Goodnight, Volity

[prog]

Sunday evening I "launched" a project I've been quietly focusing on for a few weeks: the shutdown and dissolution of Volity Games. The fact of it's been an open secret for a little while, especially to those closer to the company. But the farewell page (with text written by Zarf) finally went up on Sunday night, replacing all Volity and Planbeast

Comments

[radtea]

There's no better education than actually going out there and doing it, so well done.

[radiotelescope]

I still disagree about the "nadir of nerdism" thing.

[karlvonl]

Was it me that you saw playing Fluxx? I was perusing my hard drive, and noticed that I still had the Gamut sources. I hadn't launched it in years, but was curious to see whether the servers were all still up and running. It's only by the most amazing of coincidences that this happened on the very last day that it was working!

Why take down Planbeast, though? The last time you blogged about it, I got the impression people were actually using it.

[prog]

It might have been you! I didn't see who it was. That someone was playing Fluxx wasn't in and of itself weird; we ran the only Looney-endorsed internet-capable Fluxx game in the world (as far as I know), and never stopped receiving a steady trickle of new-user registrations just to play that.

Planbeast did go through a phase of moderate usage at around this time last year, when I promoted it on a web forum that I was hanging out on. But it didn't catch on very far beyond that, and its momentum inevitably died away.

I'm still thinking about it, though. I keep finding new evidence that the problems that Planbeast wanted to solve still exist, and I've collected some invaluable encouragement from the Boston indie-gamedev community. I'm quite convinced that last year's planbeast.com simply didn't quite provide the right answer; it was far too complicated, and lost sight of the question. I aim to try again.

[xijumist]

Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.