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  Workin It 04:51 PM -- Fri December 17, 2004  

Every few months I embark on a new schedule to make myself work. It always lasts a couple weeks, then sorta fades away (unless some big interruption happens, like a holiday or a trip - then it just drops dead). I always really enjoy it though, especially making up the schedule, which is quite entertaining, putting things in boxes and all. I'm messy and lazy, but I love organization and planning. It's fun.

This latest schedule was started this Monday. I include categories for all kinds of things, not just working on games, for a couple of reasons. Foremost is that I very rarely do any work on marketing or the website or other business things, so by scheduling time for that, I make sure I actually end up doing some. Secondly, I schedule time for other things that aren't business, like chores, playing around with Fruity Loops (my music program), time set aside for "Art" (without requiring what the art is for), and for "Fun Read" (reading fiction) and "Work Read" (reading stuff that will help me in work or in life), and others. I schedule these because if I am left to my own devices, I will just take the path of least resistance: programming and art on a game for 6 hours or so (heavily interspersed with mind-boggling amounts of web-surfing), then crashing and watching TV or playing games the rest of the day. It hurts my overall energy level, probably hurts my productivity, and means I never actually do anything but work and laze about. So scheduling these other activities, which I enjoy but never do, keeps me ... I don't know, more a part of the world or something. Makes me more complete. It's too easy to just lounge around, life is better with a little challenge. I don't know how challenging reading fiction is, but if I don't schedule it, I never make time for it.

So, this schedule is being pretty fun. One thing I got done is visible atop your browser - the pages now have good titles instead of all being called "Hamumu Software: Dumb Games For Your PC" (the home page is still titled that). I also contacted a site about advertising, finished the Supreme patch pretty much (coming soon!), and actually did a chore or two, which may be a record. So it's good. I actually only have 10 hours of the week scheduled for game development (plus 2 more hours for updating old games and 5 hours for working on board games), which is probably much too low, but it's the right thing for now - I haven't started in on a new game yet, and I'm just using that time to patch Supreme. I don't consider the schedule set in stone or anything, it'll change when needed, and it's good that I'm putting effort into some other directions of my life. When I'm in the middle of serious game development, I'll up it to 3-4 hours a day or so (and when I get really into it, I'll be doing it in my off-hours too). If this schedule lasts that long! It has to make it through Christmas and New Year's!

Journals are boring, huh?
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  Happy birthday to me 05:34 PM -- Fri December 10, 2004  

So what's been going on? Well, we're back from the trip, and a large part of the initial return involved cleaning up the house and shipping tons of orders (felt good to ship that many in one day! Except for how horribly much work it was! If I ever succeed to the point were I'm selling 20 CDs a day, I'm really going to need to set up a better system for it). Now things are more over with and back to normal (good pile of orders still though, hooray!). I'll get back to some Supreme updating today, I've got several specific issues to work on there. Also, today Sol will pick the top 50 Winter Wackiness names, and I'll try to get the voting up ASAP. I'm going to make the voting period just a couple days... it's not life or death as to which names get picked! So I don't yet know the official WW schedule, but it should start soon. And the new Supreme patch should be out later this month with luck. That's what's going on.

I've also gotten obsessively into board games (as you may have heard) - and by the way, Chez Goth is not very good - and come up with about a dozen board/card/party game ideas that I really want to do something with. One of them is the fairly obvious choice, Dr. Lunatic Supreme With Cards. Problem is, that's a whole lot of cards! It could easily be done as a collectible card game (like Pokemon or Magic: The Gathering), but I would feel like I was robbing people with the way those games work. Maybe it'd be a basic set and an expansion or two. There are over 200 monsters in Supreme, you know, and I'd like to have more than just monsters in the deck... but can you imagine a deck of over 250 cards? That's 5 normal decks tall! Try shuffling that. Well, there'd be savings with stuff like only having one Roly Poly, and stuff like that, but it'd still be well over 150 monsters.

In general though, I'd like to add non-computer games to the lineup, but I'll have to try out my designs and see if they're any fun first. Then I have to figure out how to get the components made and all! Kinda fun really. Speaking of what I see in the corner of my screen, I better change Yerfdog over, he's still eating leftovers from Thanksgiving. And I need to do a newsletter... gee whiz.
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  Flyin' Free 03:58 PM -- Wed December 1, 2004  

For the first time ever, I've found a place where I can actually use wireless internet for free! It's so cool! I can just walk around our hotel room watching spams download! And it's fast too. This is the second hotel we've had on this trip, and the first one offered "high speed internet" via ethernet cable which was low-speed. This wireless stuff is moving right along, maybe faster than the DSL at home. Close anyway.

