First.
I’d been waiting to generate some more content for the website – especially some logos or other expensive-looking things to show that we’re putting the force of dollars behind us. But that would be a lie; I am very poor ever since I bought my house. So for now you get a WordPress template and a promise that after I purchase a new AV receiver, a half-ton backyard smoker, a new gaming PC, and a new car, I’ll take what’s left and splurge on some custom embossing for our corporate logo billed at $200 an hour.
So what are we doing here?
Trainwreck is a side-project of mine that lets me exercise some creative and organizational skills outside of my day job. During the day I work in the game industry too – but in a tremendously uninteresting capacity. Rather than bore you with details, I’ll just say I work on game platform technology, and when that technology is working, you don’t even know it’s there.
I started Trainwreck as an entity to which I can attach and protect my IP. Like every asshole out there, I have game ideas – lots of game ideas. There’s a folder on my machine at home with something like 180 1-pager descriptions of games I’d like to make. I have probably 20 or so 10-page write ups and a handful of robust design docs. However, I’ve never released one of my own titles commercially. With Trainwreck I plan to rectify this shortcoming in my resume.
I don’t imagine I’ll sell a lot of product under the Trainwreck label, but I’m optimistic that our games will be different and entertaining enough to generate some buzz and delight some gamers. If I thought I could make a living at this, I’d quit my job in a heartbeat and develop my own intellectual properties full-time. But the games business, frankly, sucks. If there’s one truth that is drilled into my consciousness every day of my life, it is that without a franchise, game investments are some of the longest odds you can take. It’s like playing the lottery – the odds are low, the payouts potentially large, and the stakes are whatever you’re willing to spend.
I believe in ultra-transparency. We’ll be talking about everything we do here at Trainwreck, and we’ll be making up a bunch of stuff we didn’t actually do. We’ll talk about what we’re working on to a certain extent. If there are interesting IPs or concepts that we don’t want to reveal, we’ll keep it to ourselves until the time is right.
Our first project is a game called Arc Tactics. It’s set in a sci-fi/fantasy universe I’ve been daydreaming about since I was 10-years-old. My experiences over the years have refined my inclinations, and the Arc Universe has evolved from childish re-hashing of other material to something that is (hopefully) relatively new and exciting to people. While our first game only gives a tiny slice of the continuity we’ve developed, I hope for it to stand on its own merit of having genuinely new gameplay.
I’ll be blogging about lots of stuff – tech, game business, and production – but my real passion is for design. I’m interested in both the aesthetic and interactive parts of game, and I strongly believe in a stronger coupling between the two. It feels to me like people attach IP to a game or vice versa – I feel that they should be developed sympathetically to one another. This is an extreme challenge considering what games are relative to non-interactive media. I won’t go into detail on this yet. I’m not yet comfortable enough with my processes to start detailing them yet.
I’ll shoot for bi-weekly updates. Once I’m more comfortable with this format, I’ll have a regular update schedule. All the popular guys do it, and it’s what I prefer when I’m reading a blog.