Ironwood Omnimedia

It may surprise many people to know that Ironwood is not a full time endeaver. In fact, this labor of love by the development team is  more on the level of personal projects. There is no full time paid staff. Everyone, including myself and co-founder Willie Santana, are royalty paid. We have what most would consider day-jobs. My day-job pays the bills, supports my family, and allows me to develop our products without the dictation and distraction of earning enough money to make the next product. The benifit of this system is that we are not hampered creatively by sales. The downside is that progress is not as fast as what could be if we were able to commit our full time efforts to these projects. At most, lately, I can contribute 15-30 hours per week on a project. Sometimes, outside forces, such as overtime required of my day job, or complications and diztractions in my family and personal life can dwindle these hours even further.

This is by no means any kind of an excuse as to our slow turn around time. It is more a window into our lives. Development of any project is a personal effort. When creating content you are inevitably going to be influenced by your world. For myself, I am motivated by my family, but it has little direct influence on the content so much as my effort to provide the best content I can.

This week, I have been suffering from a back injury. This has been going on for a few weeks, but lately my injury has been progressively more intense. Even sitting here, typing this enjury, my lower back begins to throb. Furthermore, my youngest daughter is sick with a stomach virus. She being just over a year old, and already a special needs child, there is some stress as to the signifigance of her sickness. My wife and I, and even to an extent, my other two children have worked together to share the burden of helping our daughter and to carry the load of the housework and other responsibilities that my back injury have hampered on my own part.

I have continued my work on modern sagas. Work is much slower, but it continues. Medication and therapy are helping my back. My daughter is on her third day of being sick. If her condition does not improve by tomorrow, we will have her back at the doctors to see where to go from there.

I continue to work, though on light duty, at my day job. We, as a family, press on. But a labor of love must take lower priority to the daily responsibilities of life.

The good news is, I grow ever closer to the light at the end of the tunnel I see as the finnished player’s guidebook. With luck, the bulk of the book will be sent to the testers by the end of the week. The testing groups I work with on the weekends has been on hold due to my injury and personal issues with some of the players. But, I have seen very little that requires adjustment from them. This is a good thing. It means two things:

1. The rules follow fantasy well enough, with the modern additions, that it is the same game as intended and that the testers, familiar with Fantasy Sagas, need little help with interpratation and clarifications.

2. The game, new stuff to be exact, works. This means I have little to no adjustments to make. There are personal suggestions, but these are based on opinion, rather than need. Opinions are not uniform. So one player wanting something to work one way is often seen as not needed or contrary to the game as it is. I try to find the best way to incorperate all ideas and suggestions though, but also try to keep in mind the ultimate vision of the game line itself.

Besides, who knows best how the rules will need to work for further additions (such as Sci-Fi Sagas) than the guy who has to write the designs?

Happy Gaming!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Developer Blog, Modern Sagas Development Log. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.