by Chris Billowsin Business Beller, Mental Mischief1 commentstags: Awareness / Understanding, Blogging, Business Development
2023 is a new year of contrasts for me. While I am feeling positive about my own personal life, I am also very disturbed by the war in Ukraine, the oppression and murder of people in Iran and China. The general state of geopolitics is very concerning and I believe we are heading towards years of cold and hot conflict between the West and the illiberal order. This make me thankful for my good fortune and also sensitive to those less fortunate. Looking back at 2022, I updated my passion project at Heropath by releasing a couple of small incremental demos. I also refocused my attention by closing down some projects and by doing so have made some progress on some ideas that have been percolating with me for decades. I will be slowing down my posts to Journals of Doc Surge to every 3-4 months as I get busy with those projects. Which brings me to some news of what I’ve been working on the past few months and will continue to work on in 2023. These two projects, about Music and Sport respectively. are related in an obvious and a personal way for me, Both are forms of […]
by Chris Billowsin Business Beller, Hobby Heedings1 commentstags: Awareness / Understanding, Business Development, Change of Mind, Personal Resolve, Self Analysis
It has been almost a year ago that I made a commitment to spent time developing coding skills and I’m providing an update about my efforts. I can say that it has been a real joy to feel a sense of progress since I’ve undertaken this new endeavor. Here are the details Here is a pictures of what I’ve spent time at. Thanks to Procrastitracker I am able to share these images of my progress when I started October 11, 2021 up to September 30, 2022: In summary, I’ve spent about 41 hours watching videos and reading about game development, 54 hours planning and writing, and about 63 hours doing actual coding. I’ve done less than 2 hours a week of actual coding. At this rate it will take me years to get to 1,000 or 10,000 hours! This past year has given me six insights: I feel validated about my initial conviction to avoid GameDev because it is engrossing, allot of work, and will take 100s of hours to accomplish anything of merit. While it is a huge undertaking, it is possible to do this in small increments. I now see GameDev skill development being acquired by carving out […]
by Chris Billowsin Business Beller, Playstates Theory0 commentstags: Business Development, Change of Mind, Games Analysis, Personal Resolve
Since I’ve gotten over my scarcity hurdle, I’ve found an increase in creativity for me. This new energy has lead me to refocus on new core interests by closing down projects and renaming others. Below is my announcement of changes: Billows Enterprise – My root website that acts as a starting point for my business offerings. Used to be called Promaginy (08/2004 to 12/2016) and then Billows Cyber Holdings (2017 to 2019). The recent name change reflects a shift to include coaching and consulting as an offering in the future. Billows Cyber Enterprises – My business offerings of web apps and web sites that will replace Cybersidline.com. Also to be closed down will be Fandomnaut.com and EpicStartPage as I refocus to take aspects of those sites for a new web app. Those web sites never worked as well as I wanted and its time to mothball them and move on. Chris Billows Video Games – It slowly dawned on me that that doing things I am passionate about even a little each day gives me increased energy and this applies to my game development offering. I also decided to not get ahead of myself by trying to create a studio. […]
by Chris Billowsin Business Beller, Hobby Heedings0 commentstags: Playstates, Summarizing a Business Organization
With my intention to being doing coding and game development, I got thinking about the definition of being an Indie Game Developer. Indies are distinct from AAA & AA level game developers which are enterprises that do game development so to develop profits for its shareholders. They are value creation machines, driven by passion to create great gaming experiences for the marketplace. Indies also are driven by passion but they approach it differently. I think of them being the single ‘A’ level game developers, with the ‘A’ meaning Amateur. Yet as the game development industry has expanded, so should the definition of what an Indie is. So I believe that ‘A’ level game developers should three sub-categories: A-I, A-II, and A-III. Basically the more money and resources available determines the level. A-I is an Independent effort, A-II is 2-10 people working together, and A-III is 11+ people working together. All of these A level game developers start off unpaid but as they build their product they may carry-on unfunded, self-funded, family-funded, or crowd-funded depending on the scale of the game. AAA The largest sized game developers in the industry employing 100s to 1000s AA The medium sized […]
by Chris Billowsin Business Beller, Hobby Heedings1 commentstags: Awareness / Understanding, Business Development, Change of Mind, Personal Resolve, Self Analysis
It has been just over four months since I made a resolution to start learning how to code. I slowly began to introduce myself to coding concepts using Chris DeLeon’s course ‘Code Your First Game’. I am really enjoying coding! I can see its appeal and how it forces you to get to know how your own mind works. Errors and mistakes are a reflection of perception errors 99.9% of the time. I’m making a concerted effort to stay open and not get frustrated when things do not work. The course had me build some very basic arcade games and culminated in a limited, simple puzzle demo demonstrating the first steps of Heropath. I am really pleased how having a project to work on has given me a focus that I did not have previously. I am now able to take the research and theorizing I’ve been doing and apply it to the roots and definitions of Heropath. Now is the time to adopt a game development engine. I’ve done some research and listened to the feedback of some of my Twitter follows and I’ve come to a decision about which engine to work with. What I’m looking for […]
by Chris Billowsin Business Beller, Hobby Heedings0 commentstags: Awareness / Understanding, Blogging, Business Development
Happy New Year for 2022! Here is a quick review about what I’ve been up to for the past year and where I’m headed in 2022. As I’ve already impelemented in 2021: Promaginy is now my vintage web game website. Cybersideline added a couple of projects with Fandomnaut and Yertunes. Gamenigma was originally going to be my new coding project but then I was able to figure out a way to incorporate lots of my ideas into Heropath. In fact, I experienced a huge synthesis of ideas back in October 2021 which was really exciting and fun. Heropath will be the cumulation of ideas found in Playstates, Tales of Strange Cyberworlds, my passion for crossovers, and many other things. After writing and thinking for many years, a path forward has revealed itself! This is exciting for me because I’ll be moving away from writing and attempt to travel this new pathway through coding. While I will still be updating this blog infrequently, most of my writing on play and games will be moving over to the Heropath’s blog. I’ll be linking to that blog as patterns emerge. So you can expect infrequent coding updates via Heropath and other web projects. […]
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