The business plan is coming together. I'm working with the Coleman
Entrepreneur Center at Depaul University (http://cec.depaul.edu/) on
it and getting help filling in the places that I need help with
(marketing mostly).

I have business advisors for legal, accounting, business management,
project management, book publishing, book distribution, and
edutainment (an ex-Pixar employee that worked on Toy Story games). I'm
still looking for a marketing advisor.

I have decided to drop the WCP name and go with Textfyre as the
corporation name. Note the fancy logo at http://www.textfyre.com.

I have a detailed project plan and tasks assigned and started.
Basically this means that all of the work for the first six months of
Textfyre's business is tasked out and scheduled. Most of the tasks
have people assigned to them.

Although I still need designers and writers, I do have people for most
of the work for the first three scheduled games, including writers,
coders, testers, editors, and a graphic artist.

Each game will be available for download or on CD. The CD versions
will come in a DVD case with a game-specific cover and a game-specific
comic book inside. Posters will also be available for each game.

I'm still gathering information on website designers and have yet to
select one to do this work. Since I want a really nice website, this
is becoming a budget issue and I'm trying to find the right balance of
cost vs. quality. I want a Disney quality website without the $100,000
price tag. (I know, good luck with that one...)

The UI is being built by someone from within the IF community. It will
be a modified Glulx interpreter built in C#. This means that the
initial release of Textfyre games will be Windows only and require
the .NET framework. It looks like the install base for the .NET
framework is roughly 40% to 50%, so that's not very good for
downloads, but I plan to push hardcopy sales more than downloads
anyway. I also plan to push hard to make the UI cross-platform as soon
as possible. All games will eventually be available for OS X and Linux
and possibly for handlhelds. I beg for patience on this issue as I
know it's a deal-breaker for many people here.

The "launch" date is still fluid and will remain unannounced for
various reasons. The hardest target date I'm willing to offer at this
point is "sometime this year".

I would give you more about the games, but for legal reasons, I need
to keep that information close. Once the international trademark
issues are ironed out, I will probably send out the proverbial "press
release".

I started this process eight months ago. It has progressed far better
than I ever imagined it would and it's nearing the execution phase.
I've gotten support where none was expected.

I'm getting very excited.

Textfyre is coming....