Three Tales of Indie Game Development …
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 24, 2010
Imagining riches with your l33t indie game-making skills? It’s definitely possible. Here are some reflections on some semi-recent projects grounded firmly in reality. One is a traditional single-player game for PC that I thought (at the time) would be a sure-fire hit, blending one hit game with rock & roll mystique. Another is an indie Massively Multiplayer Online game. And a third is a follow-up to a hit iPhone game.
The Long Tail: Rock Legend Game Sales Statistics
Don’t Quit Your Day Job? Here’s Why I Haven’t…
There are some outstanding excerpts I can’t help but note. On Chopper 2:
“Initially, I saw Chopper 2 as roughly twice as complicated as Chopper 1, so thought it would take twice as long. But this was a mistake. I’d neglected to think about all the complexities introduced by the relationships between all of the new features. An analogy would be a number of people shaking hands. Two people means one handshake, but double it to four people and you get six handshakes. Much of the coding complexity is in the handshakes.”
Been there, done that, and he is SO correct in ways that many gamers and inexperienced game developers do not realize.
And a note in the comments about how Cliffski misjudged his market:
“When I did KRL, I was vaguely targeting the casual games portals, but I screwed up. The game was too edgy and unpolished to be casual games fare, and too simple and cuddly to be hardcore games fare. In retrospect, having some sex and drugs with the rock n roll would have been much much better. Huge variety of equipment for the band would have been better, too.”
Good stuff to think about.
Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: Read the First Comment
“Eschalon” Creator at Low Hit Points After Epic Victory Against His Own Appendix
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 23, 2010
So at the risk of sounding like a total gossip-blog…
As Thomas “Eschalon” Riegsecker of Basilisk Games put it on Saturday, “At hospital. My appendix decided it had enough of living with me.”
He has since tweeted that he’s at home, recovering from surgery. Good luck, Thomas – and best wishes & prayers for a speedy recovery!
Filed Under: News - Comments: 2 Comments to Read
Our Colorful Past…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
Many years ago, when our youngest daughter was probably around five or so, she asked us if the world had color when we were children. We chuckled and explained to her that the world had always had color, but it was merely the photographs and movies we had back then that were in black & white.
We laughed. We knew it was a cute story we knew we’d drag out in later years to embarrass her.
What I didn’t realize until a few days ago was that I subconsciously believed her.
Then I saw these photographs taken from Russia and neighboring regions one hundred years ago:
I was floored. I realized that, in my imagination, I’ve always pictured that era as being drab and colorless. Consciously I knew better, but my mental image was apparently driven by all those black & white images.
While harmless enough, I guess my take-away is how, in spite of our best intentions and conscious rejection, our mental images and models of things are still colored (or not) by the media to which we are exposed. In my opinion, that’s one more reason to fight to maintain freedom of speech and media in general (including video games) – so we don’t end up viewing the world through a single, inaccurate lens.
But mostly, I thought those were just amazingly cool photos of life a century ago in a beautiful part of the world.
Filed Under: General - Comments: 8 Comments to Read
Make a Game Too Fun, and Get Sued!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 21, 2010
Ah, America. Used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. Now it’s the land of the entitled and the home of people who don’t want to take responsibility.
So apparently, if you are a loser who can’t get a life and instead spend all your waking hours playing MMOs, you can sue the game makers for making their game so fun and addictive that you just can’t help yourself but let your life go to pot while you play. Sounds way more lucrative than gold-farming to me!
WIRED: Addicted Gamer Sues Game-Maker, Says He is ‘Unable to Function’
The frightening thing is that this lawsuit wasn’t dismissed out-of-hand. Maybe this is the judge’s way of getting back at all the people who kicked his butt at Street Fighter 2 in college. I dunno, but hey, way to create a chilling effect on the entire industry!
You know, the semester I discovered the Stainless Steel Rat novels by Harry Harrison, my grades took a definite plunge. I was blowing off classes to read these books. I’ll betcha I could make a case that my starting salary in my first job would have been higher had my GPA been higher, and all my raises and salary progression from that point on could have been higher building upon that foundation. Yeah, I should sue the publisher for failing to put a warning on those books! I could get hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation!
Or at least a free copy of the new Stainless Steel Rat novel… 😉
Sheesh. So do I need to put disclaimers on all my games now?