So that means here we are in a hotel after spending two nights in the hospital. Sol Hunt has given birth to a 1 pound bouncing baby kidney, and is currently recuperating here in the room. Everything went just great and she's already chipper and bouncy herself, in a dazed, nap-filled, plodding sort of way. So hooray! Both she and her cousin are recovering very well and it looks like it's ideal in every way, not that I enjoyed seeing her in pain.

Hmm, wrong yerfdog's up, but too bad, I can't fix it until next week. I am going to have a ton of CDs to ship out the day after I get home. I'm surprised so many people went ahead and ordered. There's a warning it gives to let you know the game won't ship until we get back, but I guess that didn't deter anyone.

I bought a pile of non-computer games while we were here, because there's a cool game store by the hospital (which you can reach by walking underground - half the city is connected by underground tunnels, because this is cold country). Last time we came I got Carcassonne which is highly recommended (whether geek or not, it'd be great for families), and this time I added an expansion for it, two Cheap Ass Games, and one called Chez Goth which looks interesting. Haven't even played two of those games yet, but I can definitely recommend Kill Doctor Lucky, it's sort of like Clue, only you're trying to commit the murder instead of solve it. I also of course wrote down ideas for 3 board/card games of my own. I tend to get inspired when I can't actually do work. That's about it. The End.
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  01:13 PM -- Tue November 23, 2004  

Well, tomorrow we leave for our trip. So I've pretty much rigged the site up to run itself! Provided I can check email at least daily, which I believe should be quite possible, I can run things like a real business (which is to say, much less responsive than usual, but still within 24 hours). It'll be two loooong weeks. Especially for my poor kitties. Should be business as usual by December 7th. Oh well, here we go! Let's hope everything works as expected. Good luck surviving without me.
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  Also, WoW! 11:44 AM -- Wed November 17, 2004  

I just want to also add that officially starting today I am going on a mini-vacation. You see, World of Warcraft is going to be released early next week. Once it's released, it will cost $15 a month to play. So as you can imagine, early next week will be the end of my WoW career (I am in the beta test, so it's free). So I need to get to it and play like crazy! What an amazing game, and boy will it be influencing Bad Graphics (although you probably won't even be able to recognize any of the influences... they're very different games!). So forget work, somewhat! Time to level up!
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  Still here! 11:32 AM -- Wed November 17, 2004  

I am still alive and still working! I've made a lot of progress on the Supreme patch. It's got a lot of new editor features to spice up levels with, although they're all pretty subtle - you'll really need to be a serious world builder to take advantage of what they offer. But if I'm right about them, they'll give you great new powers to make players suffer in new ways!

I'm also working on some website stuff. I've already (finally) automated the newsletter signup process, but I still have to add a way to actually send to the new automated list. I've also beefed up the ordering process (this is not online yet) to check orders more thoroughly before sending them to me, so that I can feel safe with part 2 of this process, which is at long last having automated downloads. So now when you order a game (on CD or download), you'll get a download link immediately, as well as your CD or emailed download link later. There's another problem with the ordering, which is that it rejects an order any time it encounters a special character (like accented letters), which is common with orders from foreign countries. I still don't know quite what I can do with that, but I'll try to come up with something! The drive behind getting these changes in was actually the fact that at the end of this month, we will be leaving for 2 weeks straight! So I want the orders to be handled automatically. I'll still be checking email, but I can only do that once a day or so, and it's a serious pain. CD orders during that time will be postponed until we get back. There will of course be a notice so nobody is surprised by that!

Why are we leaving for 2 weeks? Not for fun! I will now let you all know that my wife is going to be donating her kidney to her cousin at that time. Really! She's pretty amazing. Of course, once we get back, she's got another 5 weeks of recovery time where the doctor says she's not allowed to lift more than 10 pounds. So guess who gets to do everything around here?
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  And PS 10:59 AM -- Mon November 1, 2004  

Vote here even if you're not American or not 18!

The Hamumu Election 2004

Polls close in 5 days. We're a lot more lenient than the US.
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  Just a reminder 10:22 AM -- Mon November 1, 2004  

If you are a US citizen 18 or over...

VOTE TOMORROW!!!


And don't believe anyone who tells you there's some little rule that means you can't vote. You can. There are provisional ballots, there's election-day registration, and other rules to make sure that everyone can vote (these vary by state - google your state and "voter rights" or something like that to look up the info if you're not registered now). It's really important. Really really important.

