To quote a line from a great 80's hair metal band, "Here I Go Again".  There is a rather detailed and oddly strange back story to my venture that started at my being 8 years old, goes all the way to me being CEO/President of a 3D Virtual Reality MMO.  But the odd part is that I wasn't satisfied.  The company I lead was using licensed technology, not some (like middleware), but all of it.  We were basically at the mercy of what ever the company that licensed us their technology wanted to do.  This was a very confining place to be.  Dreams are what make musicians and game developers unique.  I am a dreamer.  So after my years with the "company", I backed up to punt, sadly, I fumbled.  

In 2001, just after 9/11, I was hit with a run of bad luck.  There was a "corporate take over" and I was voted out of my Presidency, because "I wasn't playing in the worlds and keeping up a personal relationship with our customers in the chat systems".  Odd, I thought my job was to drive the company forward, forge new business relationships and partnerships, design new products that could be integrated with our licensed engine all in hopes of carving out a niche and increasing market share and thus satisfied customers.  Be very careful if you find yourself in a a corporate environment where your board members are users of your game. They will not always see the most beneficial vision.  So there was 9/11, it hurt all Americans, it broke our hearts, I would even think that aside from all politics and regional differences, all humans on earth with a normal life were affected by that death and destruction... I was layed off.  Just before 9/11 I left my company with my head held high, went to work for a company developing web based GUI and back end systems (in perl no less) for a big bank version of Paypal.  Since most of our customers where in the world trade center, the venture capital was not enough to save us and the company collapsed within three weeks of the national tragedy of 9/11.  

I had done okay for myself.  I had a little savings and great contacts in the tech sector.  I hired one of my old co-workers from the Paypal clone and we developed an alpha version of the "game" I have always envisioned.  We licensed core 3D technology with great terms so no worries about past business experiences coming in to haunt me.  Our game was almost ready for beta and the 3D technology we licensed collapsed.  They went bankrupt and never released the source code.  We were back to square one.

I fell further back and simply started learning the portions of 3D matrix math, vector calculations, design concepts in programming that were always slightly beyond my grasp.  I vowed to do it myself.  To not work with another middleware company unless it was stable and well established.  To not have partners that simply do not get it or waste too much time on feature creep (things added just because they could - not because it was in the design documents).

I tried 3D Game Studio - $1,000 and several weeks later I had an alpha version created by myself.  However, the network engine available through 3D Game Studio was not robust enough to even create basic  multiplayer interaction.  Sold my license to a forum member and moved on.

I tried other engines - Thousands of dollars and several years later and I had tried 2D systems, Flash, Shockwave, ISO Metric Systems, Web Based old school systems, Visual Basic, Visual C++, DirectX, and many more.  I was pulling my hair out.  Thinking surely I do not have to recreate the wheel.  Surely there is a game engine that I could license like Unreal Engine but something I could manage to develop within myself and something I could afford....

Torque - GarageGames - I found it. I fell in love with it.  In expensive, powerful and a great community.  I wrote my game, it worked, then Torque was updated and there were new amazing features that I just had to have.  I rewrote my game from scratch.  It worked even better this time!  I had persistent world functionality with high user network capability with never ending grid based terrains and database driven ghost objecting systems that allowed the world to have thousands if not millions of objects that would load (ghost) around the players as they needed them in their field of view.  I invited friends and family.  It continued to work just the way I wanted it too.  It was amazing.  Time to launch!

Daunting is the only word I can think of when I hit that moment.  I had operated a successful company with similar responsibilities of running a network operation center with servers and bandwidth needs.  Was I ready to do all this on my own with my new ethos of "it's going to be a one man operation"? Was this alpha really ready for beta release?  Would it be the big game I had always dreamed of and worked so hard to realize?  I unplugged the test servers, unplugged the computer with all the development environments setup and put them under my bed.  Why?  I still can't answer that question.  My Wife says I was scared.  Either way, I simply wasn't ready.

So, here I go again.  I researched all the current 3D development environments to see what direction I should start in.  Should I use Torque again?  Should I use Unity3D, which had been gaining market share in the development market?  I did my due diligence and it looks like Unity3D is the environment I will work with this time around.  Why?  The editor is amazingly powerful.  The core is built on .net and utilizes C# and the Mono compiler.  In short, what ever is not available to me in the core of the Unity Editor will be available to me from MSDN and .NET.  Basically everything and anything I can think of is available to use.  And the community is strong!  There are thousands of users that frequent the community forum responsibly on a daily basis.  Great tutorials and in this day and age there are hundreds if not thousands of user created Youtube tutorials.  I also want to mention that there is an Assets Store where you can buy projects, models, add ons and middleware to accomplish part or all of your individual tasks for you during the development journey. 

Since June 6th I have been utilizing a 30 day trial version of Unity3D Pro.  I have been working night and day for countless hours.  Learning, researching, testing, coding examples, watching tutorials and working through them, buying scripts and starter projects to see if I really want to make the financial commitment of purchasing Unity3D Pro as well as the time and financial commitment to jump in this again.

I ran across a forum post from a published game developer.  He described my situation perfectly.  About the choice we developers make either going left and all the years spent trying to realize this great grand dream game and enjoying the journey but never reaching a published game or going right and placing a specified amount of time to produce, write, develop and publish a game even if it is not your dream game, just something that at the end may be no more impressive than a Lean To built of sticks and left over tin to protect your lawn mower, just something, anything that is finished and published.  He forced himself to do this and 18 months later he had 5 games published with over 70,000 players.  He challenged anyone reading his post to accept a 12 week journey to publish.  I accepted.

So, I am purchasing Unity3D Pro.  I am working towards a 12 week journey to publish a game.  It may not be the game I always dreamed of but it will be a game that comes from what I can dream up.

Wish me luck.  

The Journey Begins.