Blue screen of boredom

I had more hard drive problems this week. This time, I was having problems with files getting corrupted. I ended up spending all day yesterday reinstalling windows and my applications on a new hard drive. It takes forever to get things up and running again, mostly because of slow installs and slow updates. So, I got zero “actual work” done. At least I’m being a little smarter about things now: I’m redesigning my backup system, and I cloned my hard drive after reinstalling everything. Now that I have a clone, it will only take me about 30 minutes to get everything up and running again on a new hard drive.

Well, I was unfortunate enough to break my wrist a few days ago while riding my bike. It’s slowed down my ability to type (i.e. write code), but hasn’t stopped me. My friends told me to take a little time off of work, but I’m not going to.

I saw a story on slashdot recently. The creator of “Minecraft” had his paypal account suspended, and he can’t get his money out of the account. The money was for pre-orders of his game. He started developing the game in May 2009 and released an alpha version of the game the same week. So, how much money in pre-orders does he (claim) to have? 600,000 Euros (roughly $760,000). That’s pretty mind-boggling for one and a half years of work. It’s also a few orders of magnitude more money than I’m earning. (To be honest, my initial reaction to the story was that the number was fake, and it was all a big publicity stunt. After reading a little more about it, though, I think it might be true.)

I’m planning to release financial numbers for my game at some point in the future, but I’ve already suggested that it hasn’t been a financial success. And, it’s not that I need to make a ton of money, like Minecraft, but I at least need to make enough to pay my bills. I guess it’s all feast or famine in the indie game business. I think 99% of us are on the “famine” side of it.

Update, Sept 18: I just got some numbers from the sale that started last month. There was a nice increase in revenue from that, so that’s encouraging!

I just thought this was a pretty cool demo. It’s a 3D world running on the iPad and iPhone. I didn’t know they had such powerful processors. I guess it follows the general computing trend of the past 50 years, though – more powerful computers in smaller packages. Decades ago, computers filled an entire room. Then there was the desktop computer, then the laptop. Tablets and phone devices are just another step in that progression. I suppose the only limiting factor is the interface.

Speaking of the interface, this is next video is a pretty cool tech mockup. Maybe in the future, we won’t be limited to the size of a tablet or smart phone screen. (This video works best with blue-red 3D glasses, but it’s still watchable without them.)

It would be pretty weird to see someone interacting with their computer this way – since they’d be seeing the augmented reality images through some sort of glasses, but no one else would see what they’re seeing.