Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve with a little drooling problem. We’re working on babyproofing our house in anticipation of her next arrival – she’s apparently all over the place these days. We’re especially worried about the dog food. Not as much as the dog will be worried about it pretty soon, though.
It’s unbearably hot here in the loft tonight. Lousy air conditioner. We’ve had them in twice to try to fix it with no appreciable result. It’s been a warm day today, but it shouldn’t be this hot anywhere in this highly expensive house.
Spent the weekend camping (very nice little – tiny, actually – park with full hookups, lots of grass and trees in the single camping loop, and horseshoe pits but no horseshoes), replacing brakes (Loyal Reader Number One’s rear brakes were grinding their rivets on the rotors; we replaced them after a slight struggle with reseating the pistons), and looking at game engines (right now, I’m going with Delta 3D, which is open source, can be used on commercial applications, has excellent tutorials and at least passable documentation, and appears to have a lot of people developing with it and supporting it). Also going to church and Keeping the Sabbath Day Holy, of course.
Loyal Readers Numbers Five and Twelve should be here tomorrow. They’re really struggling with things down there in Sixtiesville and hope to find a new way to work the employment situation out. Something good will work out for them, but it sure looks hard to them right now.
Spent some time on the phone with Loyal Reader Number Three over the weekend. We’re still looking very seriously at the software company. We have yet another modest idea for a game (that makes about ten at this point) and want to see if a small team like ours can develop a PC game profitably. The jury’s definitely out on that point. I think we need to research how other small teams are making a living at it and either emulate them or find a jumping off point from where they are now. In any case, we need to find a game engine and try to make something simple so we can see how much effort it takes to make something at all. That field is very crowded, but there’s always room in every field for an excellent practicioner. I don’t know yet if that describes us or not. I know I have very good partners who will work their tails off for something we jointly find interesting and worth doing, and that’s the most important thing.
The other most important thing is to start doing something. Hence, I’m working through the Delta 3D tutorials. I read through several last night and am now going through them in much more detail, and I already understand way more about game engines than I did this time last week.
We’re still not giving up on the homeschooling applications, of course. I think that may be more of a moneymaker than games. Half of our partnership is highly interested in gaming, and there’s certainly more of a mass market, so we’re pursuing that. At the same time, we have a deep understanding of homeschooling and many of the challenges faced by serious homeschoolers, so we’re pursuing that too. I started getting LRN1’s time logging application uploaded to the server, but am having problems getting Rails to work. We need to look at it more carefully. If the ISP needs to have something running and they won’t, we may have to look at using our own server again. Dumb old Vizaweb. Don’t do business with them. Really.
Time for bed. See you tomorrow.
