Sigh, a good day overall, but at times it didn't feel like it. I started by working on the e-book conversion for the Chinese translation to The Intangible Man & Other Stories. This is generally a matter of copying and pasting. Many aspects of Chinese writing fascinate me. I like how the symbol for 'door' looks like a door. I'm also reminded of the insight this eastern writing has given me into the origin of Space Invaders.
Then I was notified that, after 19 years of using their services, my Share-It account has been spontaneously terminated due to the lack of any sales in the past year. This was a sad moment. In 2002, after my large breakdown and considerations of suicide I decided to restart and charge forth with a host of new ideas. I founded IndieSFX to sell sound effects, I started Bytten to review games and engage with the gaming community, and I started Cornutopia Software to finally publish my own games and stop chasing rip-off game publishers, after a decade of chasing them and being disappointed, even abused and threatened by those sharks.
I used Share-It (later known as MyCommerce, Digital River) to sell my sound effects and games, and have sold thousands of pounds worth over the past 19 years, it was really my first taste of a way out, my first period of growth, at the age of 30 having never had any sort of job other than the single-minded pursuit of game development, receiving nothing in return but dashed hopes and theft from fly-by-night publishers. I was programming games as a child, though my first years were experiments in BASIC. Perhaps one could say that from the age of 15 to 30 I did nothing but make games and chase publishers unsuccessfully.
Then in 2002 I published myself online and started to sell games for the first time. My production rate exploded: Breakout Velocity, Fallout, Bool, Yinyang, Outliner and the first version of my music software Prometheus were all developed in 2002. I also founded IndieSFX, the start of my huge sound effect library, bought a £400 microphone and some good recording equipment, and started to review games along with Andrew Williams and other regular reviewers; Steve Blanch, David Simpkins, and Hayden Yale. My biggest hit of a game, Flatspace, was made in 2003, and my last game, Gunstorm II was 2006; so in those 4 years I made a lifetime of PC games.
The games were regularly updated for many years but gradually stopped being supported until 2017 when I was reluctantly persuaded to update Flatspace for Steam. This was ultimately a good thing and I've updated and re-released about half of my games so far, but the older ones remained for sale via Share-It.
My sound effects too sold well. At first on CD because downloads of that huge size were unthinkable back then. I remember posting sets of CDs to Canada, hoping that they would all arrive safely. Gradually the sound effect sales slowed down, but I continue to sell sound effects on third party websites.
But today, without warning or recourse for appeal, my Share-It account was closed and all of my games and sound effect products were deleted. The royalty free music there was itself rather interesting artistically as it represented some of the first A.I. composed music on sale commercially. Of course, I have copies of everything, but where can I upload this? The world isn't interested, however much I feel that it should be.
So today, IndieSFX, a prong of a dream that changed my life, is over, and the day is sad. My games are for sale only on Steam, and about half, including Gunstorm and Outliner, are not available anywhere. At least I updated Taskforce last year, that game at least deserves to be seen.
Of course, I can continue somewhere, but I'll have to work out how. For my games, the logical option is to remaster these for Steam, but that's expensive and time consuming. I probably will, eventually. The sound effects are more difficult to sell as I have no vending platform now.
In work news, I stained a new frame today, the one I cut yesterday for No Good Ideas. I used blue, brown then red stain to create a strongly red-brown hue, then I varnished it. This took me up to 4pm. Then I refined the album art for my new E.P., Nightfood. Here it is so far:
Then I recorded a new take of vocals for Dreams Of You, feeling somewhat pained and anguished by the day, and these came out rather well. I will certainly use them. I've added a few more vocoder parts. This E.P. is about 27 minutes so far. It has a very different feeling to The Myth of Sisyphus. The second, electronic, half jars with the more raw and art-rock first half. I much prefer the first half because it's more unusual and emotional, but the second pop-half might have more instant appeal. The existing Burnout and Plastic Superman songs are worth putting 'out there' at least.
I'm aware that I'm only 3 minutes away from an album-length work, and am toying with a middle interlude - if so I'd like this to be raw and experimental... rocky, fast or slow, I don't know.
