Well my notice period is finished finally, and as of today, I am no longer working for Sports Interactive.

Instead, Elegant Chaos is fully back up and running, and I am planning to create and publish my own iPhone, iPad and Macintosh software.

I have a number of product ideas, ranging from the tiniest of utilities to some fairly large applications which may end up being long-term projects. Currently I’m aiming at the utility / general-purpose application market, and not at games. This isn’t through any great bias one way or the other, but because I’ve always been a believer in making software that you need yourself, and right now there are lots of utility applications that I need. That said, I do have at least 3 game ideas which may see the light of day eventually. I’d love to work on games, but I think that they’ll generally take longer and require more people, which isn’t practical for me at this moment.

I am well aware, incidentally, that making a living as an indy application developer is hard, and I’m definitely going into this with my eyes open. You need good ideas, good execution, and probably a fair bit of luck too if you want to make proper money. Only time will tell if I can tick any of those boxes, let alone all of them at once. A few people have applications that are runaway successes, but the vast majority sell only a small number of copies, probably not even enough to cover the development costs.

So there’s a possibility that I might not be able to do this full time, and might also have to spend some time contracting.

That’s fine by me - I enjoy working with other people so a bit of contracting would actually be welcome anyway.

I want to give this indy thing a go first though - have some fun, learn some new things, and unwind a bit after years and years getting frustrated having to make things to other people’s specifications!

It’s a risk, of course, but every now and then, you have to take a chance. So wish me luck, and watch this space!