I’ve seen two types of producers when it comes to assigning priorities. The first type of producer has learned the lesson’s from Dilbert books: “rate everything ‘top priority’ except ‘personal life and hobbies’”. The other type of producer really understand that marking everything ‘top priority’ really solves nothing, they gotta be decisive about what tasks are more important than others.

Today I went through some Dead Wake zombie game ideas suggested by the community members. There were several pages of them. There were some really good ideas. Some ideas would require little resource, while some might not be possible to do with an indie budget.

I started pondering how to decide which ideas were the most important ones to consider, and I got this idea about rating the threads feature that’s in the forums software. I wrote a brief entry and welcomed members to give their ratings.

I don’t know if players will want to rank everything ’5 stars’, and don’t know if this experiment produces anything worth using, but at least I decided to give it a go. If it doesn’t work, we can forget the ratings and try something else.

Anyway, now the zombie game community members are ranking ideas and we’ll see if they do a better job than some producers…

So, I’ve got my brand new computer parts and have been using the new fancy Windows Vista for about a week. After a friend of mine mentioned that it’s possible to disable the Vista’s in-built User Account Control (or UAC) my life improved drastically. When UAC was enabled, Vista was constantly bugging me and asking security questions. After taking that off, I’m saved! That’s the newbie tip for anybody who is getting annoyed by the frequent questions that are presented as ‘Better Security’. To make Vista using smoother, I disabled the darn thing and now things are much better.

Ok, so that was the first newbie tip.

The second newbie tip is that gadgets are useful. There’s a nice gadget called Notes that let you create post-it notes on your desktop. I started using notes to track ‘promises’ I’m making. Whenever I promise something (such as ‘new sales stats are coming’) I’ll write a short note using the gadget. It’s simple, it’s easy, and I like it.

I even created a very tiny experimental Time Tracking gadget that has two features: you can write one description line and then start the stopwatch. I thought about mixing these two gadgets together: I’d soon have a very simple & nice way to write to do items and track time used on them. I got 700 other ideas when I started to think this, so I decided to stop getting too eager about this fancy project management gadget. Anyway, the post-it notes gadget alone is a great thing.

I’m still learning to use Vista, and so far it’s been a positive surprise (I didn’t expect anything from it, besides DirectX10 support so that I could test to see how Crysis runs…). Vista loads much faster than XP. The Vista’s search is nice. The user interface feels bit more ‘user friendly’ (Don’t know why) and it seems to do some stuff under the hood really well (for example when I first launched my computer, I needed to do just one mouse click to get networking to work – I was amazed: in previous versions I had to install loads of stuff, press buttons, pull hair, summon mystical beasts, pray and plug and somehow things started to work). Last but not least, Vista seems more stable than earlier Windows versions.

I do think Vista is bit like a ‘fancier version of XP’, but at this point I’m not turning back. I like Vista. I like that the security systems can be made less intrusive. The system feels good to use. Crysis runs nicely.

And I like the gadgets.

Nothing to complain here.

Over thousand people have read the game production cookbook and several hundreds have already got the free guide to advertising. I’m informing my old newsletter subscribers that in order to get these goodies (among other good stuff I’ll be sending every now and then), you need to subscribe to the mailing list.

If you want to know when there’s some special good stuff (such as new game sales stats available) then subscribe to the mailing list and I’ll let you know.

I have about close to two thousand people on my old list, and there’s people who haven’t yet renewed their subscription after I switched my mailing list provider. Your email is kept safe (I’m not giving nor selling it to anybody) and you are free to unsubscribe by clicking the link in the end of any email you get from me.

In order to make sure you don’t miss any free goodies, put your name & email in the list. I’ll send you the Cookbook and Ad Trap ebooks as soon as you subscribe.

P.S. I have new sales statistics and top notch producer rountable session coming up. Stay tuned.