My first victory!

The year is 2000 and the Starcraft scene had just recently transitioned into the games expansion known as "Broodwars". I had played the original for quite some time and had attempted to compete in the few events available back then - but always had made early exits from the competition stage. Players like "Kain-The-Feared", "D23-gadiantor", "Maynard", "Agent911", etc. just all seemed so much above what I could do. While these players were winning BNet ladder seasons and PGLs for tens of thousands of dollars, I was struggling to even make the tournament brackets with a high 100's placement in their qualifying ladders.

One commonality of the above: almost all major events at this point had originated online before any possible LAN finals. A new organizer onto the scene decided to try to change this model - one that called itself "i2e2". They would hold about ~8 events in major malls across the United States that anyone could compete in, something quite revolutionary at this time. One of these events was to be held in New York on April 6 . . . a day before my birthday and in an area where I had many relatives I could visit with. Thinking that few people would travel to this new open "LAN event" with no qualifier for paid trips, especially one with less than a $1,750 total prize pool, I decided I'd try to my luck there. After all, with this new event concept, most of those "top players" wouldn't be a threat!

For reference, prize breakdown:
+ Show Spoiler +

Arriving at the event proved my initial hope of severely reduced competition to be only "slightly" reduced competition. Four Xds players had carpooled from Canada for this event. On the same team as Xds'Grrr..., each gamer was a well trained powerhouse. All of them were at the top of the ladder at the time (when it actually meant something) and they actually practiced as a team locally with the legend of the time. All I could do is pray they would be randomly seeded against each other - which became impossible as they had the weight to talk to an administrator to ensure that didn't happen.

Despite that, my bracket seemed fairly decent at first. The earliest I would play a Xds player was the RO8, so at least I wouldn't be going home that early! All I had to do was beat my random RO32 opponent and my random RO16 opponent (only 32 players had shown up) to get to that point. I didn't recognize the RO32 opponent, but I did recognize the RO16 opponent as a name I had seen before, albeit not one I knew much about. That player, known as "Silent'Assassin" or perhaps better known as "ThisIsJummy!" today, proved to be much tougher than I expected.

The map was Dire Straights, an island map that I felt nearly invincible on, for our best of 1 match. I was my usual Protoss and Silent'Assassin went for Terran. For reference, this is a picture of the battlefield:



After some initial reaver harassment, I put my usual plan for the map into action. I expanded to the smaller islands, placing all of my defenses at those points. During this time period, it was usual for an opponent to overly focus on killing the first expansion they saw, and scouting was usually pretty poor for understanding how much an opponent might be over extending themself. Hence - once an attack commenced - one could focus all of their defenses around just that one expansion. Eventually he dropped my main - about when the usual time for such a large drop there - and I offered no resistance. The minerals were mostly mined out, the probes had mostly been transferred, and the buildings there were no longer needed. Their only use at this time was to buy time that he happily obliged by ensuring he killed them all off. In essence, my main was nothing more than a "decoy" for what I was really trying to do.

All the infrastructure I needed was at my small islands - that being pylons, a fleet beacon, and a few starports. The islands, with all the space used up by these buildings plus a few cannons and a reaver or two at each, were unassailable. My mobile fleet hit where he was not, denying expansions or hurting infrastructure, until he finally tapped out.

With that victory, I was now to play Xds'Slush, a talented Zerg player, on the map Lost Temple. Here's a helpful map of the battlefield:



He was perhaps too talented for my level of play - I soon found myself in that game with a crushed natural expansion, just finishing off his attacking force at my ramp on Lost Temple. My main was starting to run low on minerals and he made his move to take a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th expansion from his victory to get more ahead to end the game.

Despite my loses, I did have the components of a protoss deathball, consisting of templar, archons, goons, and reavers. I moved my small force of less than two control groups out as a last ditch effort while simultaneously retaking my natural expansion. With no reinforcements possible, that small task group proved to be quite a team, taking out hydra/ling/lurker balls left and right with almost no loses during each engagement. His units seemed to greatly enjoy being rained on by my lighting and hit by scarab explosions. Expansion three fell and soon expansion four met the same fate. My force finally met its end at his 2nd expansion - but the time it bought was just right. My own expansion had come online - I didn't even need to build probes to saturate it as my main no longer had minerals for the probes located there.

