February Recap

February was an excellent month!

February 1st was my last day at work. I spent the rest of the month getting the business up and running. From incorporation to marketing to accounting there were a lot of things to get out of the way. Frankly, there was a lot to learn. I was starting from zero. I have a number of friends that had gone through the exercise in the past so there are a lot of brains I can pick from.

The task seems daunting at first. But really it isn’t all that hard once that first step is figured out. It is as easy as going to Amazon and picking up the highest rated books on marketing, bookkeeping, and management. I sat down with a few friends to figure out how they had gotten their businesses off the ground. A couple of quick Google searches after that I had a pretty good action plan for the month.

There was infrastructure that had to be built up too. I went with DreamHost for web hosting. They also host my Subversion repository and other data.

In the past, most businesses install an Exchange server somewhere in a back room to give everyone Outlook email and calendar access. I am convinced that this is absolutely the wrong thing to do for almost all new organizations!

Google Applications for Domains provides email, calendar, instant message, and documents for your organization. There really is no need to have a full-time IT person on staff. I recommend intelligent outsourcing of almost everything that is not core to your business and does not bring in any actual revenue. Reading and writing email shouldn’t be a core function of any business.

In the future, I will also get FogBugz on Demand up and running.

I do have a company name and website picked out. Stay tuned. I will be unveiling it soon!

Game Developer’s Conference

I was in San Francisco for a full week in February for GDC. It had been a few years since my last GDC. I stuck mostly to sessions on business and production rather than programming sessions that I had attended in the past. The first two days of GDC were actually the best. Both the Indie Games Summit and Worlds In Motion Summit were very information dense. There were fewer attendees and more tight-knit groups these days. I didn’t even bother with Expo floor this year. I had a quick walk through and that was about it.

I met a ton of absolutely brilliant people this year. I still need to send follow up emails to everyone that I met.

Running

I’m still on track to run the Vancouver Half-Marathon in early May. My last run was 15km. I was able to run the first 10km in an hour. But the last 5km took me 45 minutes. I need to start carrying water and possibly gel packs for my longer runs.

I really need to step up my diet and nutrition too. I still haven’t figured out the correct amount of carb intake. I need to limit my intake to make sure I keep dropping weight while still having energy to power through workouts.

I am fairly carb sensitive. To drop weight, I really have to increase my protein intake and limit my carb intake. Too many carbs for lunch and I start falling asleep in the afternoon. This is probably going to require a lot of tweaking over the next month to figure out what my body actually considers optimal.

What’s Next

The plan for March is to write a lot of code. There is nothing like walking, talking code to actually attract funding and a great team.

I do have a few months of runway for myself. But I’ll have to decide if I want to take on funding, court a publisher, or do contract work to extend that runway. There is actually a ton of government funding to be had through art and heritage programs. There is also a lot of funding to be had for tech startups. I’ll have to explore this further over the next month too.