It’s been a busy non-Fangamer-related week, hopefully one of my last; been finishing up prior obligations and doing lots of thinking/organizing in my head. I’ve got some information about my goals/plans for this coming week, choosing between Ruby and PHP, and collaborating on a Fangamer logo, but first a preview of some of the excellent banners that have been sent in:
The Banner Contest has been updated with another 12 entries, though I think the tide has finally stemmed! There are still 44 banners to post, though, so I may be making several more 12-banner updates :)
Developers, developers, developers…
Ryan and I have begun to get the developers gathered up, so if you’re interested, please be sure to send Ryan a private message on the forum (or just leave a comment in his Calling All Developers post).
We’re currently debating the merits of Ruby (Rails) vs PHP (Cake). It’s a very difficult decision for us — most of us have experience with PHP, but we’ve also read/tinkered/used Ruby+Rails enough to know that we really like it. Ryan is currently doing some speed tests to see what kind of performance we can expect, so I’ll let him provide the rest of the information about that.
Business Planning and Logos
During my conversations with the staff/investors on IM and the forum, I find myself repeating a lot of things about Fangamer; I haven’t been very good at providing a consistent picture of whats in my head, so this week I hope to sit down and write up a pseudo-business-plan. No useless ‘predictions’ about potential profits or 5-year cashflow or any of that junk, just a document that helps solidify my hopes/plans/justifications for Fangamer so that the staff and investors understand what I’m doing. I sometimes get a feeling that half the staff thinks I’m crazy for doing this, so this document will either make them say “Ohhhhh, that makes a lot more sense” or “I sure can call ‘em”. Either way, people are excited/interested, so that much is good.
Fangamer Logo Mockup
X-Play Logo…DOH!
On the design front, we’ve started a group-brainstorming session to come up with the official Fangamer logo. Jon (Jonk) is going to be sitting down and hammering out a few mockups sometime in the future, but the group effort has already been good/rewarding, as it confirmed my fears that my quick/dirty d-pad logo had already been thoroughly used elsewhere in the gaming world, including a show called X-Play. I’ve never watched it before, but I’ve heard no good things about it. On top of that, not only did they never mention the two Anthologies we sent them, they didn’t even take the time to thank us. Not cool, dudes :(
Next Week, the Show Begins!
I’ve been finishing up a lot of prior freelance/design obligations, so this coming week is going to be way more active than the past week was. I’ll probably be updating this blog every other day to keep myself on task. I’ll post my goals in public here, in hopes that I’ll keep pressure on myself to meet them:
- Get an appointment set up with the lawyer and meet with him before the week is out.
- Drive around, shake hands, and speak with a few CPAs and decide on which one I’m going to hire
- Get a mockup finished for the individual forum topic-listing pages.
- Get a mockup finished for the individual topic post-listing pages.
- Pseudo business plan
Whew! Wish me luck :)
Trust me, you never want to watch X-Play. The “gamer” in you will die a little each time you do.
Also, I’m so glad you liked my banner. :D
Iam also glad you like my attempts
of the two I submitted I like the second one better personally ( not the one above)
Hey, there are worse shows out there than X-Play. Like, all of the other programming on G4 for starters.
ManiMani’s got a good point. You could be watching COPS 2.0