Goldraven

The business started in January 2020, like most, because I wanted to make some money doing what I love to do. In the long term, I envision a popular, profitable, branded series of Indie games that are known for unique gameplay, humor, and strategy. The mission is to secure that vision by providing a single, scalable flagship product supported by smaller, low-scope standalones.

Charlie

I’ve been coding and playing games all my life. I started in 1980, by telling my mother I could help her do taxes using an Apple II (she owned an H&R Block franchise back when that meant something). She laughed me out of the room, but then hired me later that year to make sense of an accounting package made for an IBM machine. It was about that time I found Avalon Hill and buried myself in a pile of chits for a few years (Squad Leader & ASL, Rail Baron, Civilization…).

Eventually (around 1990) I decided to get serious about an IT career instead of depending on nepotism for my living. I started going to school full time and working part time, but that quickly reversed. Luckily, my employer understood and encouraged, so I was able to get a four year degree in only seven years. I did a lot less gaming that decade, but switched from Empires in Arms (anybody remember that rulebook??) to MS Flight Simulator and Doom (+Doom II, Heretic & Hexen, Lemmings, Civ, Myst, Quake II…). I was also finally stable enough to start a family; both my boys were born while I was in school.

New century, new life. Divorce, job burnout, both parents died; just not a good time. But it was fun to teach a nine year old how to beat my butt at Quake. Eventually married again (the boys approved) and turned my back on the whole IT computer thing. After about five years of doing something completely different, I woke up and realized I was building a Cloud in my basement. For fun. In my spare time. And I had picked up a couple of useless certs, like an A+. (I hate doing hardware maintenance, especially on WinDoze.) And so the tug of war began again between what I love to do (coding for myself) and what I hate to do (coding for other people).

Goldraven is my answer to that dilemma – getting the tools to build computer games now is absurdly easy. All it takes is a computer with a decent graphics card and an internet connection. The core software is all free. The education can be found for free or close to it. What is hard is making any money from building games. Like, any money. So I hedged. I built a few WordPress sites. I did a webdev bootcamp. I kept my day job. But I also bought a decent graphics card and a box to put it in. I learned Unity (mostly because I found it before Unreal). I asked my son for advice. I did my business homework and got an LLC and a separate bank account.

And now here I am, taking a deep breath and diving in full time. I have coding experience: close to 30 years of it. I’ve run a business before, no surprises there. My weaknesses are with art and music; if anyone wants to help out with either of those, let me know and we can negotiate. I have a good idea for a game or two. And I have a clue as to how much work I still need, to make an idea into a functioning application. I’ve done that part before. What’s new is enjoying it. I hope you enjoy the results, and if you feel like watching the process, hit that Patreon button. I plan on keeping everything I do transparent and real for my subscribers.