The east end of Commerce Street winds through an upper-class residential neighborhood before winding up at Lord’s Market. Behind spiked, iron fences stand the “city cottages” of Toresal’s wealthy merchants and nobility, built tall and narrow to make the best use of limited real estate.

Three stately houses are built close together on the north side of the road: Black Gate Estate to the northwest; Red Gate Estate to the north; and the Jacobs family mansion to the northeast. The street itself continues east and west, and the City Park lies to the south.

There seems to be some sort of spectacle going on in Lord’s Market; pedestrians are crowding the streets, pressing east.

>east

Lord’s Market

Lord’s Market is packed with people from every part of the city, all of them pressing in, blocking the streets. You’ve never seen it this crowded before.

There is some sort of wooden structure erected in the center of the square.

>examine structure

It’s a raised platform, with some sort of scaffolding built over it, and a rope dangling from…

Suddenly your mouth goes dry. It’s a gallows.

>wait

Time passes.

A man steps up onto the wooden platform. By squeezing between two spectators and craning your neck, you can just make out that it is Baron Fossville addressing the crowd.

“Citizens of Toresal,” he shouts, “as Lord of this City, it is my duty to administer justice within its gates, and punish those who transgress against the Queen’s Law. More often than not, this duty is a heavy burden. Though I may wish to be lenient, consideration for the sanctity of the law and the safety of the Queen’s subjects must always outweigh my softer instincts. Today, this burden weighs particularly upon me, for today I must administer the most stringent punishment allowed by the law.”

Soldiers prod a second man up onto the platform. The black bag covers his face, but you recognize him by the clothes he’s wearing - it’s Bobby!

>wait

Time passes.

“This man before you stands accused of plotting high treason against the city of Toresal,” shouts the Baron. “The evidence against him has been weighed, and he has been found guilty by the Honorable Magistrate Hester Rudup.”

Fossville gestures to a third man standing on his other side, a gaunt man wearing crimson robes - the man who captured you last night at the fountain.

>wait

Time passes.

“Despite the grief it causes me, the penalty for this most heinous crime is clear.” Fossville pauses; the crowd is hanging on his every word. “By the power vested in me and in accordance with the Queen’s Law… I hereby sentence this man to hang by the neck until dead.”

The Baron turns to one of his soldiers at the platform’s base and nods his head.

Later, you cannot remember whether you really heard the clunk of the trapdoor falling open, the rope snapping taut, or whether you only imagined it. You remember screaming, clawing at the spectators in front of you, and being pushed back by rough, angry hands. You stumbled and fell onto the cobblestones; you never saw his body drop.

Everything goes black.

A few changes are happening within Textfyre. First, we’ve transitioned Graeme off of Secret Letter and Mike Gentry is taking the I7 programming reigns. This is simply because we’re almost entirely focused on grammar and bug fixes and not functionality. Mike can take Jacqueline’s test scripts and just knock them out on his own.

The next big announcement is that the first game design of the Giant Leaps series, A Path to Empathy, is completed and is now being reviewed for the writing portion. It’s a big game too, with 80 rooms. Paul just disappeared after giving me the rough outline and then poof, a full design. It’s magic!

I put out a few job ads for a Flash developer and even met with one, all to no avail. It seems there are plenty of Flash developers, but none of them understand how to talk to the FyreVM .NET Assembly. And after looking at the technical aspects, I can see that Flash really wasn’t meant to do this sort of thing. So it’s all up in the air right now. I don’t care if we finish the UI in WPF, Flash, Flex, or C++. I just need to find someone willing to do the work on a start-up friendly contract.

I don’t have any real news on the investor front, but I do have a couple of great leads.

That’s about it for now. I’m not pulling the launch from September yet, but we’re running pretty thin at this point. If I don’t have the UI done by August, well, then it will be obvious. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Oh yeah..I’m hiring a part-time assistant. I’ve been working through dozens of resumes and have interviewed several people. This should help smooth a lot of the business side communications out.

Since we have had such a difficult time finding resources to work on WPF, I’m making the big decision to dump it in favor of a Flash implementation. We still need to determine the right mix of .NET and Flash to make it function well on Windows, OS X, and Linux, but I don’t see this as a huge technical hurdle.

So the UX job description has been updated. We’re now looking for a very strong Flash developer with C# experience. My preference is to hire someone in the Chicago area, but I’m open to other suggestions.

Textfyre is in the process of locating professionals to help us launch the company. Our jobs page on the blog here (see tab item Jobs) and at the website will reflect our current needs and will be updated regularly.

If you know anyone that may be interested in any of the open positions, please refer them to the website and blog.

This blog has been a sort of historical diary of the making of Textfyre. My own purpose in its creation was to share the ongoing processes of developing a business from scratch.

