Reluctantly crouched at the starting line

 

Ahoy all you sky-pirates,

 

    With the move to Colorado behind us and the future of full-time development ahead of us we`re looking to our plans and goals for the next year, and you should all be seeing more direct results and communications from us as well!

     Colorado has been great! I’ve already had the first snow of the year and have made many improvements to the house- soon we`ll also have a dedicated office and some custom, handmade (by us) desks!

     The cat (Moonlight) had mixed feelings during the trip. She went through multiple stages of grief:

 Anger

So much rage

Denial

If you can't see it, its not happening right?

Depression

She wore herself out, after many hours of solid crying

Bargaining

The trick with bargaining is to do it while blocking the view of the highway at 80 mph

Acceptance

She now has three times the people to play with and has enjoyed mocking the neighborhood dogs from the windows

 

    One of our marketing strategies is to put some showmanship on display when we are out and about for Empyrean Raiders. To that end, we dressed up as pirates and built a cannon! Sadly local law enforcement takes a dim view of pirate fire-power, so we opted for a more child-safe approach with a vortex cannon. 

 

    We plan to take the cannon (or more likely a mark 2 version) along with us whenever we go to conventions, ren-fairs, or any other events we end up at, space and rules permitting. We also got the beginnings of our outfits started, though we’re in need of a little more leather and proper goggles for sky pirates, but you gotta start somewhere!

    I put in my 4 weeks' notice on the 12th. It was going to be 2 weeks, and I really was hoping that they would just cut my access and give me two weeks of paid time off, but this will line up better with Russ’ timeline anyways. That means we'll be going full-time at RXR gaming the second week of December, barring any unforeseen bumps along the way. It's a big step and I'm very nervous that I've missed some critical detail but so far it's all happening without any big problems.

 

    Our goals for this December are already in motion. We`re getting the business of business sorted. The new LLC has been formed, and we’ve gotten banking and finances sorted. Licenses, taxes, and insurance are all in the works as well. 

    We’ll be consolidating all our products as well. RXR Gaming will be supporting many more apps than just Empyrean Raiders, the other revenue sources already being created just need to be organized and re-published so they can be accounted for appropriately. This will also be a good test for paving the way using storefronts like the Google Play store, iOS App Store, and Steam to see how publishing through those venues goes and what changes are likely to need to be made.

 

    This week we’ve also been playing around with a logo design. The great existential question of who we are, and who we want to be all summed up in a few lines and swoops. Or at least that’s the idea. So far it's been mostly high floating ideas and a bunch of pictures we’re not in love with.

 

    December promises to be a big month as well. We are planning to break off and publish the bilge game as a stand-alone app. This will both let you all play it and give us lots of good feedback and testing for us to refine before the release of the full game. In fact, this is going to be our plan going forward with all the puzzles- we will break them out as they hit a playable stage and publish them individually for your testing and enjoyment. 

 

    Bilge, Carpentry, and Joinery are all going to be coming out first, then likely Sailing. We will have to look at several of these however to avoid legal issues. With older companies big and small getting rather litigious lately (looking at you Nintendo!) we must try to be as protective of our creation as possible. Even one of these core puzzles coming under litigation could promise to be a lethal anchor on the whole game. Gunnery, Carpentry, and Sword-fighting are the most likely to have large changes. Still, we have many changes in store so that the fun and challenge remain but the design is different enough to avoid problems.

 

    We’re excited to bring you along on our journey, and to that end, we’ll be posting much more regularly! Thanks for your continued support and feedback!

 

 Bonus points for whomever can name the song from the lyrics in this post