Sunday, August 31, 2014

Here is for hope! I believe in Miracles!

I know that it has been a while since I had last posted. There have been many different things that I have been changing as a company. There are a number of different thoughts that I want to share with people. This first thought is who I am. The second thought is why did I decide to make my business. The third thought is what have I taken away from the last year.

So first, a little over a year ago, I was not an app developer. My work background is in Purchasing and Logistics Management. I served four years active duty. I served in Iraq during that time. I am also a traditional reservist in the military and currently do social work there. I am a father, a husband, and an active member of my faith. I am adventurous and do challenging things.

For my education, I have an MBA in International Business. My Bachelors degree is in Management/ Logistics and I have three associate degrees, one of which is in social sciences. I am also a certified production and inventory manager. I earned all these degrees and my certification while working a full time job. This required great sacrifice for both me and my family.

I met my wife about 10 years ago. It is hard to believe it has been that long. Time has really gone fast. We have beautiful children and a nice old house. We have really worked hard to get where we are. So where did I come from and how did I get here?

I grew up all over the place. I was born in Wisconsin. My family moved when I was young to Utah. My parents have seven boys and one girl. I was the fifth child. We lived in Utah until I started middle school. We moved to Idaho at the point. There my family lived in small mobile home. There was only two bedrooms and one bathroom. After we lived there for a couple years, we moved to Nevada. That is where I graduated from high school.

I like to think that my family lived perhaps more humble then other families I have meet. I know that there are a few that lived like we did. About a year into living in Nevada, my parents bought a 20 acre lot and moved the small mobile home onto it. It was off the power grid. My family received electricity from a generator that did not always run! We would have maybe a few hours a day. Our water came from a well.

Even though it might sound odd to think about living like that, our lives were pretty simple. I feel I have character coming from an environment like that as a youth. It kept me out of trouble. I am very grateful to have electricity today! I feel very grateful for the things that I do have and know that things can certainly be worse. I am grateful for my family.

I started my first job working for my bishop. I ran farm equipment for him. It was one of the best jobs I had. I am very grateful for him. His example and life has shown me that I can do more with myself. He helped me go and serve a mission for my faith.

I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I served my two year mission in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. This mission formed me for the rest of my life. It taught me to be selfless and willing work with people. It taught me how to pray and love people. For all young men of my faith, I encourage you to go.

After my mission, I went to LDS Business College in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. I met my wonderful wife and could not have married a better woman. We were married in an LDS Temple in Utah. We have done things right and it has made a big difference in our lives. One of the things we decided early in our lives was to not go into any debt. This decision has had huge positive impacts in our lives.

I worked as a security guard. It was the best college job you could have. I did many of my assignments in the quiet a.m. hours of the morning while doing my duties. My bosses knew and encourage that. They did not want us falling asleep on the job. Plus most people were happy to get away from homework if anyone needed anything, or it was time for the security rounds.

My wife and I ended up having our first child about a year after we here married. I then went active duty in the military. I remember very clearly the conversation that my wife and I had. She did not want me to join. There were many risks, some of which included dying and long separations. We did anyway. It was the best financial decision we made.

I was able to have my entire college education paid for by the military with their tuition assistance. I never knew that I would have been a college graduate as a young man. The experiences were great! I was loved being in the military.

A good member of my faith finds out very quickly they have an advantage over others who are not members of our faith in the military. It is because our supervisors do not need to lose sleep over us. We tend to be more disciplined and controlled in our lives. That is not always the case, but I could see that most faithful members did very well in their military service, doing very much good all the time.

Soon my enlistment was up.My wife and I had goals. We wanted to buy a house with cash, having no debt or mortgage. My brother introduced us to the South Dakota area near Sioux Falls. There we found everything we wanted. It was a commute, but the neighborhood had low crime, the schools had good ratings, and the homes were where we could buy them. We decided to move there. I shortly found a job working in corporation doing purchasing. I did that for three years.

I learned more then I thought possible in those three years. I am glad that I had the opportunity to work with the people that I worked with and companies that I did. It helped me understand a whole new type of organization. I am always intrigued with how organizations do things.

I always had the goal of starting my own business. I believe that the Lord has his hand in all things. My wife and I needed a change. I felt that I was not going anywhere with my job. It was a good job that paid well. I just did not feel that it would ever grow to more, or grow to where I really wanted to be. I decided to start my own business.