I'm not going to try to sway you one way or the other - the important thing is that you place your vote according to what you believe personally! Which of course means you better know all the information you can get. Unfortunately, pretty much every source of information is badly biased to one side or the other, so I hope you've heard lots of things from every side, and you know who you can trust. One place you can probably trust is www.factcheck.org, the site that Dick Cheney meant to point people to in his debate. Unfortunately, it's not a general information site, but rather a site debunking the lies that come from both sides. If you know a site that you think is really non-partisan and informative, post it in the comments!

And just in case you didn't hear me the first time...

VOTE TOMORROW!!!
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  Demo's up! 05:35 PM -- Tue October 26, 2004  

Hey, the Kid Mystic demo is now available, enjoy the first chapter of the game! I've also been playing some of the HH worlds, and they're really good. There are SIXTEEN this year! That's not just a record, it's a blowout. WTG sent me all the worlds, so I just need to pack them up for the webpage. Normally I play worlds all the way through before putting them up, so I can doublecheck they're okay (and be the first to get the high scores...), but this is an awful lot of worlds. I've played a few, and I'll probably have to put them up without playing all.

So with all that junk out of the way, what's left on the Hamumu agenda? First thing is to ship out HH prizes. Lots of people are getting those! You know if you are, since WTG collected the addresses. I'll get that done tomorrow (which may also be when I put up the worlds). Then it's a more relaxing time. I like to take it a little easy after the mad rush that comes at the end of making a game. But in the near future, there's a Supreme patch coming with some new triggers and effects that should further expand your arsenal of wacky level-making, and I'll be getting to work on a new game, very slowly at first, since I'm taking things easy. A new game??

Yeah, a new one. See, here's the thing... every Halloween, I like to make a surprise for you guys, like Pumpkin Pop one year, and um, that's about it. I always try to. Loonyland was supposed to be a Halloween surprise, but it got too big. This year, I got cut off by the trip we had to take to Minnesota, and the intense work of finishing Kid Mystic. I came up with an idea I liked, but it just would've taken too much time. But then I also came up with another crazy idea, and after talking with Sol Hunt herself, she feels that this can take precedence. She demands that someday there must be a Sol Hunt game, but as long as I never say I won't do one, she's fine with it being put off. And she really likes this new idea.

This new game is tentatively titled "Bad Graphics", and is a super original idea. That's one reason I'm so excited about it - this is something people will notice just because it's so unique (and next year, I can enter it in the IGF and maybe get past the preliminaries!). It is also an online game, so I'm very excited about that. You guys will be playing against and with each other and me in this grand adventure (it's an RPG of sorts). It's not coming soon, it's not even really started yet, but it's what I will be putting my effort into once I begin putting effort into things again.

No, Grimbelina will probably never come out.
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  Let the Mystical floodgates swing wide! 06:56 PM -- Thu October 21, 2004  

Okay people, I expect no less than 87,000 Kid Mystic orders in the next two days! Get to it! Please?

ANyway, as you can see, Kid Mystic is available now. There's no demo yet, I'll be working on that when I'm done with this, and maybe after I've had a little break! And have printed up some CDs, since I haven't printed any yet, and with luck, there will be a ton of orders to fill momentarily! But most of you diehard Hamheads know if you need Kid Mystic - if you own the old version of it (and like it, of course), you definitely need the new one. If you like Loonyland, you need it. If neither of those apply, maybe you need to wait for the demo! It should only be a few days.

I'm also back from my attempted trip. As far as running the business goes, it was something of a low-key fiasco. It turns out that a 56k modem does not have the necessary bandwidth to deal with 2500 spams a day. After a couple days, I developed a technique that worked - I logged directly into the server and used a webmail program to go through and manually delete all the spams, 100 at a time. It actually didn't take all that long to do, it was just a pain (and I had ample time to play solitaire while I did it, since each page of 100 emails took about 2 minutes to load). I ended up shipping several orders. No complaints about those yet, but we'll see what happens! I don't know any reason they wouldn't get to their destinations just as well as the orders I ship from here. So I don't know. It wasn't a raving success, but I was able to answer a few customer emails and ship a few orders. It was also frustrating that I only had a short time to do emails in the morning or the evening, so I couldn't reply to anything in a timely fashion like I usually do.

In the meantime, Halloween is fast approaching, and Halloween Horror 5 is on the chopping block, getting tested and ready to go. WTG mentioned 15 entries or so! That's crazy. Sounds like the biggest Halloween Horror yet! Well, I better go start printing out Kid Mystics for the evening rush. There will be an evening rush, right?? Start ordering!
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