Last week I attended a seminar sponsored by DePaul’s Coleman Entrepreneurship Center called “Meet the Angels”. I’ve been to quite a few entrepreneur events and they tend to be pretty lame. You know, no investors, a lot of lawyers looking for clients, and a handful of people looking for get-rich-quick schemes.

But the “Meet the Angels” event put on by DePaul was extraordinary. They had a panel of three angel investors along with another eight investors facilitating round-table discussions. There were about sixty people in attendance so the ratio of entrepreneur to investor was about six to one. I got a chance to pitch my business plan to five of them. There simply wasn’t time to get to all of them.

It’s interesting to interact with investors in that they see things very differently than you do. Me? I’m very passionate and engaged in Textfyre from a product perspective. They are engaged at a purely financial aspect. And they differ in how they track your plan.

Some will ask about revenue and if you don’t have any, they simply ignore you. That’s a tough line to draw in the sand, but you can understand that investors are looking for people with skin in the game. They equate revenue to proof of your mad business skills. Others will try to get to know you and determine if you’re the successful type. Does money seem to stick to you? And yet others look at things from a calculus perspective. They start talking about debt equity, warrants, conversion methods, buy-outs, pay-outs, and more.

In the end though, I only confirmed what I’ve discovered while investigating marketing firms. Customer validation is the key to getting checks written. This can be revenue based customers or it can be market test data. Either way, you have to show that your product has a real market, that you have proof that you know the market and how to reach it with consistent sales. This is the one thing all of the investors look for and won’t budge without.

One of the discussion topics I found interesting was about finding investors in the Midwest. One of the panel members felt strongly that, for whatever reason, people were far more conservative in the Midwest than on the west coast. I’m going to do some research and track angel investment groups in California. Being closer to the entertainment industry may also add leverage to Textfyre’s cause. Who knows?

The other thing that the investors firmly extolled…be imaginative. There is no one way to bring investors in. Look at partnerships, future customers, future buyers, look everywhere. Leave no stone unturned. Be aggressive.

I applaud DePaul on its ability to bring these people together. It was a great seminar and I would go again in a heartbeat.

In the course of meeting with marketing companies and investors, I’ve been getting an education in what sort of expectations need to be met in order for people to open their checkbooks or offer to work on a business.

Some marketing companies will give you a plan and ask for cash. Some will identify deliverables, a price tag, and leave it at that. Then there are a few professionals who actually look beyond the fringes of what you’re trying to do and dig deeper. Way deeper.

I’ve had conversations with a couple of marketing people that were extremely stressful. One in particular has had caused me to lose more than a little bit of sleep over the last month. But she was right and I have only myself to blame for trying to see past steps I already knew I needed to take in order to get funded and be successful.

The one step I somehow thought I could get by recently was the one where I have a nearly completed product that’s presented to the target demographic in a structured setting. Within this process we would gather feedback and testimonials. According to my new marketing “friends”, this is a requirement and I had always planned for this. I just got ahead of myself when a couple of people actually approached me about being investors. I’m still talking with investors (not unlike talking to a wall at times), but I’ve shifted my focus back to the tasks at hand. I have put a lot of money into Textfyre to date and it looks like I’m going to bear the brunt of investing more of my own money. It’s not a difficult decision…just painful.

I’m working with Mike, Jacqueline, Graeme, and Peter and we’re trying to put the finishing touches on Secret Letter and make it ready for market testing. This has become quite a surprisingly difficult effort. Jacqueline came back with a first test script with 1400 issues in the first scene of the game. Mike has addressed them and now we’re making those changes in the source code. That first scene is a tough one and I’m hoping the remainder of the game is less problematic. Not that it matters. We’re being extremely methodical about testing. No stone (or noun) will go unturned.

I’ve also taken on the task of writing a chapter book for Secret Letter. It would seem to be a relatively easy task, especially since the whole story is already defined in game form. Chapter one is already down, 1300 words long. Twelve chapters to go.

If anyone reading this has ever imagined themselves starting their own business, take note. There will come a time in the process where things do not come together as you hoped, but when this happens, you simply go back to the plan and push forward. You have to believe in what you’re doing. If you don’t have that or if you lose it, your business will fail for sure.

I so strongly believe in Textfyre that I’ve upped my own commitments to the company. We are still focused on launching the first game this year and doing everything in our power to make that happen. Any and all support is greatly appreciated.

One of the reasons I started Textfyre was that I had and have a firm belief that paid programming was a considerable missing component of the development and improvement of Interactive Fiction as an artform and medium. The “IF community”, depending on your definition of such a thing, generally focuses on the academic and hobbyist participatory aspects of the medium. We’ve had a few people sell games within the community and they’ve shared some of their processes and thoughts, but no one has recycled any profits into the community at large.

