What I'm Working On Right Now
I’m working on some larger-scale issues right now so I haven’t been posting a lot. I’ll have some rather lengthy posts forthcoming but right now the project’s a little trapped inside my head. My focus has shifted from engineering to more business-oriented goals, specifically figuring out how to pay for this thing. I’ve got a couple different threads going. First, I’ve been working on a series of posts that go over some of the early decisions I made before I started this blog. Real basic stuff like, “Why make it a MUD?” or, “Why use github and should parts of the codebase be closed?” Anything I think a potential investor might ask me, or anything I can use to distinguish myself from other games in this space. I’ve been slowly refining a 3-minute pitch, a 5-minute pitch, etc., and the longer they get, the more details I’ll have needed to work through. In addition to formalizing a message, this process is also about figuring out the most effective way to market my work. Still not exactly sure how I would measure something like that, but socializing a message is a good place to start.
Also, before I can even start to look for money, I need to have something to sell. So I’ve been spending my time thinking about what parts of the system I want to remain open and free and what parts I’m willing to charge for. This has revived some of my early ideas about trying to gamify the software dev process. I’ve started designing a role-playing game using the gabbo mudlib that I potentially license to people at some level, or just sell off to someone for a lump sum. It fits nicely into the flavor system, so it’s also helping me work through the engineering of what flavors do what and how. I’ll post more about it when I’m ready, but it’s gonna have some sort of class system and it takes place in a fictional post-colonial nation state based loosely on the years immediately following Indian independence in 1947.
Not sure when I’ll get back to dev, but it’s not going anywhere. These posts are a lot harder to write than code, but I’ll try to keep updates coming.