Hello, Alan!

Welcome aboard.

PS - When Jeremy gets back he’s gonna have to help me figure out how to embed these Flash movies directly in the blog post instead of these links…

Hi, my name is Alan Diekfuss and I’m the new art director and concept artist here at the ‘fin.

I first met with the team about a month ago and I was immediately impressed with what they had hidden up their sleeves.  Not only did they have a boatload of great ideas, but they knew what steps they needed to take in order to pull them off successfully.  Having worked exclusively for the big boys (Nintendo and Sony) for 2 1/2 years, I felt the guys here had a great understanding for what it takes to make exceptional games.  In fact, I was so impressed that I decided I had to help them out any way possible.  And here I am today.

So what is my role as art director?  Well that’s a good question and one that I plan to answer through the coming weeks.  Expect to see me posting everything from concept art, illustrations, and designs right here on site.  Here at the ‘fin, we believe in interacting with our audience throughout the development process and we feel it’s extremely important to get your feedback before we call it “done”.

Anyways, before I go, I wanted to leave you with a quote that I’ve kept close to my heart throughout all these years.

“The Pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.” - Marty Feldman

It’s been pretty quiet up here on the website, mostly because we’re all hard at work down below, in the dark bowels of the company, working on our first public release. While we do that, feel free to sign yourself up to our new email announcement list, the Thinglefeed. There’s a form to do so over on the left hand side of the screen. Once you sign up, we’ll let you know as soon as there’s something you might be interested in taking a look at.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Eh, I’m not going to give these clowns my email address. They’ll probably send me several gigs of monkey porn, and then sell my address to Clear Channel.” If you are thinking that, that’s kind of weird, but ok, I can dig. You can always just subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed, I suppose. BUT… I’m not going to make any specific promises at this point, but it seems highly likely that we’ll want to create some kind of special “early adopter” bonus for certain accounts, and being on the Thinglefeed may well be your only chance to get it! Just think of that sweet bonus and how much you want it! I signed up myself just now so I would be sure to get it.

We have a press release going out tomorrow. Its mostly boring stuff concerning our financing, but it does mention a couple of newsbytes on the game we’re developing. If you’re reading this blog, I imagine you’re a hip netizen, searching for the next juicy gamedev morsel. Or more likely, you’re Ryan’s Mom. In any case,  I thought I’d scoop our own press release, and spill the little bit of game-specific information it contains.

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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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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…

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…

At Thinglefin, we’re making games and breaking rules. As game industry veterans, we often felt isolated from our audience. And no wonder. Between publishers, licensors, marketing, and retailers, game developers are often several layers removed from the kinds of end user interactions that are essential for the development of great games.

No more! By creating a dialogue with gamers throughout our product’s development, we hope to receive meaningful feedback when it matters most: during development.

Our goal is to create gameplay experiences that are engaging, accessible, and fun. And we can’t do it without you.