LENSFLARE GAMESLLC

First Post

12 May 2016

First off, welcome to the blog! It's been exactly a month since I quit Chef to go full time writing games and (as the few people who were paying attention know) I promised that I'd post something about that "soon." So here it is... Only a little overdue.

So, yeah, I'm transitioning to doing games full-time as Lensflare Games. It wasn't the easiest choice — while I've been thinking about doing it for a while and the two games already released by Lensflare are selling a bit (well, one of them is, anyway), they're not doing well enough to actually pay the bills. I've only got a limited amount of time to try and change that before the funds run out, so... There's some risk here. Worst case, though, things will probably be okay; I'm not going in debt to do this or betting anything critical on this succeeding, either.

I suppose the thing that gives me some optimism is that I have a much better idea of what the market is like and what I want to do than when I started. The flip side is, I have a lot less latitude in what I can do; back when I first wrote TSC, everything was still a hobby and I could just try things out and see what stuck (main lesson learned? Mobile ain't exactly a great market for strategy). So, it's good and it's bad — I guess we'll see how things go.

A Bit About Technology

If you're interested in how the sausage is made (i.e., how I maintain the site and this blog), it's all available on GitHub: you can see the software (i.e., Loki) I used to build the site, and you can also see the source code for the site itself (and this blog).

I actually spent a couple weeks building Loki to get the web page under control before I wrote this; over time the site (and especially the online manuals) had kind of gotten to be an unmaintainable mess. It was also a bit of a relaxation exercise for me (since I find coding calming) and I really needed the break. So, anyway, that's a thing that happened. Maybe somebody will even find it useful.

Teh Future

Next time, I'll talk a little about what I'm working on right now.

Tags: lensflare, web development

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These are Doug's bloggish thoughts on game development, specifically on the games he's writing for Lensflare, or on Lensflare-related topics more generally. Or whatever he wants to write here, really, but those are the sorts of things to expect. Doug has strong opinions (loosely held) about many things — he could claim that he doesn't speak for Lensflare Games, but that'd be silly considering that (for all practical purposes) he is Lensflare Games. Still (for what little it matters) he's not always wearing that hat here. And yes, this is an actual picture of Doug (okay, not really, but the story behind it is too long to go into right now).

This blog doesn't currently support comments (mainly because most of the people reading this are probably spammers and/or close friends and/or indulgent family members), so if you'd like to comment on anything here, send Doug a note via email or ping him on twitter. He's always happy to hear from people, especially when they want to talk about games.