With the Zerg's original main and natural running out of minerals, the game was set to become 1 base against 1 base. Another 15 minutes of back and forth occurred, with me using DTs to deny other expansions and him using lurkers/guardians to abuse Lost Temple's natural cliffs, but I pulled it out. It was . . . quite an amazing feeling. I had just beaten a Xds member and had won money at a video game for the very first time!

Sadly, that feeling was shortly lived, as my next opponent in the RO4 (also a Xds member) got revenge for his teammates demise in a game he ended quickly. Despite the disappointment at the time, I was still amazed to have actually finally placed "in the money" at a video game! Of course, I'd have several ups and downs since then, but it marked quite a turning point - the first time I was good enough to get a "victory".

For those that browsed the above section header, there is an extra "r" in the word above. :p You see, I've done a few mobile programming competitions as of late. The first was the Android Developer Challenge back in 2008 - a contest for an Operating System being developed by Google that didn't even have a device released yet. I decided I'd take a game I had done in J2ME (EDU Blaster) and do a quick port for the contest to see how it would do. Initially, it actually generated some buzz, being listed on a few Android articles, such as this one.



Sadly, Google's judges thought it was crap, placing it in the bottom 25% of all entries submitted. I can't blame then - time has shown them to be correct. Even an updated version for the Apple iPhone did fairly horribly sales wise. Perhaps worst of all was when I replaced the math with spaceships in a quick conversion that would make over $6,000 proving my edutainment idea really was crap.



Ah well, I was a newbie, next time I'll do better! So . . . Android Developer Challenge 2 comes around in 2009 with it being on real devices this time. They will also include categories as well - one of which is specifically for education! Perfect for me to try to show that I can do better. Teaming up with an artist, we decided to do an educational, read-to-me story with interactive vocabulary and a quiz. It was quite an improvement - the graphics looked great, it was highly functional, and fairly innovative as no one else was doing this just yet. If only I had not made one critical miscalculation due to inexperience again, it might have done well!



That miscalculation? It was aimed at kids. Google had the users determine the top applications that would move on to judging and didn't allow users to sort what they judged by category. That meant . . . a good deal of people who saw the application as garbage. Even looking over those that made that cut shows the majority of applications that advanced were for an older crowd. Another defeat - but even with that mistake, the quality was still likely not quite there to have won yet either. Commercially, the application hasn't done great, and even an improved iPhone port didn't take off.

That leads me to the present! Another competition came up called Calling All Innovators that would once again have a category for Education. Except not only was there a category for Applications->Education but there was a separate one for Games->Education to further split my competition. I briefly blogged about the creation of this game as part of a post last time.



In short, the idea was to take a card game similar to "Magic: The Gathering" or "Yu-Gi-Oh!" and insert real historical information rather than the made-up fantasy setting they use. Unlike with Mystic Maggie, this would be appealing to more than a very specific age range. Unlike EDU Blaster, the gameplay was based on more fundamentally proven concepts to help it actually be "fun". Besides improvements based on those lessons, the depth and coding were a step up as well.

Despite all of the above, it still appeared I had not reached the appropriate level of ability. Emails were sent to all of the finalists (those that were at least top 10 in each category) in mid-July. My heart sank as my inbox lay empty without any such notification. Nokia confirmed that all the emails had been sent out, but there was some insignificant hope as none of those in any "Games" category had come forward as a finalist. As with my game against Xds'Slush, I was starring apparent inevitable defeat straight in the face with few options left available to me. All I could do is accept the likely loss while continuing to play out the remainder of the game.

A week passed . . . and someone posted they had been notified as taking second in the "Applications->Business/Finance" section. Final placement emails were being sent out to determine the victors of the "tournament". After a day of hearing nothing, an email from Nokia appeared for me and . . . the comeback had occurred. After expecting notification of my crushing defeat, I had taken 1st in my category. For $150,000. One Hundred and Fifty Thousand dollars. Unbelievable.



As with my first Starcraft victory, it just changes everything. What was once thought to be improbable now turns possible and I can shed my "newbie" status in a new field.

The finalists in all of the categories are now publicly available and possibly worth a look. Most surprising is that popular titles like "Fruit Ninja", "Slice It!", and "Bang! The Official Video Game" all failed to win their respective categories. At the very least, studying such results can lead to learning what wins such challenges in the future.

