sonic hurricane dot com

For better or worse, i finally decided to take the plunge into a (rather intimidating) game design career, which means three things.

First, the industry is known for demanding ridiculous work hours, so updates will most likely stay slow around here. I’ll try to keep ComboVid.com updated on a fairly regular basis, but no promises there either. And i may disappear completely for three-month stretches whenever a major deadline is coming up. That’s how it goes.

Second, i’ll probably spend quite a bit more time rambling about vague game mechanics. In fact, here’s a new Game Design category intended for exactly that purpose exclamation-point.

Third, i’ll have to cancel the DVD and refund everybody’s money. Any other choice would be inviting legal disaster. It was a dangerous gamble before, but it’s a lose-lose situation now.

I’ll dig up each preorder and issue refunds manually later this week – since paypal doesn’t have an automated option for payments beyond 60 days, which in this case is all of them.

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If you could magically (or scientifically or telepathically) travel back in time to the moment you started liking fighting games and, knowing everything you know now, decide to hate them instead (then instantly forget all your future-knowledge), would you do it? Why or why not?

Please include a few basic background details about yourself: roughly how long you’ve been playing, which fighting game you’ve played the most, how many tournaments you’ve entered, where you racked up the majority of your playing time, etc.

A couple of people e-mailed me about the DVD, so i thought it might be a good idea to provide one last project update before the end of the year – even though there’s no major news.

I’m not any closer to having a tentative release date or even a rough timetable, but i still intend to complete the DVD whenever i can. Of course i feel bad about SF4 TACV 14 taking so long, but it’s been very hard to find time for anything lately. It’s (slowly) coming along though. With any luck, that Balrog / Chun Li episode should be ready by the end of the month.

In all honesty, trying to finish the DVD is pretty much the only motivation i have for continuing that video series. The way i see it, the people who pre-ordered are the ones who supported me in the most tangible sense, so you’re the people i’m most concerned about disappointing.

I’m sorry that i don’t have better news, but that’s where i stand at the moment. Hopefully things’ll get better in the next few months. In the meantime, if anyone is unhappy with how long this is taking, please let me know and i’ll send you a full refund – no questions asked.

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Well, i think we can all agree – the reaction to my last two posts has been … outright chaotic. However the most common response by far has been genuine surprise. A lot of people simply didn’t know what was going on with these “news” hubs leeching content for profit.

Everyone’s been asking what they can do to help original content producers, and i’ve heard all sorts of elaborate, unrealistic suggestions. There’s no reason to make it so complicated.

As a matter of fact, it’s pretty simple. When you see something cool, take a moment to figure out where it actually came from, and support the original author by posting a link directly to the source webpage or channel. Post on your personal blog, or favorite forum, or social media site, or wherever. It takes five minutes and helps the author tremendously!

Aside from the obvious benefit of driving traffic straight to the source, those links also help the author’s webpage get a better search engine ranking. If we all link to real author websites instead of getting lazy and linking to news aggregators, it’ll help content producers a lot.

It’s common sense, really. When you enjoy something, just ask yourself, “Who deserves the credit for making this happen? How can i support them to encourage them to make more?” Basically you just have to make sure that you’re backing the content producer and not the middleman, because the middleman certainly isn’t going to create more of what you enjoy.

If you want to point out a combo video, then link to the author’s transcript or video webpage. If you’d like to share an article or interview, link to wherever the author originally published it. If you feel like discussing tournament results, try to find them on the organizer’s website first. You get the idea, right? That’s all there is to it.

There seems to be some confusion regarding my choice to back away, and the motivations behind it. If ya’ll don’t mind, i’d like to explain my perspective one last time in depth.

I started making combo videos eight years ago and maintained a steady pace of 2-3 articles and 3-4 combovids per year for a long time. Anyone who’s ever made a decent combo video will tell you that it’s mentally and physically exhausting, especially towards the end of the process when you can see the finish line and all you want to do is get it over with.

Back in those days, i used to take three to six month breaks to recover between each project. That rhythm was more or less sustainable. From 2002-2008, i never had a single ad banner on my website and never made a single dime from Sonic Hurricane or any of my videos. And obviously it cost money to host them because this was before u2b existed.

Last year i decided to try a different approach. I installed this wordpress platform and began writing weekly technical and strategy articles, capturing weekly screenshots, and a lot more along those lines. I even borrowed a friend’s PS3 and started making SF4 combovids and preparing custom challenges every two weeks.

I thought if i went all-in with creating original content on a regular weekly basis, i could reach my arbitrary goal of earning minimum wage on the hours i invest here. That would enable me to continue treating it as sort of a part-time job for as long as people enjoyed my work. I gave myself six months to reach that objective.

It’s been fifteen months. Literally every minute of my free time has gone into this experiment, at a rate of 5-7 hours per day – more when i’m working on a video. So far it’s earning me barely $1 a day, most of which i’ve handed over to web hosts and the post office.

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