Print-on-demand book publishers (aka self-publishing)

I’ve been researching getting a book published, as I’m considering writing a technical book and/or a fictional work, and have come across a few Print-on-demand (POD) book publishers that stood out from the rest to me.

The first is CreateSpace, the second is Dog Ear Publishing, and the third is Lulu. Depending on retail/list price, page count, quantity sold, and freelancing services you may acquire one of the first two will provide the greatest revenue per unit sale through their website for a black & white paperback with a color cover.

CreateSpace charges $39 per title to get a reduced cost for each copy printed, but there are no humans involved in the process, so you may need to spend some dollars on freelancers services if you do not feel confident that you can do quality cover design yourself. On the other hand Dog Ear Publishing’s most basic package is $1099, but that includes cover design and the interior design of 30 images or 5 tables. In the middle is Lulu with it’s basic package coming in at $369, which also includes cover design and formatting with up to 15 images included.

That said, using modern software application, doing interior layout and formatting probably isn’t going to be a big for anyone writing a software engineering related book, so I’ll assume that the freelancing fee you need to pay when using CreateSpace is $250 for cover design (and that’s may well be high, I’ve noted service posted lower then that). In that case, for a 200 page B&W papaerback, Dog Ear is the better choice for technical books due to their higher price. With a list price of $29.95, Dog Ear comes out ahead at 1000 unit, but with a list price of $39.95 – $49.95 then Dog Ear comes out ahead at 500 units. In all of my scenarios Lulu came in second or third.

For books priced below $30, such as fictional works, CreateSpace provided the greatest revenue per unit sale through their website for all of the scenarios I compared. That said they don’t do hardcovers, while both Dog Ear and Lulu do.

Also of note, CreateSpace is an Amazon company, and Amazon also owns BookSurge. BookSurge has been accused of strong arming POD publishers into switching to BookSurge for their printing services or having the buy links of their books listed on Amazon removed, so I’m thinking of going with Lulu or Dog Ear myself. BookLocker has filed and anti-trust lawsuit against Amazon that just recently passed Amazon’s attempt to have the suit thrown out.

Also worthy of metion is QOOP, as they allow you to “take your QOOP store and embed within an iFrame at your personal site or company site” at no cost and they have no upfront fees at all (at least no mention of that I could find); however the charge they cost for per-copy printing is comparatively steep.

Changes in location, employment, and project.

Since my last post, we’ve moved from Las Vegas, NV to Reno, NV.  While a number of NV natives describe the day drive between two as extremely boring, none of those making that comment seem to have driven through the unending flatness of the large parts of the Midwest.  At least the drive between Vegas and Reno has mountains.

The move was due to my accepting a position as a Senior Software Engineer at PC-Doctor, Inc. here in Reno.  We all like Reno better then Vegas.  Prettier geography, trees, less traffic, better dog walking route, and a four season climate with lower summer highs then Vegas.

On Project Wellinghall, I’m now on the third phase of M3 and scenario analysis has been running nearly constantly for the last two months.  During this phase I’ve discovered two things one, even with current bare minimum feature set, the numbers scenarios required to determine the outcome of every combination is already has an exponent over 100 and the scenarios results other then stalemates are quite sparse.

While these two things are not necessarily, bad they won’t allow for a very interesting arena combat simulator since most combatant designs will result in a stalemate when pitted against each other 1-on-1.  So then the question becomes change the game mechanics to provide a more interesting 1-on-1 arena combat simulator or go with a different type of game to determine if these mechanics can allow for a fun gaming experience.  I’ve decided to go with the later and push off the arena combat simulator until at least M5 and quite possibly M8.  At that time I 2-on-2 or n-on-m arena combat simulator will be feasible and suspect team arena combat scenarios will have far fewer stalemates then 1-on-1.

This means M4 needs to be restructured to provide for a new game type.  I’m thinking of doing either an ecology simulation or a dungeon crawler type game.  Note sure which yet, but will be determined as part of M4 planning (or at least I detail out the features that both would need and start working on the common ones if I want to defer the decision until later).

Project Wellinghall: M3 design complete

While M3 planning was completed last week, parts of the plan had not been fully detailed in terms of the game mechanics or implementation.  That design work is now complete, as it most of the refactoring to use a proper logging mechanism.  The first phase including 3 refactoring work items and 1 new features.

The second phase is to put in some internal consistency checking to ensure a steady state is maintained (i.e. that no energy disappearing or materializing out of no where).  I want to get that done before I spend time on balance to ensure that balancing work isn’t wasted on buggy game mechanics.

The third phase is the balancing phase, which includes creating the scenario manager and 3 then 3 new features.  Before implementing those 3 new features, I wan to have the scenario manager in place so that I can effectively evaluate the impact of the new features to see if they are either overpowered or useless.

