Omni-Mad – News

While bootstrapping has a lot of advantages like:

• being independent from outsiders/investors.
• being worry free, since you are not burning through a fixed amount of money.
• being able to adapt to changes by changing milestone dates and contents.

It has also some (major?) drawbacks like:

• the development coming to a grinding halt, when your “paid for” workload is getting high.
• being able to change milestones. (The “just by one day”-syndrome.)
• having no one to ask for the 500 bucks you need for the music or font or whatever.

All in all we still stand by our decision to do this without outside investment.
Even if it means it will take a little while longer.

And sorry for the lack of updates,
but my “paid for” project is in crunch mode…

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Yesterday we decided to put “Crazy Air” on hold.
That does not mean that it has been axed completely.
It just means we’ll stop the active development to focus on other things.

Development on Crazy Air started early in 2008
and the world changed a little bit since then.

We don’t consider any effort put in the project so far to have been wasted.
In the coming days we’ll add a bunch of posts about what went wrong, what went right
and what we earned by workin in Crazy Air for nearly 3 years.

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Also the big changes really did set us back for a while
they actually made is stronger in the long run.

In August we did as small 48h challenge and created a game from scratch.
We didn’t have a designer on board, so it is a little … confusing,
but the point was to prove that our framework is solid.
And solid it is.

There were no major flaws and implementing the game logic was actually a lot of fun.

September was a bit slow again, since I switched my day time job and had to move to Berlin.
I don’t have a permanent place to stay yet and switching from hotel to hotel makes consistent development harder than necessary.

On the bright side: I’m doing a port of a really cool game right now.

Update:
I almost forgot to mention it, but:
The framework has been backported to windows,
so finally giving our artists and designers test versions they can actually work with is possible again.

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This part shows some sample code how a dialog is loaded
and added to the dialog hierarchy.
We usually try to keep the hierarchy flat,
but sometimes its cleaner to use sub dialogs,
so the possibility is there.

definition = g_resourceManager.getResource< UIDialogDefinition >( "yesno.odlg" );
YesNoDialog pYesNoDialog = new YesNoDialog;
pYesNoDialog->createFromDefinition( *pUIElementCreator, definition );
pRootDialog->addChild( pYesNoDialog );
g_resourceManager.releaseResource< UIDialogDefinition >( definition );

(Note: I omitted the asserts to improve readability.)
No magic going on here:
Load the definition (resource) from a file.
Create the dialog object.
Tell the dialog to use the definition.
Add the dialog to the tree.
Cleanup.

That’s all.

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Yes, there has been a serious lack of updates lately, but that doesn’t mean we vanished.

Bad news first:
- Steffen, who is along time friend and was one of our candidates, decided to pursue his own targets, in his own way and time. We still stay in contact and are more than happy to consider his feedback, but for the time being he will not be joining us.
- “Mr.X”, one of our silent funders, has also left us due to some personal circumstances. While this is a serious blow in budget and business expertise, we fully understand his reasons.
- The acquisition of office space failed. We had some good candidates, but in the end we decided that none of them was really a perfect fit, so we are still looking. (Maybe the Gamespaces.de initiative will help us.)

Good news:
- A lot of development took place behind the scenes.
- V0.8 of CrazyAir has been finished, just slightly behind schedule.
- Looks like we have new project and with it a new developer. (More on that later…)

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