Afternoon Update – Weds., May 21st, 2014

Folks,

Happy Hump Day to you all! It’s been crazy busy at CSE over the last few weeks, with the usual mixture of the good, the bad, and the ugly. Fortunately, the good has greatly outweighed the bad and the ugly, so this will be a mostly positive update. As is my way, I will start with the negative stuff before the positive stuff.

I was mostly out of commission last week (at least game wise), due to some in and out of office stuff (nothing tragic, fortunately), but after a few days relaxing, I’m back and catching up with the mound of stuff Tyler has put on my to-do list (25 items, which is why I hate going on vacation), all of which I need to do before the streaming event. We also had the usual amount of lost time here, due to other folks’ illnesses, flooding, and now the loss of air conditioning in our office for the last two days. Since I don’t think anybody wants to see videos with me sweating like a proverbial porcine, that might delay things a bit. And that is a good lead-in for the update on the streaming!

We are still working like crazy trying to get everything done, but I’m not confident we will launch the BSC event on time. Once we are 100% sure of either launch or delay, I’ll let you know. We weren’t kidding when we said that this event was going to be chock-full of stuff. Well, getting that all in place before the event takes time, and we do have a game to make too!

Now for the good news. First, the streaming event will have more goodness than originally planned. We have a really great announcement to make during the event, one that I hope our community will be quite excited about. Now, before anybody starts worrying, no, Facebook didn’t buy us for $2B, $2M or even bus-fare out of beautiful downtown Fairfax, Va. The announcement has nothing to do with investment, M&A, etc. but it is one that has made us very happy here.

We have also added some additional interviews to the calendar, and it’s looking like our dance-card will be quite full for the streaming. Plus, the third of four new programmers has joined our team. We will do a formal introduction update for him and our other new team members later this week, but in the meantime, let’s just say that he is a wild and crazy guy and no, it’s not Steve Martin.

Financially, things are going very well. We are almost halfway to our next stretch goal, and spending is right on track. We are getting close to our move-over (we are just moving down the hall) date, so the office won’t seem like a gold seller’s sweatshop. Finally, work continues apace with the game and the store. Our IT guys have been beating the store to death with their sticks, and our new web design guy has been working with Charles and our Backers to make the site better and better. I think you’ll like what you see when we open it to even Backers for testing.

As for the game itself, well, we’ve made a lot of improvements and have a lot more coming over the next two weeks. Hopefully, we’ll have a test at the end of the week that will highlight some of them. We will also send out the first bunch of invites this week to Backers, who we will upgrade to Internal Testing access for free.

BTW, Tyler asked me to apologize to the Community for the lack of a Producer Letter this month. While I told him it wasn’t necessary because frankly, he’s been trying to do too many jobs at once, he still feels guilty about it. He’ll have one ready to go along with the streaming event, however. So, don’t be afraid to say “Apology accepted, Producer Rockwell,” on the forums.

As per above, it’s been crazy busy around here with the normal workload. Now, having to integrate a handful of new people all in the same month comes with its own challenges for a studio our size. It is nice, however, to see the new faces (even if a couple of them are familiar faces) around the office. We still have a couple of openings for more experienced programmers, but the team is rounding out and getting into shape. Once the four new programmers are fully integrated into the team and the codebase, I expect we will begin to pick up the pace rapidly.

As always, everybody here at CSE thanks you for your support, and we look forward to killing you in the game in the not-too-distant future. 🙂

-Mark

P.S. To give you folks a hint at how busy our schedule will be, I have included a blurred-out photo of part of the schedule.