January 9, 2001

Back to work on Jumpman: 2049, business stuff, and something new for me – ADVERTISING!

Something I’ve never really done before – advertising. Yep, I sell a game without advertising it really. Yeah, I plop it down in all the search engines and shareware sites, but, I really don’t do anything with it. Well, with the release of Boulder Panic! 2 DX (the version I’m finally happy with, and after and expansion pack or two, will finally retire the code base for BP!2 CB, TC, DX, etc) I decided it was time to advertise. I have a goal – I want to sell 1000 copies of BP!2 DX. I’m not sure if that one is possible or not – I mean, it IS just an obscure puzzle game. However, advertising is going to help. Mind you it cuts down my profitability, but, sacrifices have to be made…

The cool part of this – while I’m still doing the BP!2 DX expansion pack (which I’ve been promising for 8 months or so now – I keep re-writing BP!2), I can really dig in on Jumpman:2049. SO what’s first up on the agenda? Well, I need a brand new User Interface library. See, one of the mistakes I made with BP!2 DX was that I tried to use the normal Windows abilities within a DirectX environment. Problem – you can’t do that with fullscreen exclusive modes, which get the best preformance (and the game suffers because I can’t add all the whiz-bang effects I’d like to). So instead I’m building me a brand new library to handle windowing, etc. It’s really not THAT bad of a task, and I’m planning on writing this as a very re-usable piece of code that will eventually be put into TDS later. But for now, this is going to be the real ‘begining’ of J’49 🙂

The business it’s self is progressing slowly but surely. Filled out my stuff for Summit / Microsoft (RE: VBA in games), and so they will begin telling the world about the deal sometime soon 🙂 This is a good thing! I’m still behind in many ways – I need to get more information to the management team, etc- but, I’ll be getting on top of it faster now that BP!2 DX is done!

Midnight Ryder
AKA Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr
President, MidnightRyder.Com

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