Filed Under: Politics - Comments: 9 Comments to Read
Frayed Knights: Goblinville Reborn
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 20, 2010
Yeah. That Frayed Knights thing. The indie computer RPG with its tongue planted in its cheek in development. This is an update. And I’m sure you will find it the latest of all of my updates up until this point.
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on content. Specifically, the LAST dungeon of Frayed Knights 1. Actually, it’s not the last one the player will visit, but with its completion we have all of the world geometry in place. It’s all tweaking / polishing / optimizing now.
This was a replacement for another level that had already been “done.” Done, but it just wasn’t working. The previous was poorly laid out, and had proven impossible to optimize correctly. (Programmers terms – the engine uses portals – old-school tech – to optimize “interior” geometry. These are notoriously finicky in this engine and have very explicit requirements to have a prayed of a chance of working correctly. And without them, your interior level runs poorly and the lighting looks like crap).
So after a bunch of debate, vague discussions about “fixing” the level, and some concentrated efforts to try and tame / redesign the thing, we finally agreed that it just needed to be completely redone. Brian, who had done the original, was more than happy to agree. It had been his first completed dungeon with the tools / engine, and he’d learned a lot of tricks since then to make better levels.
Unfortunately, after agreeing to this, Brian has been afflicted with a bad case of Real Life, and so all work from him has stopped for the time being. This is the problem with being an indie and working with contractors whom you can only compensate in intermittent, token payments of beer money.
I’ve been working around the problem for a bit, but finally decided to do it myself. This is, in areas of artistic endeavor, generally not a Good Idea. I’m not exactly the talent when it comes to this kind of thing – as an artist, I’m a pretty okay programmer. However, I do suck less than I used to, and I decided I was going to cheat.
Specifically, I was going to borrow some geometry from the previous dungeon and re-use it. And not only that, but I was going to swipe some geometry from another level that never been used in the game. By borrowing the best pieces of two previous dungeons, I could maybe arrange them according to the desired gameplay, and link them with some custom material of my own that might not suck too badly.
Of course, I underestimated the time requirements of even that.
However, we’ve ended up with a big freakin’ dungeon. Maybe not quite Tower of Almost Certain Death big (my other major contribution to the dungeons in the game), but still big. The entrance, a couple of bridges, and what we call the “Escher Room” remain mostly intact from the previous dungeon. I don’t know what Brian was on when he created the Escher room – it certainly wasn’t part of my specs – but he took it and ran with it. His justification for it was folded into the storyline around the dungeon, which we’re keeping.
Story-wise: This is currently the lair of a tribe of goblins which are now divided into two factions – a larger but weaker majority oppressed by a nasty thug named Gorash and his army of goons. But they didn’t build this place.This place is far older than them. And it has its own secrets. One secret was discovered by Gorash and allowed him to make his bid for overlordship (with a bit of clever deceit and misdirection to find a use for it). But the dungeon is divided into an area principally occupied by non-hostile commoners, and the rest of the dungeon off-limits to any but the hostile elites.
Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, but those are the basics that drove the dungeon design.
One odd bit that I’m still working with is that the dungeon is encountered before it is possible to “complete” it and unravel its biggest secret. I’m still working out the hints and dialogs in the game necessary to make sure the player “gets” that the solution is going to require a great deal more adventuring outside this dungeon itself. What I really don’t want is players as stubborn as I am refusing to leave the dungeon until they’ve figured out the final “trick,” searching endlessly for something they may have missed. Instead, the party will have to retrace Gorash’s actions to discover what he learned, a quest that took him all over the caverns.
Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: Read the First Comment
Indie RPG News Round-Up, Aug 19 2010
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 19, 2010
Some Indie RPG Goodness that has been happening lately…
Road Gangs
This is a vehicle based RPG set in a post-apocalyptic United States by new game-maker Blackwater Games. Your gang must find a number of nuclear scientists hidden in cities all over the country and use them to disable a certain number of nuclear silos before it’s too late. Vehicle combat is real time, there are 23 vehicle types in Road Gangs and all vehicles have over a dozen upgrade options available.
Road Gangs is currently available for the PC, with a Mac version planned “soon.”
