I realize that I don’t blog nearly as much as I used to. I’m not going to lie and say that I’m going to change that- things are busy!

Firstly, I’m learning a huge amount lately on the recent shift from working solely on my own projects to contracting. It’s something that’s been slowly occurring over the past 10 months, and previously, I did not see myself getting any enjoyment out of working on someone else’s project, under their rules, for their visions.

And I was wrong…

Most likely, what burned me on working for other’s projects in the past was the experiences I had in working on close to a dozen indie projects that never got past the team devolving into immature back-and-forths that usually doomed the team (one of the reasons why I wrote this thread on Garage Games). And let’s not start on working in the IT field- there’s two reasons why IT has one of the highest rates of substance abuse: Bosses, and users. I’d mention vendors, but after a certain trip to Atlantic City in a limo where I almost walked out $2500 richer from the tables (don’t switch dealers when you’re up), I think I’ll let them slide…

It was like this, except without the girls, long hair, cigar...or winnings...

So what happened? Well, I took a contract. I did it for the money, really, and reluctantly, because I was neck-deep in Epic Frontiers and started as an advisor to help get a fellow Indie off the ground. It turned into a year-plus contract that continues now, and helped me cut my teeth on negotiating, dealing with clients, and working on a contract that was far from the kind of games that I envisioned myself working on. But as the project takes shape, you still look at that and say “wow, I did that”. I also got to farm some work out to my Epic Frontiers team for various art and web back-end tasks, which is always nice, especially since they did such great work on my own project.

Some time later I picked up a second client and proceeded to level up my skills on a game that threw a good number of curveballs at me. I learned about stress, crunching for weeks on end until my body literally caved in and got so sick that I couldn’t work at all for two days (says something about crunch-time, even when self-imposed), and how to better estimate time on contracts. I also learned a lot about the Torque 3D engine, especially on the network side, where I basically gutted out the unnecessary parts like Predator.

Pictured above: Network optimization.

So, after a few months, the part-time IT work that I was doing dried up and I was laid off. Three days before Christmas…

Ted, you're job security is what we like to call "fra-gee-lay"...

At that point, I figured it was time and went full time into game development contracting, which is where I’m at now. I work every day (6-7 days a week) out of my home office, and I’m pulling in just enough money to not miss bills. I feel less stressed on most days, and my wife (and I) think that I’m much happier doing what I love.

So what’s next? More work.

Having made the transition, the goal now is to secure my footing by getting contract work done as well as producing more products, both for Torque and for the wider game development community. And some of the tasks on my table look like this:

• Ongoing contract work
• Products (Magnitude Editor, Path Blazer, GUI Packs, Texture Packs, etc)
• Learning Actionscript, Flex, PHP, and making some forays into Flash-land
• More contract and product work

With the Magnitude Editor released last year, I’m working on an update that ports it over to Adobe AIR for greater flexibility in where it’s used, for those who don’t want to buy engine licenses for those on their team who just enter data, and also to reach past just the Torque engine market. And for those who have purchased the original, they will find this version as a free upgrade.

There are some other tools that I have in mind, but foremost right now is a tool for the Torque engines named Path Blazer, with the following features:

• Easy creation of path nodes by extrapolating the current direction of the path, allowing for a single click to produce a point at or near where you want it to be
• Duplicating paths to the left, right, above, or below the selected path
• Path “lathing”. More on this later…
• Re-numbering paths, making it easier to take out nodes from arbitrary areas and retain consistent node ordering
• Setting attributes for every node in a path
• And more…