the site and make it look a bit like one I’d need if I were launching the commercial version.

To start, I’ve made a new theme to replace the light, airy minimalist one that was here. This one is loosely modelled off the look of my GameDev journal, although I won’t go as far as making the headers all Comic Sans to emulate the comic book look. I’m debating whether I should put an image as the background; sometimes I find them distracting, but a nice pattern can work well if it’s carefully chosen. I might also play around with the colours a bit once I’ve seen the site in action. I also need to see if this font works well for blogs - I’m not sure how Trebuchet MS handles large blocks of text at smaller sizes.

I’ve also retired the poll I’ve had up for ages: building blocks had been winning for quite a while (probably the game developer influence there!). I’ll try cycling them around a bit more often.

Any suggestions for the site look? Any layout bugs I’ve missed?