danielcolomb.com » so!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.

AJAX, you’re so confusing!!

Dan — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 21:33:07 +0000

So, i’ve been building a website for this Paintball team. They seem to do pretty well in tournaments and from what I’ve been told they already have possible sponsors lining up. They want their site ready as soon as possible, but at the same time I don’t want to give them garbage. I want to be able to give them quality software. It’s hard to do sometimes when I’m not even getting paid for it. The deal is we make them a website, and we get free advertising through them, kind of like a sponsorship. But AJAX is being a pain, so it’s easier to just go play eve instead of working..

Maybe i’ll go do that now..

I got the log in system working, so i might as well take a break.. my brain hurts

Buckets of Popcorn

Dan — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:45:59 +0000

It was a lazy day, it was amazing grace, it was a half-a-dozen claymores daisy-chained.

Sometimes Aesop Rock lyrics are like audio cocaine. Not really sure why, but when i hear that line my brain melts a little. I don’t think that me being at work bored out of my mind helps much. Today is Thursday (my Friday) and i really don’t feel like doing anything. I’ve run my reports, i’m updating what i need to, everything else is running fine, and Zach’s working on our interface atm. I’ll probably start working on the Gatekeepers site in a bit, currently there’s not much to look at, it’s all back-end stuff. I’ve just hit that motivational blackhole, where it takes extreme amounts of willpower to do anything but surf the intarwebs.

I can’t believe they’re bailing out the big 3.. i wonder how this will impact our pocket books. I’m still adjusting to living on my own, having to pay bills and all that fun stuff.

Well, break time.

So!Soft is alive!

Dan — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:31:20 +0000

So, you’re looking at the blog of the co-founder and part owner of SoNotSoft LLC. The big day started today as Zach got us registered early this morning. Since then we’ve been doing all sorts of things. Everything from planning what steps we need to take next (like get all our financial and legal things squared away) to what projects we’re going to undertake next (after the games we have planned) to how our website is going to look.

So far i’ve just been working on getting the website set up and running. I’m in the process of installing a wordpress blog for our dev blog, and comtemplating on using e107 for the news, forums, downloads section. I’ve also been thinking about building the whole sha-bang from scratch, but that’s pretty time consuming and i’m sure we’d rather have a prefab site up now, than a custom one three months from now. We can always customize as we go.

So, first thing for me, once everything is installed, is to get the rss_reader on there and ready for download Then from there i’ll start working on other stuff.

That’s all i got for now.