If you’re one of the dozens and dozens of people who has contacted me recently, then I beg your indulgence a bit longer. The procedural city project captured a lot of attention. It wound up on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Kotaku, Flowing Data, BoingBoing, a cross-section of various blogs, and even Digg. (Although true to form, Digg managed to scorn the original link to my site and then embrace one to a different site, days later. (Someone sent me an email explaining the malfunctions and social gaming going on behind the scenes at Digg, but that rant will have to wait for another post.) Still, this follows Digg’s usual pattern of picking up on news that is both late and wrong, and then acting as a spawning pool for a “discussion” that would be too stupid for YouTube.)
This surge of attention brought in a flood of project invites, feature requests, programming suggestions, bug reports, criticisms, business proposals, code snippets, collaboration proposals, and fan mail. As an example: I have requests from three different indie bands who want to use footage of the city builder in their music video / stage performance.
Keeping up with my day job, the Pixel City stuff, my column at the Escapist, my webcomic, and this website proved to be too much. Managing a large slate of projects is a lot like juggling: If you drop one, you’re probably going to drop them all. I dropped everything for a bit this weekend and went for 48 hours straight not producing anything for anyone. And it was awesome.
I’m going to idle along for a couple more days, meeting my business obligations (day job, Escapist) and let everything else slide for a bit longer. Better this than burnout.
Anyway, if you’re waiting for me to get back to you, I apologize for the delay. It’s in the queue.
Grand Theft Auto Retrospective
This series began as a cheap little 2D overhead game and grew into the most profitable entertainment product ever made. I have a love / hate relationship with the series.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
Denuvo and the "Death" of Piracy
Denuvo videogame DRM didn't actually kill piracy, but it did stop it for several months. Here's what we learned from that.
Mass Effect Retrospective
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
Bowlercoaster
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
Make sure to play some L4D during your stay from burnout.
Good man. Takes time to post that he’s taking time away from posting. That’s the spirit.
That’s what you get for being a good guy. ;)
Anyway, Kotaku had a link showing Rock Band2 with the L4D
survivors.
Look it up!
TF2 Sniper/Spy update, comes out this week, Shamus! Make sure you budget plenty of time to be killed without ever seeing your attacker!
Better that you take a step back than tumble down the cliff.
Every time I have released free software, I end up dedicating more time than I ever planned to spend on it after release. Looks like this is especially true in your case, ’cause you released something really cool.
I was worried something happened to you. Nice to know you’re still here, even if swamped in praise/criticism. Take a break, then come back to us.
I saw the post on Kotaku, and people were totally unaware of the details behind it. They thought it was a professional deal, and were salivating about an MMO using this kind of technology (as if it’s a new invention).
To be honest, I’d like to use this for games I want to make, too, but it’s hardly revolutionary. Just really really cool. :D
I look forward to a rant about Digg.
People still use Digg? It’s nothing but noise.
Well I’m sure I speak for everyone here, who can now say…
“I read his blog before he was uber-famous!”
Enjoy your rest Shamus, so you can remain on top form!
I read some of the comments on Kotaku and I think it broke my brain. I’m to scared to go and look at the other links now.
I rather liked Burnout 3. : P
Anyway, I understand completely.
Shamus: YOU ROCK!
(digg: I quit you years ago, and I never looked back. Guess why!)
Yeah, that kind of thing is why I don’t read comments on sites. Well … except for communities like this one, of course, where I can be sure of a relatively high signal-to-noise ratio.
Shamus, you rock!
The only Digg I can handle is the Digg Reel. And that’s just because (a) someone is wading through the dross on my behalf, making it a meta-Digg experience and (b) it’s a TiVoCast that automagically manifests on the DVR, a zero-effort event on my end.
Anyhow: very glad to hear that you’re still kicking, Shamus. Count me among the “concerned that we hadn’t heard from you in a while” set. Here’s to hoping that you find your pseudo-respite as cathartic and battery-recharging as possible!
Shamus, while recharging the battery you may enjoy this HL2 mod – it’s very… sad (in a good way).
I mean, they loved it at RPS, so it must be good, right? ;)
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/05/15/touched-by-the-hand-of-mod-dear-esther/
Congrats on your newfound popularity. I hope you can turn it into something worthwhile and profitable.
You cool Shamus. I was also among the “where did he go? Is Shamus ok?” group. I agree on the need to occasionally drop all the additional pressures past the minimum and relax once in a while. I’ll be glad to see you back and happy soon. :)
Glad the project brought you some publicity, Shamus. Well done.
The hubs and I were talking this morning about Shamus being MIA. Glad it’s a good thing instead of a really horrible, tragic thing although I kind of figured since there were some twitters yesterday.
I hesitate to call this “new-found fame” though as I really thought DMotR had already cemented your fame. Either way, ‘grats on your new project launching to such success. Not bad for an indie coder that didn’t even make a whole game, huh? Kind of gives me hope for the whole indie dev scene.
Maybe Shamus needs to get an agent?
I knew that RPS blogpost looked familiar!
Kudos, Shamus.
Shamus,
Good for you! EVERYONE deserves a break sometimes.
Isn’t it wonderful how a week-long-project can turn out so unexpectedly well?
Anyhows, enjoy the break!
Never went to Digg. Just know it as that button under some blog posts. Now I’m glad I ignored it.
Hope this new attention turns into cash flow for you somewhere down the line. That can’t be bad, right?
Did you hear that William Gibson, as in William “the man who coined the word ‘Cyberspace'” Gibson, linked to your youtube video in his twitter feed?