Darkwind: War on Wheels
Keeping with the vehicular combat theme, Olena Korskii of Psychic Software emailed me to let me know that Darkwind: War On Wheels is still going strong. It’s not really an RPG – it’s an online persistent world turn-based 3D wargame. But it’s cool enough to be worth mentioning here. Again. I look at this video, and I think, “Holy crap, it’s like Car Wars.”
You can check out the game at the Darkwind: War On Wheels website.
Timelapse Vertigo
This has been chatted about in the forums, and it’s really starting to look like it’s coming together in a cool way. Timelapse Vertigo is an indie RPG set in the far future. Life on the Earth’s surface has long since been made impossible and the remnants of humanity now dwell in the Underrail, a vast system of metro station-states that, it seems, are the last bastions of a fading race.
Bizarre, huh? Yeah, and it looks cool. Here’s another video (two cool vids in a row…), provided by StygSoft:
Check out more information here: Timelapse Vertigo
Alpha Kimori
Alpha Kimori is, according to the website, “a cute, bright, and colorful Japanese Anime inspired episodic casual 2D Role Playing Game (RPG) which features an intricate action-adventure epic story with a delightful mix of sci-fi and fantasy elements.”
Check out the Alpha Kimori website for more info.
Din’s Curse
Din’s Curse is up to a beta patch 1.006. It looks like it’s mainly some enhancements / fixes on the beta patch 1.005. If you haven’t tried Din’s Curse in a while, check it out with the latest changes. It still feels like the same game (which is GOOD), but it looks much better. Just when I thought I was over the game, the new patch got me sucked back into it.
Planet Stronghold
Planet Stronghold is an upcoming sci-fi RPG from veteran indie game-maker Winter Wolves Games. It promises to be a story-heavy RPG with turn-based combat a little like many older console RPGs.
If you want to try the public alpha – to get a feel for it and provide feedback – the public al is now available. You can check it out here.
Age of Decadence
As previously reported, the game has hit what I’d call the “alpha” stage. Now is the long, grueling stage of fixing, cleaning, tweaking, changing, improving, re-doing, and so forth. There’s no ETA, but I’m becoming hopeful that it won’t be too many more months before Age of Decadence becomes available.
RPGDX Game-in-a-Week Competition
RPGDX finished its RPG-in-a-week competition, with the theme of “alternate history.” You can check out the final results here (just follow the [Alternate History] tags).
Konsoolo RPG Editor
The Konsoolo RPG Editor, an indie-created Flash-based alternative to RPG Maker, is under development. There’s a new video out showing the the “auto tile layering” technique being incorporated into the editor. If this thing flies, it may soon be far easier to create web-based RPGs. Though I don’t know how well it can be adapted to making something that’s not so jRPG-like.
But here’s a video demoing this part of the editor:
Frayed Knights
Did I mention this awesome RPG in development called, “Frayed Knights?” Once or twice, probably. Anyway – progress continues. I’ll have an update tomorrow. Short version: Progress is speeding up again, and the very last dungeon is now built, textured, and awaiting final touches and filling with adventure. This doesn’t mean the game is close to release or anything, just that “principal development” is finally drawing to a close. For the first game, at least…
Aaaaand….. that’s all for now, folks. I’m sure I’m missing a ton of stuff. If you have an announcement and I’m not being too lazy, email it to me so I can include it here.
Filed Under: News - Comments: 11 Comments to Read
Activision Answers Indie Contest Questions
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 18, 2010
For those who were interested in what the heck a big mainstream publisher like Activision was doing sponsoring an indie game competition:
Activision and the Indies: How Does This Contest Work?
Note: You have only a few days to enter the contest, so get cracking if you are interested.
Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: Read the First Comment
Am I Becoming One of THOSE Guys?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
When I was a kid, I remember reading movie reviews in the paper (yes, that’s what we had to do back in those days, on actual paper even…) and being stunned at how the critics would pan the movies I thought were so awesome. Why, those guys were out-of-touch old-fart snobs who had obviously become so jaded that they had lost all love of movies. After all, was it so wrong to create a crowd-pleasing movie?
And now, here I am writing almost the exact same criticisms about mainstream games that are almost scientifically formulated to please the mass audience of gamers. Games that a million (sometimes MILLIONS) of players love.
What is wrong with me? Have I turned into one of THOSE guys – those jaded out-of-touch snobs who’ve lost the love?
