9 Aug 2016

Small progress is some progress? 

The good news is we are official, WinsowShade Imaginarium LLC, was created, effective 12 July 2016.  This move makes things feel a bit more substantial even if the summer has seen slow progress.  Of course while all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy (and poor), there does seem to be a requirement to do some work in amongst the play.  Harsh realities to be sure. 

A trip to England for Joe and new job for Mike has kept both of us busy this summer.  To a large extent these have been leveraged as growth and research opportunities.  Mike has delved into the development and software creation world, and Joe has managed some creation, design and execution growth. 

Our first holding 1212Gaming continues to work on development of the game tentatively named "Arena".  Without giving away any details, suffice to say that discussions a year ago regarding Arena and the possibilities of geo-gaming (my attempt to coin a phrase, you heard it here first) have been spectacularly proven viable by a little yellow cartoon creature called Pikachu. 

Augmented reality, as well as augmented physicality are the waves of the future.  I’m not sold on the inevitability of the “singularity” where AI becomes sentient in some manner.  But it’s readily apparent and already a fact that augmented reality and physicality will continue to accelerate and take humanity to the next level of existence.  It’s hard to not be excited about the possibilities.  Humanity in the near future is going to use machines and computers, increasingly miniaturized and powerful, to augment their natural human state.  I'm not talking about simply making things easier, I'm talking about making impossible things possible.  Incredible times ahead. 

We can see the way forward being lit by gaming and Pokemon Go is the most famous example so far.  It’s a game that interacts with the physical world around you.  And more importantly you interact with the digital world it lays over the physical.  To be sure it’s not a perfect fusing, and the interfaces/manipulation remain clunky.  But the pure, raw potentiality is clear to see.  

The question then, is how to harness it, and who will figure it out?  It is of course a journey, but every journey has success and failure, stops and starts. 

Clearly Niantic, the developers of Pokemon Go have a head start.  I have no doubt dozens, and perhaps now thousands of developers are creating similar games that use the real world as their playground.  But Niantic has won the first to market race.  Or at least the first to market that went big, because there have been several games released using the phone GPS function and the real physical world.  Some have been of middling success, but nowhere near Pokemon Go.  As we said in the fighter jet business, "Fight's On"!

For 1212Gaming, the success of Pokemon Go proved a revolutionary idea was viable.  The question then is this, how do we build upon it, and grow from it.

29 April 2016

1212Gaming was formed on 1 Jan 2016.  We had an idea and vision but only a vague plan and needed to start fleshing the thing out.  Slick and I met once a week, which we still do.  We did it via google hangouts and started dropping some early planning docs on Google docs.  We started talking about the details; and wow, were there a lot of details.  Even after four months of work there’re very many more things we don’t know than we do know.  Learning to know what you don’t know is eye opening.  But one thing is certain, we know a ton more than we did at the start.  The first step is supposedly the hardest, but I’m here to tell you, the rest of the early steps aren’t easy either!

The initial discussions were about the strategic plan.  We decided to concentrate on that a bit in the beginning for several reason, some of which are unique to our past careers and current life situation.

Actually, it was Slicks idea, he at least had an initial direction.  One thing he had learned from working in Portland and dealing with IT start-ups, there is a lot of buffoonery that hopefully we could avoid.  Not claiming we’re the immaculate company conception here, but forewarned is forearmed.

Normally when an entrepreneur decides to make a go of it they have a very specific product in mind and are neck deep in developing it.  Too often they don’t consider the long game and when the product is ready, they aren’t.  It’s a ready, shoot, aim situation as Slick put it in one of our initial meetings.  There isn’t anything too terribly wrong with that as long as you get to the strategic relatively soon.  The good news of course is that your product is done and ready, even if you aren’t.  When you’re just starting life, that may in fact be the best way to go, you are looking to make a mark and get the company going.  For us however, we’re relatively secure and older, which gives us the luxury of waxing poetic about strategy.  The danger here of course is taking it too easy and not getting serious about it.  I think we both fight that every day.  I work a full time job and have two young children and Slick does much the same (minus the young children, a subject he gives me grief about because his are in college), and in fact he had to change jobs recently.  It’s a challenge, but overall we’re having a blast.

Of course, the reality is nobody is interested in what two, albeit experienced, fighter pilots think about entrepreneurial strategy if they can’t actually produce a successful product.  So, while we were neck deep in strategic goal setting and creating a company ethos, we had our heads above water searching for that first product.

Gaming of course came to the forefront, because that’s the “fun” passion and the early goal.  We pitched quite a few ideas to each other and let the stream of consciousness discussions take us wherever they went.  Lots of great ideas and branching subjects moved from games, to education, and to training using what is essentially gaming tech. 

Along the way we reconnected a long term friendship, probably the biggest positive the whole operation has generated thus far.

Our USAF fighter pilot sides were drawn toward leveraging gaming tech and the emergent VR capabilities to increase real world training and especially debriefing capabilities.  One of the great advantages the USAF has over other world air forces is a heavily developed and stringent mission debriefing culture.  There are few air forces in the world that attempt to glean as much learning from debriefing every day training opportunities.  We wondered how we could enhance that already well developed system.  The two of us had dozens of ideas, each more grandiose than the last.  We started a collaboration product called the wall of spitballs.  Just throw something up and let’s see what sticks.  As a mental exercise it was a ton of fun. 

Now, that’s a lot of territory and we are still wandering that wilderness today.  But we did have one thing come into focus.

