A Cartoon About Poppies

My body just gave out last night and I slept most of the evening. I'm not feeling particularly better this morning, though there's definitely a fretful edge about me as I now worry about possible bugs in the game. As I've said previously, we live in a strange age where the consumer is God and I now feel utterly obliged to fix everything and anything that might be wrong with my code.

It's a odd place to be. On the one hand, I feel like I've come to the end of a journey of many months, when every day I've had to figure out another problem or learn to do something new and often difficult. The reality is that I'm now judged by strangers with the power of clicking on a star rating which can either destroy me or build me up. Yet I also understand that there's no way of knowing the real value of that rating. In the internet age, we're used to rating things and people sometimes rate out of sheer spite or malicious intent. We're also in throwaway age, when people try and discard with equal indifference. For me, however, all of that is plumbed directly into my central nervous system and strangers now have the power to make me feel sick and faint, buzzing or glad, miserable or elated. Never look at the reviews has always been a motto I live by. With Google, you can't avoid it. It's there, visible and unavoidable, when you need to examine the bug reports for your code.

But that's for tomorrow. For me, today , I just feel so damn happy that I wrote 10,000 lines of code which made a kind of logical sense.

All of the above was rattling around in my head, last night, when I fell asleep. When I awoke I tried to relax by drawing a cartoon. Taking the encouragement of Ben as my starting point, I thought I'd try to change my style. I can't honestly say I followed any example, though I was looking at some cartoons by Bill Stott earlier in the evening and had I realised how much I enjoy lines which aren't straight. So I tried to draw this with a deliberately unsteady hand. After a couple of less successful attempts, I began to settle into a style and I drew three cartoons in rapid succession and I was surprised that I liked the results.

The Last Day?

Today I intend to make the last day I work on this game before launching it. Whether that comes to pass, I don't know. Other business crowds my schedule and I'm finding it difficult to squeeze in enough quiet hours to stare at code, trace logic, and track down the last remaining bugs. I've finally decided that I'll publish two versions, having discovered that advertising inside apps/game tends to earn so very little that I might as well maximise my chances by offering an ad-free version of the game. Not that any of this game is meant to make me a fortune but even a few quid from all my efforts would be rewarding.

Income for work. It's a strangely old fashioned notion in this world where everybody works for nothing or works for very little. Somebody once told me (I think through a comment on this blog) that I should charge £60 an hour for building websites. I laughed. That's so far from my reality that it's depressing. The smaller the world becomes, the smaller wages become. There's always some genius in China or India willing to do the same work for a twentieth of the price. I was thinking the other day how the best jobs might be those that demand a local presence, like window cleaning or sweeping the streets. There's no chance of that work moving to Bangalor, which is a good thing since I reckon it's probably the job I'll end up doing.

We live in a single dollar economy with countless websites offering a place where workers can offer their skills for the price of a book of stamps. Amazon, one of the richest companies on the planet, encourage authors to publish their books for pennies or for nothing, as part of their loan scheme, where they promise you a share in a million dollar pot. They also run Amazon Turk, which is a depressing example of modern labour economics. App and game development is the same. The market is overcrowded, with small independent publishers struggling to overcome the advertising might of companies like EA, Zinga and Supercell. Hard work is being rewarded with poverty and only the love of the business (or, perhaps more realistically, the dream of making a fortune) keep people making the apps.

It was always thus, you might say and quality will always rise to the top. I'm not so sure, though my app, I hasten to add, won't fall into either bracket of poor or bad. I'm too small, tired, and busy to make it anything more than my 'best effort'. I hope to publish in the next couple of days and then I'll talk more about it. For now, I have bugs to hunt and pennies to earn.