de Paul Warren

Archive for the ‘The Business Element’ Category

And so the stage I dread the most. Advertisement. I know it’s a vital step in any success, but I’m not good at it and dread doing it myself. Recently I have finished making a game I have been developing for about 4 months. The first month was steady work where the latter three months were on and off development. The game itself is a strategy game based off of two open source games. It is most similar to the popular Risk games and their variations, with a few noticeable differences.

The game is now ready for the public to play. But there’s one small detail, in order to attract players, I need players. It’s the catch 22. So what I need to do is find some way of having people join but also be patient in the early community life of the game. Do I spend some money to setup advertisements on other websites? Do I offer prizes for the Nth player to join…

I guess I have to do some sort of advertising, but I want to do what is best for the site. I don’t want to attract hundreds of people right away, to only have them leave and never come back because it was the wrong crowd. But I also don’t want to wait 10 years for the game to gain light and catch on either. So I’m off to do some advertising I guess. But if you haven’t seen any of my ads, head on to www.ikonquest.com. Feedback, suggestions, complaints or general comments are welcomed.

My Authoring Path
I attempted to create a few novels. Made a few that were 50 to 100 pages but Wooah were they bad. I was a young teenager then, what can you expect?

I also didn’t have the knack for original ideas yet. Well some were my own but it was clear where I had drawn my inspiration from. Never completely satisfied, and a good thing too, I continued to rewrite and record notes for other ideas and stories. It seemed that my originality started to bloom where my ability to stay on task and create one solid story had faded.

I now had thousands of little notes all organized into several large binders that were all unique. I could finally say I had true unique and original ideas for stories. But nothing solid as even one written chapter. My goals for writing had also changed. No longer had I written for expressing and exercising my creativity, I now had the desire to create true literary pieces. While I didn’t expect my stories would be a reading requirement in schools, I wanted the possibility to be there.

My second goal was to create something truly science fiction. Something the community would accept as worthy of the category. Any idea too close to those of “Star Wars” or “Star Trek” and my works would get shunned and called not true science fiction. So I collected many Science Fiction magazines and a few classic novels to study for science fiction is truly about. That when the reader opens the book, they know it’s sci-fi.

Now I don’t have anything completed yet, but I’m working for the first time on my first draft. The whole series has been picked at and adjusted to become more realistic and believable. The draft will be my first, but seeing as I’m currently on another path, I don’t have much time to work on it.

The Development Path
Shortly before I entered college, I didn’t even have a computer. Not that I could afford one at that. I learned how to program on paper. While everyone in the class was writing poor code and just hoping things ran, I had to be sure it ran as I had even less time to develop than they did.

I fiddled around with modding games, not that it went anywhere at the time. Didn’t make anything either, I just took a look at the code but moved on to something a little easier. It was around this time that I started to program with perl and PHP. After a year of perl programming in college, I moved on to PHP and have done most of my development in that since.

I have three projects made with PHP. These, I consider my best work. The latest which is also a game, I have posted here, iKonquest.

My other two are an advanced webmail script by the name of Hermes which is currently used at myguarded.name. It specializes in a not-so-unique anti-spam method of whitelists. Eventually I will invest some time to setup Domain Keys for further security, but the biggest few solutions involve the participation of other services.

My last project is called Themis which is the user management script run by both previous projects.

After I finish iKonquest, my next path will be

Business Development Path
Starting and running my own business. I don’t know why, but I’ve found myself too modest for my own good. I always understate my abilities but find I can’t shake myself from doing this. With the passion I have for the gaming industry, I won’t let it keep me down. If I can’t get a job as a developer, I’ll make my own.

While the company is unregistered, it’s name will remain top secret. But until then, I will be developing games on my own under my own name. I’m quite sure running this company for the first bit will take up at least a third of my time.

Designs are already coming together for a game similar to that of Dungeon Keeper 2 and Evil Genius.