Going back to the gaming theme, we both had a somewhat similar idea for a game.  Slick’s idea was much grander and had a real world, hardcore education purpose and endgame.  Every time I think about it, I get fired up.   If we ever realize that product it could be revolutionary.  My idea was smaller, and focused purely on gaming, and specifically on the expanding phone gaming industry.  I wanted to make something strategic, but in a relatively casual way, something that was customizable, and casual enough that you could fill those little moments in your life where that incredible pocket computer you carry around could stimulate your brain in the dead times.  Times like waiting in line, or travelling and such. 

As a guy who grew up before computers were as ubiquitous as they are today I find the usefulness of the devices constantly and extraordinarily intriguing.  I doubt my kids look at them the same way, I think perhaps there’s a unique perspective there can be harnessed.  One day soon first world humanity will not remember those days.

 Anyway, back to the story.

What we came to realize is that the broad brush ideas were in fact complimentary.  Soon we had a nascent tactical level product direction.  Our first project would be to tackle the smaller game idea, which would form the core of the larger educational product.  The key then is to prove we can deliver something that’s successful, develop it, produce it, market it and ideally make some money to turn the gears needed to bring more products to fruition.

After several months we had a direction, and we’ve moved out smartly from there. 

A little history about my partner and I; Slick and I met in 1996 at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa Japan.  Slick is a "callsign" he goes by as we are both former F-15C pilots.  We hit it off right away having many of the same interests.  Plus I needed someone who could help me with my IT problems!  Eventually I got my callsign, which was Guido, and we proceeded to have many adventures over the next 20 years.  We always kept in touch, and often while sitting around late at night with a cocktail and a bar to hold us up we cogitated.  It was many nights and many bars.

We cogitated on life, on the Air Force, and on all manner of things that you tend to sort out while in your cups.  Sometimes we even figured we should write it down on a Bar Napkin.  If we ever managed to actually do that, we must have lost those napkins, or perhaps they were used to clean up in the morning.  One of the subjects that continually came up was how incredibly bad some emerging tech was implemented in the Air Force, especially in the realm of IT and training.  We always figured we'd do it better if we had the chance.

Meanwhile we honed our experience and knowledge of training processes by instructing people how to fly the F-15C Eagle.  If you really want to learn how to parse what is important in training and systems integration, and what is superfluous, there is little better place to do it than training in Air to Air Combat.  When the stakes are that high, and the job that potentially dangerous, separating the chaff from the wheat becomes a matter of life and death.  It can make you a very serious person, but it can also help you appreciate the frivolous both for what it is, and for what it does.  Fun is important, and there are few professions who take their fun as seriously as a fighter pilot.  Because they understand all too well what is not fun.

That of course is a bit heavy for a fledgling gaming company; but it's central to how we are proceeding.  The point is that what was learned in the classrooms, simulators, while deployed and in the jet gives one a very clear focus of what is important.  More significantly it strips away many pretensions and fosters a need and desire to learn from mistakes.  Honest self, peer and supervisory assessment of your performance is how you improve, and for us, how we stayed alive.  Along the way then, we learned how to train hard, in what was essentially a career of "war gaming".  We lived, breathed and ate tactics to grand strategy as applied to our flying and Air Force career.  As we progressed, we continued to love gaming, even if it was often approached with a rather serious edge.  If you want to meet a competitor, who will compete at virtually anything, find a fighter pilot.

Of course life happened along the way.  Children, our wives careers and many other of the familiar life events we all navigate came and went.  Now we find ourselves 20 years from that meeting in 1996.  It's all culminating in a new beginning.  Experience collected, earned and now implemented as we take 1212Gaming from an egg state to eventually, a full grown company.  Join us as we aviate and navigate through this new adventure. 

Press!

So it's been a another long hiatus; a great example of how hard it actually is to just write.  Seems so easy right?  You just sit down and scribble some thoughts down, type them in, make sure you have your, and you're sorted out and viola, done.  Right?  I can hear my writer Brother in Law laughing at me right now.

Boy did I get that wrong; lots of blogs come and go.  Actually, they never really go, they just sit around like zombies on the web, much like this near dead one right here.  What I've come to realize is you really need a hook.  Something that is your little corner of blogdom.  Some people blog about food, or travel, or selfies.  But focus helps, gives you a topic to riff on each week and helps you to increase your expertise.  That's what this blog has been missing, well minus the actual blogging of course.

My intention was to just yap about life in general, or whatever came to mind.  And I suppose I always reserve the right to do that but without a focus you get what we have here, five years and a handful of posts.  Clearly that was not working, so what, if anything has changed?

Good question.

What changed is an old friend of mine and I got to talking via e-mail and then Google Hangouts.  Somehow the idea of making computer games came up, something we had both talked about at times as being the perfect second career.  We'd both retired and were working good jobs, but they weren't the "dream" job.  For the two of us the dream was designing virtual content, improving IT experiences, being CREATIVE.

Those initial contacts turned into several meetings from Oct to Dec of 2015.  We met weekly to just dream and talk about strategy, goals, large picture projects and to have a beer together even if he lived in Portland and I was in Panama City FL.  Those initial meetings morphed into the foundation of a fledgling company.  A startup if you will, but more than a start up, it's in fact a culmination of our prior experiences flying fighters in the Air Force, and a lifetime love of IT, technology and computer games.  An experience based culmination and creation.

1212Gaming.com was born on 1 Jan 2016, under the umbrella of our bigger dreams loosely contained in WindowShade Imaginarium.com.  I say loosely because they are constantly in danger of bursting out and taking flight to places unknown and certainly exciting.

And there you have the situation coming full circle.  This blog is reborn and repurposed as an extension of 1212Gaming and WindowShade Imaginarium.  It will be a living document tracking the inception and development of a small dream germinated in the fevered imaginations of two gamer fighter pilots, one an IT and programming nerd and the other a developer and technology power user.

We are engaged and cleared to press.  See you out there friends, it's time to get creative.