I have always wanted to make products for my faith. I felt as a child the entertainment that we had for our faith was limited and not all that good. I saw this as a prime market. I needed to learn it though. I start out by making children books. They were simple and something that I could do fast. I wasn't really good at it. They did not do well at all. I thought I would do a little better, but I was not surprised. I wanted to get into app development and I saw the books as a stepping platform.

Here was my problem. I had experience with programming in visual basic. I would use it to make custom reports, forms, and databases to streamline processes for my work. It was a lot of fun for me. The problem was, I had never had a programming class in my life. Before I quit my job, I took one C++ class. I loved it, as it showed me the basic structures of programming. I am always learning more, but I feel empowered now.

I had to make a decision too. Did I want to go back to school to learn everything about computer programming? I would lose three more years and would have to postpone my business. I decided that I had better just do the business and focus on that for now. I eventually found my way into programming games. It was odd how it all came about, but I have been doing that now for about a year.

These are the reasons why I choose the area that I did to start this business. First, it is an emerging market. It's barriers to market are low and the cost to get start is low if you have no overhead. The problem is the competition. Everyone else can do this too. That is where having a well defined target market comes into play. I have that now.

My family is debt free and we own everything that we have. That makes it very possible to do things that most people cannot do. I have been able to learn something new and devote a lot of time to learn a whole new discipline and Industry. I still need to learn a lot, but I feel that I have a good grasp now of what I am doing.

This last year has really taught me a lot. First I learned that God knows all things. He can be in control of our lives, if we let him. There are no accidents or co-incidents. Never would I have thought that I would be creating a game for my faith all by myself. Lehi's Escape was all done by me, except for the voices and editing of my family. He will direct us. There are direct paths that God wants us to go down and each choice matters. Until you understand this, you will never find your calling in life.

Second, I learned that I need to do what I know I am suppose to do. I prayed and got a clear answer from God that this is what he wanted me to do. I did not know the details or what purpose he had for me, but I know that he wanted me to do a work for him.

Third, I learned that if anything in this life is going to happen, I am the one who is going to have to do it. No one, and I mean no one, is going to magically come down and fix my life for me. Sure that is always some dream of big cash flow that comes true for some people, but the facts are that will never happen for me or my family, unless I go out and earn it. If something big is going to happen in my life, I am the one who is going to have to make it happen.

Fourth, I saw that I was capable. Maybe not at first, but that I could be. I learned to see people, including myself in what I can become. This new vision in life has greatly impacted life. I always believed I could do great things, but now I am doing it. It has been a great blessing, but also a great sadness too. I people that really do great things with their lives and others that I think will never see themselves as what the can and aught to become, for whatever reason.

Fifth, I learned that to make a good video game it takes a lot of time! There are many details and everything matters. You can reduce this time if you want to pay a lot of money.

Sixth, I learned it is okay to fail. It is and if anyone is going to be anything really great, they have to fail. That comes with trying. Through perfect practice, you can become perfect though. Perfect practice is my goal. Trying to do better each day and using the time to that most that Heavenly Father has given me. I learned that I can repent each day, do better, and build on the last.

So in closing, I hope that this blog can help people understand that if anything good in this life is going to happen, we have to believe in God, believe in ourselves, and then go and work our hearts out to do good for others and our families. These are things that I believe in. Here is for hope! I believe in Miracles!

Saturday, June 28, 2014

I just wanted to add a list to help new game developers get started. These are the things that I am currently using to create my mobile game app Lehi's Escape. This list of resources would have been a great help to me when I first started. So here is some information that I sent to a friend to help him get started.

Here is a list of Open source software that can be used for mobile app developement:

1.Unity- a free game engine for people and companies making less than $100k. Animation, Game production, Coding, and deployment can all be done in here. For 2D and 3D games. www.Unity3d.com/unity

2. Gimp2 - photoshop type program but free. http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

3. Inkscape - a vector image program. http://www.inkscape.org/en/

4. Blender.org - A 3D image, movie, animation, and game engine. I use this mostly for animations and modeling. http://www.blender.org/download/

5. Audacity- Voice recording software. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

6. LMMS- Sound production software. http://lmms.sourceforge.net/home.php

7. It would also be good to start a free Copy account. This is 15 GB of cloud space to backup projects in case your computer crashes and then you can share the projects with other people who may also be working on your team.https://www.copy.com/home/

Those are the programs that I currently use for my app development.

