Okay, holiday's officially over. The rugrat heads back to school tomorrow and is climbing the walls today for something to do. Five year olds are fun, but they don't deal well with the whole "why don't you just quietly read a book" thing.
Plans for 2008:
1. Development and release of a new premium game. And it should come as no surprise that this game will have the word "Bulldozer" in the title. Bulldozer's my own little teeny tiny franchise, and franchises are no fun unless you can drive 'em into the ground. Much of the development will be on a Flash-based level editor with a database back-end, which will dovetail into a contest in which I give away a really cool prize for the best level.
2. Discontinuing the premium puzzle-pack. It was a cute idea to try to "upsell" the puzzles as premium titles, but I make way more in ad-revenue from the puzzles than I've made from selling full copies, so that'll probably just fade away. If I make more titles for the web, they'll be ad-centric. Puzzle games will exist in a "double life" as competitive puzzles on thecodezone.com as well as non-competitive versions that I'll release to every hideous "1001 Flash Games" portal I can find. If you don't like the ads, you can still empower yourself to buy Bulldozer or Duck Tiles or UberBulldozer to shut 'em off. But I won't have a premium version of Zombie Kitten Attack available. There's just not enough money in it.
3. Development and release of more "viral" games, including new daily puzzles and some arcade games.
4. Development of a blue-sky project that's been rattling around in my head for a year. My blue-sky projects tend to come to nothing, so that's gonna wait until after UberBulldozer.
2008 New Year's Resolutions
1. Devoting exactly one day per week to viral games. That includes promoting the existing games (i.e. submitting 'em to new portals) and modifying games to work with "premium" portals that support things like global high score tables. Mostly grunt-work.
2. Better scheduling for my projects. I needs a plan!
3. Not paying interest for anything except the house. Every other debt-system I have, from my car payments to credit cards, is on zero-percent interest. I did well last year, but I'm going to be even more diligent this year at gaming the debt system so that I'm not paying interest. I pay off the balance on all short-term debt cards each month anyway, so that's really not a problem, but I'm making it a stated goal for this year.
4. Pay a big chunk of the principal on my house. I know that every fast-talking financial planner will call me a fool because his magical green-light stock system will make money way faster than my home interest will lose money, but those systems will, by and large, be going to hell in the next two years. And if the economy goes to hell I want to be in a position to continue to do well with less. And if the economy doesn't tank and somehow manages to stay strong, well then I guess Shelly and I will just have to drop ourselves to a four-day workweek to keep pace. Call me a fool, but I ain't seeing the downside :)
5. Lose some weight. That one's obligatory.
