The Clock Is Ticking
I left my day job last month and I realized I haven’t posted about it yet. My focus hasn’t shifted much since my last post; what I’m mainly working on now is securing funding. However I’ve got a clock ticking now, and if I have to start a new job somewhere I will have a lot less time to work on the project. That said, the increase in urgency has narrowed my focus quite a bit. I have a couple specific avenues of funding to tell you about as well as some potential engineering updates in the near future. Hopefully this post will give you a better idea of how exactly I’m managing my time. Last week I spoke to my brother about marketing the platform. His background is in hardware, but he’s been successfully able to build is own business and market his products so his feedback was invaluable. The TLDR is that, without a working prototype, getting some kind of lump sum investment is unlikely without a really good idea. And while I don’t believe my ideas aren’t good enough, they aren’t flushed out enough and fixing that would take some indeterminate amount of time. I’ve only got so much runway before I have to find some source of income.
The alternate route is to get someone to pay me to work on the project under their umbrella. I have a couple possible leads, one is to resurrect my idea of a game about software development built on the platform, the other to use the platform to model Samsung SmartThings devices in a hotel or college dormitory environment.
The software development game is something I want to pitch to LinkedIn. I forget how much I’ve posted about it here so a quick description: it’s a role-playing game that hooks into things like your SCM, bug tracking, and code review systems and as you write software you advance your character. The narrative isn’t fully flushed out yet; I have a setting, character classes, a couple NPCs and some key locations planned, but I’m not sure yet what the story is actually about and which RPG conventions fit the experience I’m trying to create. That last one is important because it determines what kind of management functions will be available, and that’s one of the key selling points. It would take some time to fill in all the blanks, but it’s certainly doable in the time frame I’m working with. I’ve chosen LinkedIn as a target because I feel the idea marries well with what they’re trying to do there, and I have a contact there I can potentially leverage. The contact is an former colleague that built a Sass framework called Compass on his own time and was able to get LinkedIn to pay him to work on it. I won’t speak to him until I have something to present, but his feedback would be really valuable since he’s sorta been through what I’m trying to do. He may be able to cooperate in other ways too. As for how I see this game complimenting LinkedIn’s existing value proposition, I’ll go into that in another post.
The SmartThings idea I got from Fugue, an old EotLer and my former roommate. His company got started doing network installs for hotels, but these days they’re moving into the IoT world. He pitched me a job helping them write middleware that sits between SmartThings Devices and a some sort of management application that lives on the Samsung television sets in the hotel rooms. I’m not too interested in the whole middleware thing, but it occurred to me that to write such a thing the first thing you would want to do is model the devices in some virtual space, and my platform could certainly fill that role. I’m sure they have a bunch of other requirements they’d need to fill, but gabbo could at least be the glue that holds stuff together. Then, once you had everything modeled, you could also use the platform to write an actual game. After hotels, their next biggest customer is college dormitories. Gamification could do wonders there I would think, whether its about energy conservation, or creative decorating, or even college kids coming up with their own devices and mini-games (dorm geocaching anyone?). I’d feel better about this idea if I had a more fully realized game idea I could offer them, but that could be a real time sink and I’d rather focus my time here on solidifying my platform-level ideas.
I also want to dedicate some time in this phase to doing some coding again. A purely CLI interface isn’t going to wow anyone, and while I don’t really think a GUI is really important for the initial rollout of my product, it could help me sell the thing. It’s kinda unfortunate that it takes away from actually writing the game, but business is all about compromise isn’t it? That said, the GUI has some pre-requisites that will be nice to be able to bang out along the way. To really show off the GUI I need a sample area and some color, and both of those require finishing a bunch of stuff in the mudlib like flavors, inventory management, and comms. It’s definitely a stretch goal, but coding the 3d room map would give the pitch a needed “wow factor” element. I’ve never done any OpenGL though and I have no idea how long it’d take me to build.
Another former EotLer, Jason, has offered to let me use one of his servers to host a demo instance of the platform. He’s out of the country right now but when he gets back I’ll have to spend a little time on operations-related tasks. We’ll get what I have up and running and I’ll probably want to write a little code to assist deployment. Having a steady running instance of the platform out there will probably also force me to fill in some holes that currently exist in managing the stateful elements of the mudlib like user management and such.
For the pitches, it all comes down to creating a great PowerPoint presentation, which I’ve never done before. Right now I think my best plan is to blog as much as I can and then start to refine those posts down into a twenty slide outline. My ideas have always been very broad, but twenty slides ain’t much. I may have to outline thirty slides and then cut ten. I’ll want to create a recorded video version of it to send to people, and it’s gotta be slick. I need a camera and decent microphone and I’ll have to educate myself on how to inline video and stuff with PowerPoint. For the engineering tasks, it’s just codecodecode and we’ll see how much I can get done by the time the video’s finished. While all this is going on I have to also update my resume and interview for other jobs as a fallback, so there’s that to worry about too. I’m not even sure what my priorities would be if I did have to go back to work at this point, but that’s a topic for my personal blog.
So that’s where I’m at. Like I said, there will hopefully be more posts coming as I work on this presentation. I’m going to start with LinkedIn since I think I’d have a better shot with them. And who knows, other potential target markets might come to mind between now and when I have to go back to work…I’m not ruling that out. Reminder that with all of this, though, that I’m still dedicated to keeping the platform free and open-source. I’m not exactly sure what kind of deal I would strike with the investors for the implementation-specific code, but I figure I’ll deal with that when it actually becomes an issue.