Joe Martin – Product Marketing for Startups

October was busy, because I’m always busy and I wouldn’t have it any other way, etc. I even managed to get out of the house a fair bit, assembling a game of Artemis: The Spaceship Simulator with a bunch of other games journalists and somehow attending the Games Media Awards too, even though I wasn’t nominated.

Oh, yeah. The GMAs. I should probably talk about that.

Understand: I don’t actually want to. I feel like, between them, John and Dan have said everything which needs to be said – but I’m still getting people asking me for my thoughts. In brief they are: Yes, there are problems. No, I did not enter the competitions. Yes, the abuse being thrown around over all this is terrible. Yes, so is the censorship.

Other than that, I’m more interested in actually trying to solve the (very real) problems, rather than talking them to death. To that end I’m working with my some of my editors to outline an informal Code of Conduct for the younger writers we work with to refer to; because if anyone is right about anything in all this then it’s Lewis Denby about everything.

But that’s enough about all that. This post is supposed to be about what I’ve done this month, which is a lot.

Firstly, in case you missed the post at the start of the month: I curated and published a book! It’s called The Science of Computing and it’s available on Amazon now. Go buy it in triplicate!

October also saw me contribute to a number of new publications for the first time. Gameranx were the first of these, contacting me to take on a column I’d written about whether the games industry had travelled back in time. Then, Trusted Reviews got in touch to take on the first of a series of features that’ll continue into November – though the first of these isn’t up yet.

Beyond that I also did my usual work for Custom PC Magazine and Bit-tech – I’m proud of my Dishonored reviews in particular – but I also did extra work for them too. Bit-tech took on a few extra articles about Medal of Honor: Warfighter, for example, while Custom PC Magazine got a feature about the future of game financing. That’s not as boring as it sounds, hopefully. It’s about the philosophies various developers use to approach models such as advergaming and free-to-play.

Custom PC wasn’t the only place I wrote a feature for this month either; PC Pro Magazine also let me run an investigation on deleting yourself from the internet; how feasible is it and what are your best options? That was an interesting one to put together, especially when it came to dealing with government agencies.

Speaking of big agencies, I’ll also be appearing on BBC Radio this month – talking about Dishonored with Adam Rosser this time. I was on last month too, talking about Steam, but I forgot to mention it in my September post.

And, on the topic of me-speaking-into-microphones, I launched the third season of Unlimited Hyperbole finally! That will be continuing for another few weeks but has already gone down a storm, getting publicised on Polygon, The Escapist, VG247 and more.

Finally, there was my games work. The independent game I’m currently working on as Lead Writer is moving forward nicely, with the scripts and story documentation I wrote finally condensing into trailers and playable prototypes. There’s still a long way to go, but it’s getting there.

Um. There’s also a weird little game I’m working on with Craig Lager, codenamed as Project: NSFW, but that hasn’t moved forward in a little bit now. Since I’m doing the (frankly terrible) artwork on that one though, that may be for the best.

Update: Also! A content pack I wrote for Split Decision, the game I designed earlier this year is now available too. That must have slipped my mind originally!