Well, fuck. It seems that Quark, my 4-year old "work" system has succumbed to click-rot. It doesn't appear to see any hard drives available and considering the current drive is screwed in pretty tightly I'm guessing it's the dreaded laptop hard drive click of death. The timing could not be worse. Fortunately all of my data should be backed up and current, but this will slow efforts on my game and I've been trying to get things ready for PAX. My other laptop (Quiche, friendly neighborhood Ubuntu machine and device unto which I expound this current situation) isn't equipped to handle the development environment that I need.

Quark and Quiddity both haunt me as brain dead shells of what they once were and I'm left debating my options. I could try for a new hard drive for Quark, other than the hard drive I think the rest of the system is fairly good shape. Easiest would be to buy a new system, but I was hoping to hold that off until I had a bit more actual income... No matter what I'm not entirely excited about having to rebuild my environment and seek out as many licenses as I can from boxes and CD stacks... It's certainly a nasty set back for time with only a few more weeks to PAX! It may be that I should spend the money I was planning to invest in a PAX trip into the new computer, which will be sad but that's the world of the small business owner pretending to be a graduate student... By the way, anyone interested in investing in a small business?

Meanwhile, the last build I published to my partners should be an almost demo of the game... I had a major bug fix built but hadn't gotten to publishing it. I'm going to look into borrowing someone else's system to get that build posted as soon as I can, and maybe it will be enough for PAX in case I decide to go the route of ordering a new system and needing a few weeks for delivery. I'm not entirely satisfied with the current state of the game, but maybe it will have to do...

I saw the Community Games announcement and it sounds pretty good and just the news I was hoping to hear. 70% of 800 points should be around $7/sale, which seems like a pretty good deal and more than I expected from Microsoft for Community Games, particular if the rumors about XBLA contracts with independent developers are true (~10-20%). If the GfW group gets there act together and a good Windows Community Games Marketplace together in time I might be pretty happy to try the "self-publishing" route via Community Games' peer review system...

Posting this from the Great Harvest in Plainview. Great Harvest is awesome, naturally.