Work Life Update

I feel a little bit bad about neglecting this blog for the past few months, but it's actually mostly a good thing. It's a sign that my brain has been occupied with my job and I've been able to channel my excess mental energy into Project Mind Twist. I'll follow up shortly with a different entry about the games I've been playing lately, but enough people have been asking me how the project is going that I figured I'd just post about it.

As I posted here, Mind Twist is a free-to-play turn-based strategy game designed by Richard Garfield and developed by Mind Control Software, where I work as VP of Business Strategy (a job which is equal parts business development, product strategy, and Mind Twist). Living in Seattle and working for a company in California is not the ideal set-up, but I love the project and I love the people I get to work with so I'm pretty happy all in all. I wasn't sure how much I would like working from home 2/3rds of the time (and flying down to the Bay Area and staying in a hotel the other 1/3). It turns out I'm not a huge fan. I can see why some people would like the freedom to sleep in and not have to take a shower right away in the morning, but I for one prefer going into an office and being able to feed off the energy of all the other people. Working from home I feel a bit out of touch and it's just a little bit less fun. Like I said, though, I love both the project and the people so I'm not giving up the job. On the other hand, I also like my Seattle-based circle of friends, my house, my daughter's school, and my wife likes her job so I'm not moving. Meh. It's not quite ideal, but it's still plenty good.

Working for a small company is pretty different than working for Wizards/Hasbro. Mind Control is very nimble and very talented, but there's always this danger looming a couple of months away that we could just plain run out of money. The way an indie dev studio works is you have one or more "work for hire" projects where some bigger company (usually a publisher) is paying you to make the game they want made and then you use the profits from that game in order to fund the game you want to make. That's the way Mind Control has operated historically, but now in addition to pursuing work-for-hire we've also been looking for investors who believe in our business plan enough to invest directly in the company. Along those lines I'm delighted to report that we'll be closing an angel investment round later this month. It's not enough money to keep the company solvent all the way through the launch of Mind Twist, but it's enough to relieve the stress that comes when you are in between work-for-hire gigs.

As far as the project itself goes, we completed a successful "pre-production" period and we have a prototype that's playable on both iPhone and PC (including one against the other) which we believe demonstrates that the game design is good. I'm actually quite impressed with how deep and re-playable the game is. I mean, I knew it was Richard and I liked it when he first described it, but it's worked out even better than I thought it would. The game has now been in full development mode for a while and we're far enough along to start thinking about how our Friends and Family Alpha is going to work, and whether we can get it up and running before the end of the year. Edge Online did a nice interview with Richard and I last week that you can read here if you want more info about the game.

I guess that's the update. Cool project, cool people, cool job, and I feel pretty good about my role in helping the company raise enough money to bring Richard's latest vision to life.
Posted by Randy Buehler at 11/3/2009 11:17 PM
Categories: uncategorized

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