Man, I hope not. Though I think I’ve learned to appreciate what those movie critics were dealing with back then.
I’ve sometimes re-watched those old movies I loved as a kid, and discovered how lame they really were. They weren’t necessarily bad… but they were designed to appeal to audiences that weren’t particularly sophisticated. An audience that hadn’t already seen the same storyline and characters enacted on the silver screen a dozen times before over the last thirty years. An audience that hadn’t already heard the same jokes, seen the same action sequences (but with weaker special effects), or heard the same professions of love and duty.
So these movie critics had been there before, and found themselves in the movie theater saying, “Well, it’s pretty, but HEAVEN HELP ME I HAVE TO SIT THROUGH THIS BIG-BUDGET DERIVATIVE PABLUM ONE MORE TIME! Won’t someone please make something original that surprises and excites me?” They wanted to see something that reminded them of why they love movies in the first place. Instead, they had to watch stuff calculated to cash in on proven formulas. They had to – those kinds of budgets demanded the closest things they could get to guarantees.
So now, here I am – a gamer and developer, not a critic, but I’ve been playing these games since the pre-Pac-Man era and been making them for – scarily enough – about half that time. So I’ve played a few games in that time. And when playing through the introductory tutorial of a familiar genre, I think I hear the echoes of those old movie critics screaming in my skull. I want something to surprise, excite, and delight me, and remind me why I love gaming.
And both mainstream and indie games still do that for me. Sometimes.
It’s just that with the big budget mainstream games, too often I find myself playing and overcome with a feeling of ennui as I realize that while the game may offer some twists and new mechanics, I’m traveling through some extremely well-charted, “safe” territory. It’s like riding the log flume at the amusement park the weekend after your whitewater rafting trip.
Indies don’t have any kind of monopoly on pushing the boundaries, nor are they immune to playing it safe. And – let’s be honest here – wild experimentation and explorations into unknown territory often lead to failure. Simply being different and original doesn’t make something good.
But I have found that more often than not over the last few years it has been the indie games that have made me stand up and take notice. I will freely admit that since I’m playing more indie games than mainstream nowadays, the difference could simply be accounted for by sheer probability.
Or I could have turned into one of THOSE guys.
Filed Under: Indie Evangelism, Movies - Comments: 2 Comments to Read
So If The Videogame Thing Doesn’t Work Out, I Guess We Could Fall Back On Being Doctors…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 17, 2010
This interview at RPS with the founders of Bioware is fun. Whether it’s the fact that NOBODY knew what they were doing in the studio when they made Baldur’s Gate, their decision to follow their dreams and make videogames in spite of having spent years and serious money into graduating from med school (and deciding they could “fall back” on being doctors if the game thing didn’t work out), or all the publishers telling them RPGs were dead and that there was no hope for this game, or the fact that they started with the Direct X 3 “Asteroids” demo as the starting point for their Infinity engine, I’m not sure what part is the best.
Rock Paper Shotgun: Bioware Interview On Baldur’s Gate
But there’s another story here. A personal one, I guess.
Frankly, I feel like Bioware peaked with Baldur’s Gate 2. Nevermind that I spent more time playing Neverwinter Nights than any non-MMO ever. The more recent stuff hasn’t really thrilled me, though I still haven’t taken the time to play DA:O. I may love it and have to recant.
Maybe this is just something that happens to people who pretend to be critics, who are over-exposed to a genre. The smoothed-out orderly crowd-pleasing fair is just too dull, while the indie, garage-band type stuff has much more raw appeal. I dunno.
Still, I loved the story of the group of clueless newbs putting together one of the best-selling RPGs of all time.
Filed Under: Interviews, Retro - Comments: 10 Comments to Read
Frayed Knights Subtitles
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 16, 2010
Okay, this is a goofy little poll, but for those of you who might be interested, I’m, like, polling. Which is like asking for advice. Except I’ll probably disregard it and do whatever I want to anyway. But right now, I’m not sure what I want to do, so … I poll.
So here’s the thing. There are now THREE Frayed Knights games in development. So they need titles. “Frayed Knights 1“, “Frayed Knights 2” and “Frayed Knights 3” are just kinda… lame. They need something else. A subtitle.