Project Wellinghall: M3 planning complete

I finished up the planning for M3 earlier this evening.  Most of the engineering tasks did get pushed from M3 into what had been the empty bucket of M4.  The one I did keep was to add a decent logging infrastructure and replace various statements to print to the console with proper logging.  Late in M2 I started to accumulate a lot of these print statements in my efforts to verify and debug the game mechanics, where in my work previous to that the print statement were only short lived,  so they didn’t cause problem.

Also included in M3 is the tool, which I mentioned previously here, that I’m lamely calling the scenario manager.  I anticipate the scenario manager will be of great help in getting a feel for what kind of game reality the individual game mechanics come together into.  Should that game reality seem wanting of the balance necessary to be fun, then the scenario manager will be very helpful in quickly determining how a tweak to a game mechanics effects the overall game reality.

At this point I’m just looking at the game reality in terms of whether it provides for a fun environment in which to design an automated combatant to duel another automated combatant.  For this to be fun for me, the designs for the top units should not follow a single attribute to extreme (i.e. being the biggest, the fastest, or the most enduring shouldn’t be the win button).  Also there should not be one unit design that can beat all comers in all scenarios at all starting distances.  Going a bit further I hoping that there won’t be one unit design that can beat all comers at a specific starting distance, but its possible that may not be doable.  At the same time I’m not trying for a rock, paper, scissor type balance where each unit design has a design it is strong against and one it is weak against.  I’m fine with some designs being generally better then many others, just so long as it isn’t better then all of the others all of the time.

Now I’m off to go survey what my existing logging options are in Python, so I can either pick one or rule out using a pre-existing one and get one with writing my own.

Project Wellinghall: M2 complete; M3 planning begins

I spent the day trying out numerous dueling scenarios to get a feel for how the game mechanics. After designing a succession of better units, I think there is likely room from improvement in the game mechanics. I’ve also decided that investing a lot of effort in tweaking the game mechanics with only the M2 feature set was not wise, as based on my experience today I think about half of the features I have planned for M3 really need to be implemented to get a more solid handle on how the game mechanics will play.

When I re-planned M2- M4 after re-designing the game mechanics at the end of M1, I left M4 empty and M3 had very little in it. Since that time, M3 has had a couple more features added to it in addition to a number of engineering tasks, while M4 has remained empty.

Currently, I’m thinking I’ll move the other half of the M3 features, which do not appear necessary to tweaking the game mechanics, off into M4. I also need to weigh the cost of the engineering tasks against their immediate benefit. Although a number of the engineering tasks will help with debugging and the time it takes to understand the impact of a tweak to the game mechanics, but I’m not sure the time saved will be offset by the cost in the short term (long term sure, but there may not be a long term for this project if the game mechanics prove fundamentally flawed).

So my next step is to generate SWAGs for the engineering tasks.

Project Wellinghall M2: Coding complete, now for some tweaking

I just crossed off my last work item for M2 of Project Wellinghall and then spent an hour playing around with the fruits of my labor. One thing that is clear is I need spend some time writing some code that generates a bunch of tables so I can get a better handle how all of the game mechanics interact. I have got a bunch of knobs and levers I can tweak in the game mechanics, but currently my view on how things change in response to a tweak is rather narrow as I currently only have one scenario and that pits two very similar combatants against each other. I’ve also got various numerous spreadsheets I’ve created manually as part of my game design process, but each table only deals with one aspect of the game mechanics, so I need create a tool to generate a wide variety of scenarios, get them executed, and then summarize the results into numerous cvs format tables for easy spreadsheet viewing.

At present I’m just trying to decide if creating that tool is work that remains in M2 or if it goes in M3. If it goes in M3, then I need to decide how much time to spend manually messing around with the features I have now before calling M2 done and moving on to M3.

I think I’ll spend tomorrow playing around with it and then see where to go from there.

Time for a colloborative game project

In my last post I mentioned that it was time for me to start working with other folks again, that I was posting my resume to various sites, that my expectations of finding a good position were low due to the current economic climate, and that I was going to wait until after I finished M2 of my current game project before actively looking at job postings.

During the last week, I couldn’t resist reviewing current job postings and the state of things is even worse then I thought. Additionally, the posting of my resume online has generated contacts (and spam) with recruiters but not from employers.

I figured that working with other folks again meant that I’d need to find position at a company, as my current project is both large in scope and radical in design, which makes it a hard sell in my opinion and I’m a craptacular salesmen. Thus, I see it as highly unlikely that I’d be able to recruit any partners for this particular project until its far enough along to sell itself and that is months off at best. I also can’t afford to hire an employee to work on the project.

