Commuting

It's finally starting to hit me how inconvenient it is to start a company in Stockholm (still no plans of leaving Skövde). First of all I'm starting to run out of SJPrio points so I'll have to start paying for train tickets like normal people again soon. Obviously I'll have to buy a one year traveling card if we actually manage to sign a deal and start production; but that's still quite a some time away and the card costs nearly 40k SEK so it's a pretty big gamble to buy it before we know if we'll ever get any money. However before that there will be a number of meetings and a period of working on pitches fulltime, so even in the absolute best case, and if I sleep on a sofa for a week in a row while working on the pitches, I'll probably have to spend 5k on train tickets minimum, and maybe 15k in the worst case; if we make large number of pitches and then give up. I'm not really sure if it's possible save money by buying the tickets though the company either.
Also I can assume that it's pretty hard and expensive to find an office as close to the central station as the old Grin office, so I'll probably need an SL-card as well which is another 700 SEK per month, and it will probably add another 15 minutes or so to my two hour commute. While I'm hoping to be able to have a bit more flexible working hours and do some work on the train, I'm not really sure if that's possible as I'm sure we'll all be pretty damn busy. Also I'm not sure what kind of salary we'll be able to give ourselfs, but I doubt it will be that high to begin with, so right now it feels like all my free time and all my money will go to travels. And that's if things go well.
I kept a brave face during my time Grin as the extreme commute was my own choosing and I felt it was worth it in the end. But right now it feels a bit overwhelming to spend all that money (I haven't even mentioned the 33k I'll be investing in the company at startup) for the chance of working my ass of and spending 4-5 hours a day on a train/subway... but I guess it could be worth it in the end as well...
Anyway... now I'll be heading to the train station...

Epic phone conversations

I recieved some updates about the company today. It seems thing are moving forward; next week I'll be going to stockholm again to discuss the formalities and the bureaucratic aspects of founding the company and then we'll start contacting publishers as soon as possible. Also I had a phone meeting with Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games, today about the cost of licensing the Unreal engine. It was pretty scary, as I get really nervous by telephones in general and don't really have much experience of talking with higher ups in the game industry, but it went pretty well; he seemed like a nice guy and I got a lot of good information. Of course we're still far from deciding anything about an engine... I'm still kindof wanting to go with my own engine even though it's definatly not a very good idea.

Buy Fret Nice!

Apparently Fret Nice is finally released on XBLA tomorrow. Woho! So go ahead and buy it, but don't even think about using the guitar controller. While it's unfortunate that the main gimmick doesn't quite work, I still think we did a pretty nice job, given the circumstances and the short development time.

So anyway; I tried doing some optimisation today and implemented some simple profiler tools, but it's really painful to do profiling on PC; the framerate fluctuates about 30% even when I don't do anything. I still managed to find a couple of things to fix, but I'm still worried about how many enemies I'll be able to have, especially if I want it to run on any computer even sligthly older than mine.

Also the plans of starting up a company are moving forward. I'll be heading up to Stockholm again soon to meet with the old engine guys from Grin and have a look at their new engine. I also recieved a mail from Mark Rein, the president of Epic Games, today and I'll have a phone meeting with him to discuss licencing the Unreal engine. It's pretty scary actually; I was just expecting a generic reply from their sales division...