Here are some things that you would probably like when you start to develop:

1. Good Computer:
 These are the current specs my my computer:
     Windows 8.1
     8 core processor 3.11 GHz
     32 GB Ram
     nVidia GeForce GT 640 video card
    1 TB harddrive

Now other specs can work as well, but this gives you an idea. I have had no issues running the software on this computer.

2. Microphone- I use Blue Mic Snowball, 2 condensors, and it records well, but any computer microphone could be used. I have recorded sounds with my ipad Mini.

3. keyboard with MIDI Input/Output with MIDI to usb adapter will work too with software.

4. Keyboard with number pad. The number pad is very import for blender

5. 3 button mouse(wheel is usually the third button). This is critical in blender as well.

6. Monitors- I have three Monitors. It really helps with testing and development, but you can get by with one. Once you start using more, you will see why I love having multiple monitors. It allows production to go faster, i.e. I have coding on one screen, asset placement on another and the actual game testing on the third.

Other hardware that I do not have, but would get once the business grows:

7. Render Farm- This is a series of PC boards linked with CPU, RAM and shared hard drives. It allows multiple images to be processed at once. This is very good for animated movie production. These can be as expensive as you would like them to be.

8.Drawing pad. This will help with the modeling and texture creation. You can get apps on ipad or android that have same functionality, but a pressure sensitive pen is also critical. 

There are some other good gaming engines and programs out there. The only other one that I will mention to you is the Unreal engine. This engine does not transfer to all the mobile devices, but is a very beautiful game engine. There is a fee to use it, but I am keeping an eye on it, as I may change over to that engine as they open up to more devices. Right now it only works on higher end devices, but the fee is $20 a month and %5 royalty on sales, but is the complete game engine, where unity free has limitations with it. I can go over all those with you another day if you would like, but for now, Unity is easy to use and learn. I would start with the following links and tutorials. You can see how easily you can make a game.

This is a simple roll-a-ball set of tutorials:

This is to help with scripting if you are very new to programming and will go over programming basics:



I do have some youtube tutorials that you can watch on blender. The tutorials are okay and teach some of the more basic things in blender. I need to make some more, but I have not had time. www.youtube.com/channel/UC653Y5bO_f4-Yg1T_p7rXrw

I hope that this helps. I have not worked so long hours in my life since I started doing this, but I am excited everyday to work on the projects I do.

Saturday, November 9, 2013

The hassles of publishing a mobile is known to many, but not so many. Who do you actually know that has published a gaming app? Unless you are in the industry, you probably know very few. It is a challenge and fierce market. There are over one hundred thousand gaming apps in the market, so one must ask themselves, what is the best way to penetrate the market and get a small foot hold in a battling market. One must remember that those that build and deploy mobile games may be just as fierce and violent as some of the games that they produce and it will not be an easy task.

When I think of the challenges that we all face in the industry, a few tips come to mind. One, find your niche market. You do not have to compete with the entire market, just the few apps that are similar to yours. Find them and see what the bench marks are. Get better at your designing process and take positive feed back lightly and negative feedback serious. Improve every day and do not be afraid of it.

There are also the costs to consider. If you only made $500 off the app, would it be worth it to you? What type of team do you have and skilled are you? On your team you should have people with the following skill sets: Someone exceptionally good at 3D modeling or making sprints, depending on your platform. Someone good at texturing. You will need someone who can do animation. You will also need someone good at sound management. The sound aspect of a game can make or break it. There is also a need for one who is very good at programming. The actual coding of the game develops the overall feel and success of the app.

Now, if you are just like me, you should learn all the different tools available to you. If you are on a budget, then consider the different challenges you need to face. If you cannot afford to have someone else do the modeling or animations of  you characters, you had better start learning and fast. You will soon see that time is you most valuable asset and the more you have of it, the better you will do.

These are just a few of my thoughts for today. Next time I write, I will go into the different tools that I have used and the overall process in game development.

Thanks for Reading,
Freeman Hyzer, CPIM
CEO of The Hyzer Company LLC

Saturday, August 18, 2012

We are a new company that focuses on electronic goods and software. At this time we have just published our first app, Mobi Donut. We hope that people are able to enjoy the game. If there are any issues or comments about the game and you do not want to place your remarks in the play store, you are welcome to place them here. I will be adding more information here as time goes on to help others who are interested in game development to learn a few things from my experience.

Thanks,
Freeman Hyzer, CPIM,
CEO of The Hyzer Company, LLC