So much to read, so much to play... So much concept work to do.... Oh well, books and games will just have to wait. One of the things i'll actually have to plan out is how the company will work, i want it to be different... I want people to be able to work from home, in their own time. Terms being that they'd fill some quota of total work hours monthly (or exceed it) & get an hourly rate. There are a few problems with this i can see, one being that i'd need some sort of guarantee that they're working when they're "signed in". Another is that all game files would be floating around on internet-connected servers, meaning hackers could access it and leaks are more of a risk (i don't mind this much though, slap a bit of NDA on employees maybe).
Why would i have a different model like this? Well, i want to create a job that little broken me could do, a job that doesn't require me to have a certain sleeping pattern, a job that will pay me for the amount of work delivered rather than for just being at work. I'm not going to expect my future employees to be capable of things even i am not!
Thinking about that, i think one way i can make sure everything goes smoothly would be to hire like 3 or 4 people to work at different times, so that there's always be at least one member of management online so that employees could ask them questions instead of asking me directly. Of course asking me directly would be best but if we don't have regular work hours there's no guarantee i'll even be awake (of course i'd take phone calls in emergencies even if i'm asleep). Basically 3 or 4 people that don't mind signing in and out of work at specific hours and share and understand my visions and goals. That would be their primary assignment, to be able to answer employee questions about what exactly to do, or do next. Secondary assignments could be things like community management (forum & wiki moderation & stuff), producer (make sure the programmers aren't stepping outside the boundaries of original design goals), designer (pretty ideal, if they're a part of the design team then they know what we're trying to make) or things like that... That's one problem possibly solved, and i think it would pay off to allow people to work at the times they choose and from home. There's a chance it'd increase productivity since people choose their own break hours and stuff, the most important part would be to make it blatantly clear how many hours more to work for the month to get the "minimum hours", and number of hours to work daily to reach these by the last day of the month (a number they would avoid raising)
One thing i'll (FOR SURE) do before i'll start trying to raise a company is make a detailed roadmap of everyone to hire, and every task to finish before i do so. Inevitably with how society works today i'll need to have people working on specific hours (like support) but to my great luck, most people are ready to work during specific hours.
Think i'm getting ahead of myself? Thinking ahead is NEVER a bad idea in situations like this, no matter how early it might seem. And if you haven't noticed, practically everything i've done over the last month is think ahead. That's what concept work is for!
But before i even start working on "company design" game design is going to come first ^__^
Today i really badly want to get down the core functionality of articy: draft. Luckily i have a good idea of how the interface works by now, and they have demo projects to show me examples of how to use the program. It's a matter of time before i get this down. This "needs" to become a tool i'm comfortable with, a tool that boosts my productivity. It's already a tool that (massively) boosts my "precision" with the concept.
I was pretty tired today since i did not get good sleep, but i think i managed to get a nice grip on Articy Draft. I surfed through and seemed to completely understand all 3 demo projects. To be honest this is really simple and straightforward, i would've caught it on the first day if i hadn't slacked so much. (Scolding myself here >_<) but well, to just look at the bright side, i think it's a good thing i'm not rushing or getting ahead of myself too fast. Until i've actually got people working with me it's important that i do things at my own pace and to my own ideas of "perfection".
I had lots of time today to finish writing my .txt documents and what's on the wikia into articy, but i didn't... Cold feet? i think not! i'm going to blame it on being painfully tired. I actually feel very much at ease and motivated everytime i look at articy (it's the color scheme.) but i didn't work today. at least not yet when i end this log.
I need to do something about my sleep, even if i used melatonin last night i didn't fall asleep when i wanted to and i woke up way too early. Right now it's hard to sleep though, due to my nature i always feel too warm at temperatures others are usually going to be comfortable with (like underneath my duvet) and i have a hard time lying still. But the other problem is that it's winter in Iceland, and so all limbs sticking outside of the duvet (seeing as i'm in a garage will be cooled to levels that most certainly aren't healthy and could kill me if the rest of my body wasn't warmed up (quite literally).) Heater keeps me sweaty and wakes me up regularly, not to mention makes noise. Cold can harm me and keep waking me up, but at least doesn't make noise... Hard choice right? i'll find a way...
But if this wasn't enough, a problem that haunts most indie devs is involuntarily nonstop thinking about their projects while going to sleep (which obviously keeps them up) for example the plague rat idea was something i thought of when i should have been fast asleep :(
Even if i'm dying to finish Emilie Autumn's book and playing some video games (Starbound is interesting... but not helpful to this project.) I absolutely refuse to give myself the time to do anything of the sort until there's nothing on the Wiki that hasn't been placed inside of Articy: Draft.
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