Chewy Software Part 2: Spinning Tales, Spinning Wheels

After I got my dotcom web design job (Calypso Systems, LLC), it was difficult to keep the nascent game company rolling along. Meeting for one day weekly isn't really enough to get anything meaningful done. Further, the goal of producing a playable game demo seemed somewhat remote. There was some immediate attrition in the ranks as a result of this drifting. We lost one artist and our two programmers as they left for school and jobs in other parts of the country. What remained was your erstwhile author, Tony and the programmer.

We had no shortage of cool ideas. Tony and I had pushed away from the generic fantasy setting that we had started with towards a more "Bio-Mechanical", Sci-Fi universe. The result was that we had pages and pages of brilliant drawn art from Tony. Due to the size of the team and our limited time commitment, we began to assemble a very limited demo. You could walk around. That was about it really. The character art was lifted from "Diablo" as a place holder.

Meanwhile, my training in graphic design from my job began to pay off. I got better and better with Photoshop, and began to pick up some 3d Studio skills. Leveraging my Photoshop and web programming experience, I was able to do some nifty things to keep the project rolling. I made a level editor in JavaScript that could output the primitive tile-based maps that we were using in the game through a palette / point and click interface.

This is the name of the game in keeping a micro-business project running. Being able to do multiple roles while picking up the skills you don't have yet. Since I had composed more music than we would ever need done within the first month, I concentrated on picking up the art skills that we needed to turn Tony's drawings into in-game art. Thus, what we lacked in team size and skillset I tried to compensate for with youthful enthusiasm and lots and lots of training.

After a year had gone by, we were really no closer to our goal. The programmer's company didn't seem interested in picking up the idea. Further, we had a crippling notion that the game needed to be "perfect" before we could move on. The Great was indeed the enemy of The Good.

Then the dotcom bubble burst. My company, Calypso, was owed almost a million dollars from clients that could not or would not pay up. I was at a crossroads: figure out how to turn this weekend project into a viable full-time business or move on.