I had to come up with 111 business ideas for Seth's alternative-mba program this week. The idea was both to make sure we weren't choosing the business we wanted to start just because it was the first good idea we came up with, and also to prove that ideas were worthless because we could come up with a million billion-dollar ideas. There are nine of us, and so that's 999 ideas between us. We are going to take the best of these ideas and publish them all online. Of the 150 or so ideas we publish online, I suspect that 145 or so will be done by someone within the next five years. It's not that uncommon, it's just that everyone tends to think of the same stuff at the same time. That's why hit movies come in pairs.
We did a game as part of Startup Weekend and then decided to pursue it after. Hopefully it will go into beta this week, but holy smokes it turned out to be a lot more nuanced than I ever imagined.
Game programming is some of the most satisfying code you can write outside of coding up your own operating system.
It's real time, lots of subprocesses that you have to schedule properly to keep the game ticking along at a playable pace, all kinds of interaction between objects and if you're 'lucky' a good bit of math and 3d stuff.
I have a subscription to Game Developer magazine. It's a typical industry magazine. Very heavy on the advertising and PR, with an occasional high quality article. They sometimes offer free subscriptions, and if you search around you might find a sign-up form. They make their money off advertising, and they seem to be more interested in increasing their readership than collecting subscription fees.
Hit movies come in pairs because the big studios try to leverage each others marketing budgets. You really think that nobody thought of an asteroid movie until Armageddon/Deep Impact?
It's under NDA, so I can't do a day-by-day blog of everything that gets said. However, I'll certainly write something up toward the end of the experience.
We do have a public group blog though, which you can find here:
