My new friends at EO, I bring you profound news about a personal venture that I have officially put into motion today.

During the last week, I have drafted a business plan and secured a generous investor to help me establish my own independent game development studio.  Today, I put in my formal resignation as Senior Artist at Mass Media / THQ.

I will begin, after a two week vacation in Spain, to develop pocket-games for X-Box Live Arcade and PC in earnest, beginning with two PC only projects (developed in GM) that I will sell via digital distribution and on-demand-publishing.  These two projects will be submitted to Microsoft for consideration of a grant to port them to X-Box Live Arcade via XNA Studio as well as SONY and Nintendo (though, those last two consoles would depend on a more aggresive level of support.)

I hope to be solvent within the first five to six months.

This is an exciting opurtunity for me.  One that I want to document on EO to share the experience with in hopes to inspire all of you to seek out the career that you truly want.

I have only one personal request of support from the EO community.  I would like to know if the community as a whole would be interested in acting as informal quality assurance for my projects.  Those that volunteer to help with closed beta testing will ultimately receive complimentary copies of the final games and possibly small cash bonuses (I'm not promising anything until I'm solvent-- but the possibility will be there.)

Ultimately, as gratitude for the warm welcome you've all given me, the EO community will always have access to complimentary or discounted copies of my games.

Thanks... and here we goooooooo!!!

Wow.

Well, if you need anything, you know who to ask. :D

That's a very bold and inspiring move. I'm definitely up for beta testing (when I feel that my input is relevant), and would like to wish you the best of luck. Although I'm sure you won't need it.

This is the second time I've seen a professional jump off the big industry to become a solo developer using GM. Steve Ince, who's works include Broken Sword and Beneath A Steel Sky did so with Mr Smoozles Goes Nutso. Dunno if he'd have any valuable experience, but maybe you could be able to get some useful information out of him (via his blog or an e-mail).

Oh, and is any of the games you have posted on the forum a possible candidate for a commercial product?. Yeah, I didn't think before I wrote that :P

way to go duuuuuude!

you beat me to it by some months - but i'm not far behind.

i'll be rooting hard for you, for surely.  definitely keep me posted :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

That sounds ace. Good job duder

Wow. This is wonderful - good luck with your studio!
I'm definitely interested in beta testing for any of the future games you'll be creating.
Using GM for the games... this is bound to bring a good deal of attention to it - always a good thing.
One thing I'd like to know, however, is how exactly does one port a GM game to X-Box Live Arcade? You mentioned XNA Studio, is this another set of tools with a language to rewrite the game in?

XNA Studio is Microsoft's C# game development suite.  I'll be committing a certain portion of my time to training up in C# and XNA Studio with the goal of being fully proficient with it within the next four months.

By porting, I mean simply that-- rewriting the game within XNA Studio so that it is ready to compile for both PC and X-Box Live (one development, two compiles.)

Very good luck to you... maybe someday, if I ever need an "in", I'll give you a call... :P

Unofficial quality assurance sounds great. So are you going to be working on these games solo? If so... well, sounds daunting, I hope it goes well.

btw, for those interested, garagegames has developed an xna toolset that is very very similar to game maker, called the torque x builder.  this toolset lets you create games that run on both pc and xbox360.

here's the full scoop:
http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque/x/features/txb

and here's the direct link to the demo download page (the demo lets you toy around with the toolset for 30 days):
http://www.garagegames.com/products/255/#features

this toolset is something that i've been researching for quite a while now.  it's very promising.  it has much of the same user-friendly interface features of game maker, and even adds some of it's own rad perks.  one example, you can directly scale/rotate/etc. objects in the room after you've populated them (which dictates their starting transform at runtime).  another example, they have a wicked particle fx setup that lets you create and store particles in containers that you can actually see running in the editor.

i recommend you check it out.

TorqueX always baffles me when I try to research it.  It's like I can't get any clear answers other than its feature set.

Does it handle 3D?  Why all the different applications needed?  What's the difference between their different applications?  It just boggles me.