To Fail is to learn

I think I have arrived at a point were I am happy to talk about recent events in my business ventures and hopefully allow other people to learn from my mistakes.

I started a business called Tizma Ltd back in Dec 2007 to undertake contract software development and sell my own brand of software online.

For at least a year things went well. I had a decent contract paying the bills and my first product CSV Easy was born. Naively I thought this product would be the making of me….. How wrong I was.

Now without blowing my own trumpet I thought and still think the CSV Easy is a great product. Almost everyone who tried it liked it and found it useful. The problem was theses allies were also reluctant to pay for it.

The software world and publishing model had changed around me and I simply didn’t see it coming. We are now in the age of free web hosted services with huge functionality and amazing mobile apps that cost 99p!!

CSV Easy is just one of those tools people expect to be free or incredibly cheap, plain and simple.

Fast-forward to October 2009 and my first child is born. We’re both excited and happy, but within the same week my main and only contract ceased.

I decided to take it easy until the New Year and enjoy the beginnings of my first born - somewhat burying my head in the sand. During this period I wrote an entire web system I convinced myself was the future, but alas it’s still just on my Hard drive and scrapped.

I expected to have a thriving user base of CSV Easy and the by Jan 2010 the business was hemorrhaging funds with still no real contract work to think of. I’d stupidly registered for VAT, had business mobile phones, top spec broadband and the yearly costs of having a limited company, with accounts and taxes was crippling.

So, in March 2010 I had to do something. I had to get a job and this is where I’m at. A challenging and well rewarded role that I’m thankful for. The business is going through the motions of shutting down and I’ve learnt the hard way that I should have taken baby steps towards entreprise and certainly not put all my eggs in one basket.

I’m still actively supporting and developing CSV Easy and its now available from a new product focused site csveasy.com but its now a personal product rather than a commercial behemoth.

Fear The Dronx Is Live

Its finally happened my first XBOX Live Indies game is available on the Marketplace. It has been since yesterday and as I type it sits at position number three on the New Releases section.

I have a mixed feeling at the moment, yesterday I sent out quite a few codes along with the press release to a lot of gaming sites, but as yet I haven’t noticed any mention of it accept for XBLA Ratings, but thats not a review.

I do worry that XBLIG doesn’t get the respect its due except for a lucky few. There are many awesome games available and I firmly believe mine is one of them and worthy of its 80 MSP.

Once I start getting sales data from Microsoft I will soon find out. If there are any gaming sites that would like to review my game please get in contact for press release and review codes.

Aftermath

Well, three weeks on and the whole XNA submission process has been an eye opener. It takes a long, long, time.

You’re basically reliant on other XNA members to download, try out and critique the title. I’m not complaining about any of the really helpful members who have helped me out, its just frustrating to wait.

Of course I did my bit and tested for other people as its only fair. It just feels like it would be more helpful if Microsoft actually had a dedicated team to be the mainstay of aficionados doing the bulk testing (or maybe they do??).

So now I’ve finally entered Fear The Dronx into Peer Review, although there are 54 other titles ahead of me :(

Fingers crossed it gets through without a hiccup.

The launch of Fear The Dronx is getting close

This day has finally arrived, Fear The Dronx has gone into peer review on XNA. I am truly excited to have finished this little slice of entertainment. Its been set at 240 MSP, I wanted 80 MSP but as the game is over 50mb Microsoft won’t let me :S

The product page is up and running with screenshots and the video trailer. If you would like to check it out go here.

Hopefully the process won’t take too long and will be relatively pain free.

So if you’re part of the XNA community and can perform reviews I would love you to help me out and get puzzling.

A follow up to continue after the review is over.

Feature complete

Its finally happened. Fear The Dronx is feature complete. All levels are in, tutorial finished tonight. Just some final testing and website prepping. Should be in peer review by mid week.

No more windows server

Its finally done. I have transitioned from a dedicated windows server to running all my windows development to a virtual machine on my mac.

I am amazed at just how good the performance is. I have Visual Studio running on Windows 7 in my virtual machine, cross compiling to my XBOX via XNA. All working beautifully. Big <3 to parallels.

And for web development I have IIS7 running smoothing. The old windows monolith is now ready for its final resting place on eBay!

My electricity bill should start to drop after turning that bad-boy off.

On more interesting news, Fear The Dronx is now being polished and I hope to submit it next week some time for peer review.

Late changes

I think for some time now I’ve thought that Qoobz as a name was a real cop-out. A “crazy” play on words that is just marketing bullshit. So I’ve been thinking hard about an alternative and now we have a winner. From this day forward Qoobz shall now be known as “Fear The Dronx”. Menacing or what? Its far more interesting, thought provoking and gives a tiny whiff of what might be in store. Well, that’s what I think anyway. Nearly done now, XBLIG is calling to me.

Connectivity restored

Finally I have broadband back. Not great at 4.5 mbit but better than nowt. We are allegedly getting an exchange upgrade this year.

I can now get back to finishing Qoobz.

I hate moving

This is now the sixth time I’ve moved home and I’m sick of it. I have the process pretty well organised, but the bureaucracy involved in switching services over just blows my mind.

I’ve sorted everything except for Broadband. I’m using Eclipse who I’ve been happily using for the last six months, but this house move has been a disaster. Now, let me say a large portion of the blame is with BT and there lack of information, but Eclipse haven’t exactly been proactive with chasing the connection issue.

So as I type I still have no broadband and a “review” schedule of the 23rd of August over the line.

I’ve heard the area I live in is notorious for bad lines and poor ADSL, but my neighbours either side both have it without issues… aaaarrrhhhh!!!

So, I’m gonna ride it out till the 23rd then kick Eclipse into touch if nothing is resolved and to add insult to it they’re still going to charge me my monthly fee!