Now, “Frayed Knights” is kind of a wordplay / pun / humorous title, making it clear that this is not a serious RPG. I’d like the subtitles to be consistent, so should they:
#1 – Also be humorous / a pun? A subtitle like, “A Dark and Stormy Knight.”
#2 – Be serious and old-school sounding, accentuating the humor of the “Frayed Knights” main title by contrast? (The pilot episode – The Temple of Pokmor Xang – was like this).
#3 – Go overboard with the melodrama of the title, making it silly by virtue of it being so overwrought or using exaggerated words (like, “The Temple of Horrendous Doom” or “The Accursed Skull of Destruction.”) I’m using names like this for some dungeons and magical items in the game (like “The Tower of Almost Certain Death.”)
So…. what do you think?
To keep things straight, the preferred poll is in this forum thread. That’s where I’ll be referring the most as things move forward. I appreciate the comments that people have already posted (and I’ve been mostly butting out of the discussion, just so as to appear unbiased ‘n stuff).
But for those who have an opinion to share but want nothing to do with the forums, I will of course be reading comments here.
Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 10 Comments to Read
Ultima IV Part 2: Dude, Where’s My Avatar?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
I haven’t played this – just passing along some news from RPGWatch from someone who has. I certainly want to check out later:
Filed Under: Game Announcements, Retro - Comments: Read the First Comment
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: Scott Pilgim Wins!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 15, 2010
I knew nothing of this film until two days ago. So “Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World” was a total surprise to me.
But I’m in love, now…
This is one hell of a weird movie, but it totally rocked. Starting with the Universal logo rendered as an 8-bit video game image accompanied by the theme music that sounded as if it had been arranged on the Commodore 64 SID chip or original NES, the show is a love-letter to the gaming-and-comic-book set.
Imagine a romantic comedy with martial arts, thrown into a world that works much like a late 80’s / early 90s video game. With a plot that makes about as much sense as the average video game plot of that time period. It’s based on a small comic book series I’ve never read, so perhaps there were some additional references I didn’t catch. But if so, I didn’t miss ’em.
It’s wildly experimental and stylized, but FUN. It uses the language of shortcuts and video games (and comics) to help tell the story, so I imagine someone who has never played a game of Mario or Street Fighter in their life, or read an action comic book will be utterly confused. But for a gamer like me, I was delighted. Defeated enemies explode in neon glowing score values and a torrent of coins. Average, awkward 20-somethings shuffle and mill about until the fight scene begins, at which point they become expert martial artists. Sound effects are scribbled on the screen just like a comic book (or the old Batman TV show). Scenes are framed in comic-book style, often breaking out multiple images into comic-style panels on the screen at once. The villains posture and monologue, and their super-powers are acknowledged and accepted with the briefest of explanations. And the main character decides to “get a life” by grabbing a floating “1-up” icon out of the air.
Besides this, the show is full of humor, from subtle to deadpan to broad and slapstick. The humor doesn’t always hit its mark, but the shotgun approach had me laughing through most of the show.
It may prove too weird even for some gamers. But for people like me who grew up in the arcades, or spent who spent much of their youth with a game controller in their hand, this movie is for us.
Filed Under: Movies - Comments: Read the First Comment
A Poor Craftsman Blames His Tools…
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 13, 2010
… But I never claimed to be a good craftsman.
One of the advantages of using “mature” technology is that it is SUPPOSED to have fewer bugs than the new stuff, right? Fewer bugs, fewer compatibility problems, fewer unimplemented features planned for a future release, etc.
But when I end up spending half my time working around “undocumented features” or trying to decide if the blemishes in my game on account of the engine or tool failure is “bad enough” to warrant avoidance, or looking at alternatives to solve the problem, it gets frustrating.
It’s kinda like getting the “almost” perfect car that looks beautiful, has an outstanding sound system, incredible comfort, all the safety features, low gas mileage, great power, everything you could possibly want in a car – oh, except the engine will quit on you whenever you make a left turn. Just, you know… plan your route so you are only making right turns, or make sure you only make a left turn when you can coast and don’t have to stop for traffic or anything long enough to get the engine started again, and you’ll be fine, right?
That’s pretty much how I’m feeling these days.
Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 14 Comments to Read
Indie Funding – And What Comes First
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 12, 2010
I’ve been meaning to post and comment on this for a while. Brian “Psychochild” Green has an excellent article on all the different ways you can fund indie game development. Aspiring indies, take note.
I think it’s a pretty exhaustive list, actually, with all kinds of weird options covered within broader headings.For example:
Selling blood for money to pay your concept artist = self-investment (in a big way).
Visiting Vinnie and Luigi (not the Mario Brothers you are looking for) for money with your kneecaps as collateral = self-investment.
Begging friends and relatives for help with your game = Bootstrapping.
Begging friends and relatives for money for your game = Project Investment.
I think a small business loan would also count as self-investment, as you are still personally on the hook to repay the money.
And so forth.
The big challenge across the board – a problem more fundamental than finding funding – is being able to accurately predict the ROI – Return On Investment. For every dollar you invest in a game (be it sweat equity or real cash), how much do you expect to get out of it? What’s the likelihood of losing money, versus the likelihood of making much more? If Peter Molyneux’s theoretical mainstream developer spends $5 million on developing a killer iPhone game and it sells a million copies, great. But if it only makes $2.10 per game that it sells, it’ll be on the fast track to insolvency.
If you don’t care, and you are doing it just for personal satisfaction, good for you. But don’t expect anyone else to be willing to make those same sacrifices to realize your own personal dream.
So how do you figure it out? Well, that’s the real trick. When I first started the indie game thing, I tried to obliquely ask the same question that most newbies ask: “How much does an ‘average’ indie game sell?” That’s very much a “How long is a piece of string,” question. And I found a great answer one day by an experienced indie (pre casual-game boom):
“Zero.”
I guess he was rounding off to the nearest integer, or was actually picking an approximate median based on anecdotal evidence. Now this was in a different era, where games were mostly downloadable for the Windows & Mac and some cell phones, before portals and Casual Games and web-based gaming had really risen to full prominence. But while a lot has changed, the difficulty of generating ANY kind of revenue beyond pocket-change (literally!) for an indie game hasn’t.
What that means is that for a new indie on the scene – the kind that NEEDS the money to get started – there’s not a very “realistic” way to set up projections. The way to remedy this is to make and sell indie games of the style / category you intend to make and tweak your business / marketing… a Catch 22.
Or – as we’re seeing in some areas – you can get some mentoring going on. We’re kinda seeing that with how Amanda Fitch of Amaranth Games is providing some help and advice for aspiring “casual RPG” makers, or how the Indie Game Fund is investing in likely candidates making games in the style they are familiar with. I’m not positive how Hanako’s business relationship with Spiky Caterpiller went for the game Science Girls, but it seemed a reasonable partnering of a new developer with a successful veteran. Once upon a time we had Steve Pavlina doing much the same for casual and indie games.
We need to see more of this. Indies being indies, it’s certainly not going to ever be a universal thing (nor should it be). People are always going to break the mold, do their own thing, and sometimes be wildly successful at it. But as indies are in the wonderful position of having a bigger problem of growing the market rather than fighting over it, it seems like there are some excellent business opportunities out there for new indies pairing up with the vets. It may take on various degrees of formality, and it may not solve the funding issues (many indie vets are barely treading water themselves, but that still puts them in the top five percentile), but it may be an important step in solving a more fundamental problem.
Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 7 Comments to Read
Age of Decadence Entering Final Stretch
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 11, 2010
I mean, Age of Decadence has been in development far longer than Frayed Knights (but it sounds like it’s a larger game).
It’s still got a ways to go. But this is exciting news indeed.
Filed Under: Indie Evangelism - Comments: Comments are off for this article
HPOA = Highly Productive Office Assistant?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 10, 2010
Yeah, this has been like – everywhere today. I got no less than five links to it this afternoon. You probably did too. But hey, in case you didn’t, I’ll share. This is just too awesome. And it’s even game related! Farmville is mentioned!
Girl Quits Job With a Bang (and a Dry Erase Board)
And I had no idea what a “HPOA” was until I saw this. My guess would have been… uh, what I wrote in the title.
I laughed. I cheered. I hope she finds a good job soon. And I look forward to reading tomorrow’s update.
UPDATE: Bummer, I was afraid it was too good to be true… thanks, Lexx! They’ve now come clean.
Filed Under: Geek Life - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
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