That said it just dawned on me that I could collaborate with other folks on a new game project rather then my current one. A few days ago I decided to try my hand at writing some fantasy and science fiction, and in brainstorming for that effort I came up with a couple of ideas that I just realized would be well suited for a game that wouldn’t require hand crafted textures and fairly minimal amounts of models, animation, and landscape. So while these ideas could not be used to create a game without any artists being involved, as is the case with my current project, large off-shore teams generating content wouldn’t be required to complete a game either.

So my next step is to contact some folks to see if any have the interest and spare cycles to take on a side project like this. If not perhaps I can find some collaborators in the forums of game development websites.

Time to start working with other folks again

After some reflection on the last year of doing solo software development, I’ve come to the conclusion that working solo does not allow for maximum productivity, that maximum productivity can only be achieved when working as part of a group, that I a get a lot of satisfaction from being maximally productive, and thus it is time for me to start working with other folks again.

That said, over a decade of experience developing software as a member of groups of various size has also shown me that working as part of a group can also result in productivity significantly below that of working solo, that I find working at low productivity to be unsatisfactory, and thus I should not join just any group of folks developing software.

Economic times are pretty bleak at the moment, with rumors of Microsoft laying off a significant number of people and Google engaged in stealth layoffs, so it could be quite difficult to locate software development groups that are, highly productive, actually looking to employ more senior software engineers, and either don’t screen candidates using lists of acronyms and buzzwords or are screening for a list of acronyms and buzzwords that match up with my personal list of acronyms and buzzwords.

So the first step is to get my resume posted to about dozen tech job related websites and see if that generates any leads as a result of getting through the screening filters of a group that is actually looking to employ a senior software engineer.  While waiting I plan to finish up the second milestone of my current project, so I can get that finished up before I start dedicating a lot of time to searching for an appropriate position.  When the time comes for that I figure the first step will be take a look at the positions available that require Java and C# and determine which language has more open positions of interest (not just total number of positions Java wins there) compared to C++ to determine if I should be investing time into learning one of those languages and their associated libraries to expand my personal list of acronyms and buzzwords.  The other thing to look at are jobs in the gaming industry as perhaps learning libraries related to that is the way to go, as C/C++ are still the languages of choice for shrink wrapped console games (with a notable exception being XNA for the 360 since that requires verifiable .Net).

I’m confident in my ability to pick up any of these things, but I can’t learn them all instantly.  I’d be happy to spend a few unpaid months learning languages, libraries, and technologies required by by a great position if I knew it was still going to be there for me at the end my self-training period, but the job market doesn’t work that way so I’ll end up having to to speculatively choose where invest my time and how that time isn’t wasted.  With all of the choices available these days it would be pretty easy to pick the wrong areas to invest in.  For example a search on Indeed yields only 1,684 results for “Python Senior” versus 8,876 results for “C ++ Senior” and13,970 results for “Java Senior”, but of course when I started working with Python it was not to improve my marketability in the job market, but to provide for high productivity development of the game engine prototype I’m working on and Python has fulfilled that role quite nicely.

Personal preference for geometry coding

I started fiddling around with the rendering engine for Project Wellingham as my entry point to getting back into that code base, and in short order I realized that I really liked working with geometry related code and that I’d been missing such coding while I was working on Project Fangorn and my stock analysis software before that.  Although Project Fangorn was a strategy game, I had purposefully designed it to not make use of any geometry to keep it as simple as possible considering it was going to only have an HTML interface, so I didn’t get the same level of satisfaction working with those game mechanics as I do with game mechanics that utilize geometry.  Of course I didn’t actually realize it at the time and attributed most of my lack of satisfaction with working on that project to frustration with the limitations of Google AppEngine and in hindsight I can see now that I really should have tossed in the towel on that project back in early October.  Oh well, live and learn.

For those of you who read this blog regularly you may notice that the title has changed from “Josh Heitzman’s Impersonal Blog” to “Josh Hetizman’s Blog O’ Code”.  When I originally started this blog, it was because my wife didn’t want me putting up long posts about my work on shared blog about our activities, family visits, photos, etc., so I considered our shared blog to be for personal stuff and this one to be for work and technology related posts (i.e. impersonal).  At first I wasn’t going to post this as it didn’t seem consistent with the blog title, but then it occurred me that there was no reason I couldn’t just change the title.

Project Wellinghall back underway

As Project Fangorn, a light weight web-based strategy game, has been put into the deep freeze and I’ve taken some time off to do some game playing, it is time to dust off Project Wellinghall and get back to work in it.  I stopped worked on Project Wellinghall a bit over six months ago (5/22/2008 to be exact) when I started working on stock analysis software with this being my last post on the subject.  At the time I didn’t actually call it Project Wellinghall, but having a code name makes it easier to refer to, so I went ahead and gave it one retroactively.

I have no shortage of written game design, planning, and current progress documents relating to that project and specifically to M2, so I won’t have to wallow around trying to figure out where I left off; however, I do have over 50 pages to read to get back up to speed.

Time to make some tea!