I've already written a great deal, so this will be shorted than it actually should be. Basically: I'm thinking of quitting my 8-5 day job. Don't get me wrong - I actually like my current position. We program primarily in Django (Python) with some legacy support of Ruby on Rails/PHP/JSF applications that are all good skills to develop. We do Code Reviews (Reitveld), Unit Testing (Hudson), Issue Tracking (Trac), Version Control (SVN/GIT), etc etc. It's just a talented group using real development practices (unlike early in my career, where I had to work in "put today's fire out" type of shops). It's a secure position and the health benefits cannot be beat.

But . . . I've always wanted to work on games. Furthermore, I'd like to keep up career-wise with my younger brother. We both used to be competitive in gaming (albeit, him always more successful than myself, with his winning of a car at one point in Warcraft 3 and averaging $12,000 salary/prize winnings a year) and now he is kicking my butt in the career world. Unlike myself, he got his MBA after his Computer Engineering degree, and just accepted a nice six figure salary from Amazon that is more than double what I currently make. As someone who actually "creates stuff", I'm not going to be able to compete against one who "attends meetings" in the normal USA corporate world. (I still think our current system is so screwed up, but this is a tangent).

The only way to compete is to go start-up, and it frankly does frighten me. I've always "played it safe". I placed college first. I placed my day job first. Stuff that was uncertain (pro-gaming and mobile development) have always been done strictly as a hobby. I've never given them a "real go".

And it has reached a point where the "part-time" label just doesn't cut it anymore. In gaming, I ran up against this after 2008. Up until that point, I had been able to compete in gaming "part-time" in side events. In particular, in 2008, I won Carom3D at the US Open ($700) and took 2nd for Asphalt 4 at the WCG Grand Finals ($5,000). After that . . . I couldn't do squat. The economy ate up all of the side events and the main events (like SC2) have become filled with tons of people doing it full-time. One just cannot compete 10 hours/week against thirty players in an average event doing 50 hours/week.

In mobile development, I am running up against the same hurdle. Complexity is increasing fast, and the expected quality of content has become quite high. I won't be able to duplicate this success "part-time" and the mobile eco-system is shifting to only 2-3 mobile platforms to prevent "side events" like the Nokia one above.

So - I'm just about to take my leap of faith to see what I can do. In both areas (progaming and programming), there will always be winners and losers, so it is quite a risk that I will be one of those who fail. I see many posts of those who want to "go pro in SC2" on these forums when only a fraction will ever succeed - most will become untold stories of failure that those that gain their fame are able to rise from. It is something I am well aware of.

However, I do have a solid financial stockpile now to fund an attempt. I have to hope that if I fail, I'll be able to get another decent corporate job from my background. I think I should be able to find another position somewhere assuming the USA economy doesn't crash further.

It is worth noting that the mixture of progamming and programming above is what I do plan to attempt to do during this time. While the majority of my focus will be on mobile development, I will also likely give professional gaming a try, albeit not likely in SC2. The money is SC2 just isn't there yet to support more than the cream of the crop and I do not feel I am "top 10" material. Rather, I think I'll be trying League of Legends if the $5 million a year really does materialize. At that amount of funding, it could support 100 gamers at $50,000/year . . . or one just has to be "top 100" material, a level I think I am able to achieve at 20-25 hours a week. Of course, will still likely continue to watch SC2 and play it occasionally - but casual time spent on a game is a whole different story.

In terms of mobile development, I have a few novel ideas to try out. Additionally, I've been working a RTS/Tower Defense hybrid called "iCommand: Persia Strikes" for about 2.5 years now. I've sunk about $40,000 into the project (40 pages of voice acting, artwork, music, etc) that sits unfinished as I just often cannot find the time to complete the "hardest 20%" that needs to be done along with other projects often taking time away from it (Mystic Maggie, EDU Duel, etc). Planning to make a new promo of this within the next two months as being able to do in a week what used to take two months should greatly allow me to close the gaps that need to be filled. Oh - and if you happen to be an amazing artist or if you know of someone talented who might want to work on some mobile projects (small hourly rate up front plus small percentage share of profits), send me a PM.

All of this is up in the air - still figuring things out!