Although I don’t have any profits (let’s not talk about the increasing debt I’ve incurred) to speak of, I do have a sincere interest in sharing the fruits of our internal workings as much as possible without crossing swords with my attorney.

So with that in mind, we’ve put together a “shared source” version of our Glulx VM implementation named FyreVM which can be reviewed and downloaded from the FyreVM website. By shared source we mean that there is a non-commercial aspect to the source code and we also want to restrict branched versions of the VM itself. Any code you write that uses the FyreVM is of course all yours. We’re going to put up samples and those will all be public domain. We will entertain friendly requests for a limited (individual) royalty-free commercial license.

FyreVM is the culmination of a lot of thought on my part and a frustrated review of the Glk specification. I’m not saying Glk is bad or wrong. I just think its limited in its usability by the average developer. There has been a sizable effort by several people to make Glulx and Glk as friendly as possible and yet we still aren’t seeing any increase in games developed with higher quality user interfaces.

So I’m sharing FyreVM because of how we implemented I/O, which is differently from how Glk implements I/O. FyreVM uses channels to convey all information between the virtual machine (game engine) and the user interface. We’ve completely abstracted away any detailed knowledge of pointers and memory and low level programming hacks to access the I/O interface. The developer has to simply retrieve the text that comes out of each channel on each “turn” in a game and do with it as they may.

To aid in this process, we’ve also created a very friendly set of Inform 7 extensions to give developers the tools they need to create channel based games.

Of course we’re still working on sample games to show off the potential of FyreVM and Channel I/O and we will report updates on the website. We invite anyone and everyone to help create samples for the website.

Textfyre is dedicated to being involved in the interactive fiction community and will continue to share our tools and processes as time, money, and lawyers permit.

Textfyre is now going through the most difficult period since its birth. We’re pulling everything together to move from a start-up company with virtual, part-time sub-contractors to a living, breathing corporate entity with several full-time employees, an office, a marketing team, investors, and more.

The critical aspect will be our final business plan, the presentation, and whether or not our potential investors sign on the dotted line. There’s no guarantee that this will happen and yet it’s critical to the future of our company. I am, however, confident that we will get the necessary funding and launch in fall.

Last month I met with two marketing firms and am following that up with meetings with several others. These steps will insure a wide and very public launch.

I’d like to welcome Jacqueline A. Lott Ashwell as a game tester and I’m also in talks with Daniel Sadowski of Soundrama.com in hopes of adding a score to each game.

As has been noted in previous posts, I’ve been working on funding Textfyre through angel investors. In order to facilitate this endeavor, I’ve spent a great deal of time on developing a rock solid business plan. In February I had meetings with two potential investors and have been in touch with a third. These meetings were informal and not meant to be full blown presentations. They both worked out perfectly in that I received exactly the type of feedback I needed to fill in the gaps in my business plan.

One of the gaps included the financials, which I had worked on last summer, but so many things have changed since then that I needed to completely redo them from scratch. I worked with my business plan advisor, April Lane from the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center at DePaul University in Chicago, to rework the financial projections and come up with a target funding amount.

Outside of one more meeting with a marketing firm, all of the gaps have been addressed and the plan is 99% complete. The next step is to develop and practice the ten to fifteen minute investor presentation and then setup final meetings with investors. This all should happen in the coming weeks and we should know more about our funding situation by the end of April.

Based on the outcome of these meetings and the always continuing internal work, Textfyre will launch in either June or September. We’re confident we can launch by September, but we’re hoping to launch by June.

This past Saturday night I arranged a dinner meeting with a favorite fantasy fiction author of mine, Janny Wurts. Janny brought Don Maitz, her husband and I flew Michael Gentry up from Virginia to join in a discussion about her work being introduced to interactive fiction within the confines of Textfyre.

Janny is extraordinary and if you doubt me, take a look at her website and review her artwork. Then I highly recommend that if you haven’t already, or if maybe you stopped short of reading through all of her books, that you should read every single word she’s written. Seriously, Janny writes as if every word is a first born child, every sentence as if it were her blood, and every character is drawn directly from her heart and soul. Even if you stumble through the complexity and density of her prose, trust me when I say that the payoffs are profound and worth every minute of your time.

During our dinner she pulled out The Paravian Sketchbook and Mike and I were floored. This sketchbook contains pencil drawings of various settings within the world of Athera and are some of the most detailed and beautiful artworks I have ever seen. I’ve been to the Vatican. the Louvre, and various other European galleries and Janny’s artistry can easily be described as brilliant.

Eventually we discussed how Janny might become involved in Textfyre, but before too long we had to call it a night. Even so, we had a great conversation and there’s hope that Janny will bring her brilliance, in part or whole, to helping Textfyre create great games.