danielcolomb.com » so not soft

The Gatekeepers

Dan — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:55:41 +0000

As you all know (or i hope you do), a few friends of mine have come together to join forces in the epic battle against bad video games. We’ve formed So!Soft LLC (So-Not-Soft), an independant game studio and have been working with the XNA framework to make games. Actually, lets rephrase that. So far Zach’s been doing all the programming, I’ve been handling most of the web stuff (admining our website, setting up our twitter, and working on a side project for the Frank’s Paintball Team).

So, yeah, the website is getting really close to being done. I hope they like it. I spend quite a lot of time getting the functionality to work, and Zach put in a bunch of time on the CSS (which looks amazing imo).

I’ll let you all know when the site is finished and finalized!

Code Monkey

Dan — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:43:55 +0000

So, as i sit here staring at lines of PHP, I take a glance to my left and what do I see? My boss falling asleep at the keyboard! Oh, maybe he had a late night last night? Maybe he’s just tired this morning? But this isn’t a new thing, it’s been daily for the last month or so.

So being a code monkey, like many of us out there, I take this as an opportunity to amuse myself.

OK. On to other things that don’t deal with the day job. Last month (or last year, har har) So!Soft release it’s first game (Retension) on Xbox Live Community Games. After going through Playtest and Review, the game was finally put up on the market place! Very exciting for us! We’re not sure what happened, but somewhere between Review and appearing on the Marketplace, something broke. Since we don’t deal with that part of the system, we can only assume that something in the XNA framework broke the game. We’ve been assured that the XNA team is working on the situation, but as it’s still the holiday season, i’m sure it’ll be a while. Once everyone is back to work (and snowstorms stop hitting the Seattle area), our issue will be fixed. Even though the game is broken, we’ve had some good reviews from actual users. And we’re not dead last in the rankings! Last time Zach checked, we were 77 out of 100. Not bad for a broken game if I say so myself.

Now it’s the new year, 2008 seems to have flown by. I guess that’s what they call “Life happening to you”. In February I’ll have been at this job for two years. I don’t think I’ve worked anywhere that long. This is also my first non-minimum wage job. It’s not bad here. I could definitely be in a place much worse. The pay is decent, I’ve gotten to know a lot of people, I get along with pretty much everyone, and those I don’t get along with, I tolerate. So, like I said, things could be worse.

Wow, nothing breaks your concentration like when your music changes from Asian Kung-Fu Generation to Iron & Wine. I seriously think my brain skipped a cycle.

First Weekend

Dan — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 15:44:48 +0000

Just finished my first whole weekend at the new place. It’s starting to really feel like home the more i use things and put things in their proper place (like clothes in my dresser instead of in the hamper).

Friday night was Halloween. Zach made me a zombie, his makeup job was awesome! I’ve posted pictures across pretty much every networking site i’m part of, as well as flickr. That night Sean also moved some more of his stuff into the house before I left for the Halloween Party i’d been invited to. Good times had by all i must say. I came home, went to sleep and woke up bright and early the next day for our first So Not Soft meeting.

[Edit]: So Not Soft has also opened it’s bank account. Meaning we don’t have to tie any costs to our personal monies!! YES! [/EDIt]

At our meeting we covered a lot of things dealing with our new game (which i’m not going to go into detail here). Next thing i’m going to have to do is get XNA 3.0 installed on my machine. I kinda forgot on saturday (sorry, zach ). I’ll see what sean and i can get going this week.

Now i’m back at work, bored like usual. Sucks when you automate pretty much everything.

So Not Soft Store is open for business!

Dan — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:45:03 +0000

Our store is now open for business! We finally got our paperwork yesterday making our LLC official! We also got our EIN (aka Federal Tax Identification Number), which means that we can start taking money from victims.. i mean, customers.

*yawn* require caffeine