2007 What Went Wrong

Coffee Quest

My number one thing that has to be listed in the what went wrong category has got to be non other than Coffee Quest. This, as people who follow this site already know, is my Duke Nukem Forever. Granted, I don't have a team working on this game or a budget but it has taken far longer than it should have. I've started development on Coffee Quest 5 a few times only to abandon the work, but let's hope that 2008 is the year that CQ5 finally sees the light of beta. I'll of course be playing it on my Ubuntu machine as obviously 2008 will also be the year of the Linux desktop!

Too Much OotW

One of those Weeks is the one item that managed to make both my best and worst list. The big thing that I did wrong with OotW was to have far too many releases. This was due to me treating the “Making of One of those Weeks” articles separate from the open source releases of the episodes. This in itself is not a bad thing, except that most my visitors don't care much for the open source releases or the articles. My decision to combine them was probably the proper decision, but that decision wasn't made until late in the year.

Polls

While polls are the best way of getting feedback, weekly polls were a bad idea as I quickly ran out of things to ask. While I could have started having generic polls like many other sites have, the purpose of a poll is to get feedback that will improve the site. While I know that at least one person was upset that I dropped the poll, I think that only having a poll when there is something worthy to ask is the best policy.

Project Creep

This is a Blazing Games issue more than a site issue. While at the beginning of the year I followed my 2007 new year's resolution regarding only working on four projects. Later in the year I started a few other projects, most of which went no where and were never mentioned in my blog or on the site. There is only so many hours that I can devote to the site, so hours spent on abandoned projects is waisted time. Project creep directly leads to the final wrong which is...

Not Enough Focus

The big problem that I continue to have is the simple fact that Blazing Games is treated more like a hobby than a job. If it was paid work, I would have no problems whatsoever focusing on one project at a time for the maximum benefit of Blazing Games. While the advertising on Blazing Games does cover it's costs, there isn't enough profit to pay me a proper wage. That being said, if I was more focused, the better quality might be enough to drive more people to the site allowing me to get more for advertising and result in me making enough money to pay myself allowing me to focus 100% on the site. Still, I am not entirely sure that ad revenue is the best way of monetizing the site but I am not smart enough to figure out a better way (for the record I consider selling hats and shirts to be worse than ad revenue as if you do the work yourself you are eating up lots of time for very slim margins and the third party options I have seen sell junk that I don't want my name attached to).