All right, so my first week at Thinglefin is just about over.  It’s a big transition in quite a few ways, some of which I’m sure aren’t even clear yet.  Perhaps the most obvious is the difference in working environments: I’ve switched from the stereotypical cubicle farm to a home office in my basement.

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This just happens to be another rambling post about programming. I’d like to get some kind of little tags by the post title so you can quickly tell what a post will be about, but until then, I will warn you manually.
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We’re using the Collada file format to get skeletal data and animations into the game, on the theory that it’d be simpler to use this exciting new open standard file format than it would be to write and support yet another damn Maya exporter. This theory might have been wrong, but at this point it’s working and there’s no going back. Read on for boring complaining:

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One of the first rules of game development is that you do not talk about game development. On most large game projects, all public information will usually come from one of the official spokespersons, typically the producer, the lead designer and the external producer (the external producer works for the publisher, not the studio, so may or may not have up-to-date information on the game). The rank and file developers are forbidden from talking to anyone in the press or public about the project. Failure to comply results in embarrassing warning emails or an uncomfortable meeting with someone’s legal department. There are occasional companies with slightly more permissive policies. At one place I worked, we were highly encouraged to post about the game on message boards and build hype, however all posts had to be approved first. You can image how often people felt the need to go out and hype that game.

So here I am at Thinglefin, master of my own destiny at last, and finally in a great position to talk about what it is I work on, and I find myself still conditioned against it. There’s still that voice screaming “No! Don’t expose your precious ideas to the bad internet! They’ll come for you!” Which is a shame because I’m getting super-excited about this project! So what am I excited about, exactly?

Our project is at the same time very simple and yet uniquely ambitious. At its core is a unique multiplayer game and online world aimed at a very broad audience. That audience? Anyone who surfs the web. Perhaps you or someone you know are a member of this audience? We’d like to think so. In order to make our game appealing to you, the web-surfing public, we’re setting our game in a setting you may already be familiar with, a webpage. Yes, our entire multiplayer online graphical game will be playable in the browser, from any computer with a recent Flash plugin. We think this is fucking brilliant. Who wouldn’t play a game that’s as easy to start as browsing over to a website?

That’s where the ambitious part comes in. Though the game itself is small compared to the big MMO powerhouses of our time, presenting it completely in-browser makes for some interesting challenges. In some ways it’s like writing a modern-looking game on an Apple IIgs. Since we’re delivering it all over the web, resources can’t be huge, and since Flash is not hardware accelerated in any way, drawing to the screen is slow. It’s a great opportunity to trot out a bunch of retro game programming techniques that have not been needed in years and update them for the Internets age.

We’re currently wrapping up the “infrastructure” phase of development, and just coming into the cusp of the “funfrastructure” phase, in which we can see our creations take shape before our very eyes. I’ll talk more about it again soon! Gotta shake those old habits.

Hi, my name is Ryan, and I’m Thinglefin Employee #3.

When Toby and Jeremy first approached me about Thinglefin about a year ago, I was immediately impressed with their vision for both the business and the product.  The business they envisioned would be small and nimble, in direct communication with the game’s players without the encumbrance of a distant publisher.  The product would take many of the lessons we’d learned in traditionally large-scale MMO development and apply them on a different stage, to a game which would be smaller and more managable in scope yet with the potential to reach a far larger, more diverse audience.

Today, thanks to Toby and Jeremy’s tireless efforts, that vision is a giant step closer to being realized.  I’m excited and honored to have the chance to join them for the easy part - making a fun game! 

But my first day will have to wait for a couple of weeks, while I complete my obligation to my soon-to-be previous employer.  Until then…

Like any small company, we each wear a lot of hats at Thinglefin. For instance,  Jeremy is de facto IT guy and web site administrator in addition to his primary role as high arcanist/coder.  That seems to make sense to most people, and no one seems to question that particular combination.

But often, when discussing my own contributions to Thinglefin, I find that people are surprised that I’m both the business guy and game designer guy. Now admittedly I have no prior experience running a company and for the people that know me, thats likely the root of their surprise. However, I get the same reaction from people I’ve only just met. Its like the two roles don’t fit together in the interdisciplinary cosmology; they’re on opposite poles from each other.

Of course I understand how, on the surface, game design and business planning seem unrelated at best, and possibly antithetical at worst. However, when viewed in a certain light, I actually find that the two have a lot in common.

Good game design communicates a vision of how a game will work. It provides a road map that enables a team of developers to craft a finished product, and just as importantly, it provides course correction when the result doesn’t meet expectations.

Similarly, good business planning communicates a vision of how a company will work. It provides a road map that enables an organization to reach profitability, and just as importantly, it provides course correction when the unexpected occurs.

Both must function with established limits (hardware requirements and market size), occasionally byzantine regulation (ESRB and the IRS), and demanding audiences (beta testers and the board of directors).

And the truly outstanding ones? Well, they’re able to define whole new categories.

Hello, my name is Jeremy, and yesterday was my first day at Thinglefin. Well, perhaps a bit of a lie. With my friend and partner Toby, I’ve been working on getting Thinglefin off the ground for more than a year, on and off, over various weekends and late evenings. Developing the technology behind Thinglefin’s first project has been my primary hobby, but only recently did I come to believe it could actually be the thing I do for a living. So in some ways, today was nothing new. But it is new - today was a celebration of breaking free from the confines of the publishers and cubes, and working on an exciting new project that’s only bounded by my abilities and vision. It’s only starting to sink in.

A little about me: I’m the co-founder and chief engineer here at the ‘Fin. I’ve been working in 3d graphics and games for about 9 years now professionally, and been aspiring to it for many years before that. It all stemmed from a moment in 1990, when a friend brought over a copy of Ultima 6, one of the first games to feature a huge continuous open-ended world, with fleshed out characters who did more than just stand in one place and give you the same tiny piece of dialog over and over. My immediate thought was “what if you could make a game where every character in the world was played by a different person, all interacting and contributing to the game’s story?” At the time I lacked the tools and experience to realize this vision, or to even realize the difficulty and scope of what I imagined. Between then and now, many multiplayer online games have arrived, all telling us a little something more about what it is that draws people into these virtual worlds, and what pushes them away.

And now, after being involved with several such projects, it’s time for me to apply the lessons learned in a way that’s only possibe in a small nimble company without a conservative publisher looming over you, and without the momentum and inertia that comes with having a 80 person team all working on different parts of an immense design. Speaking of, I have a tasklist to attend to…