Bone Jarring - Shutting down

Note: This blog entry is copied from the blog at www.bonejarring.com. That website will disappear soon, so I am reproducing the final blog here.

Life changes.

I started this effort in 2012. At the time, I was being paid, but the company I was working for was a zombie company waiting for its death blow, and I had no idea what I was going to do. In 2014, I setup the company, the website, and the github repo, and started working on the side, as I had a good full-time job at this time.

I have not been able to devote enough side time to make this work. And in the meantime, a website came along which captures the spirit of what I was trying to do. It’s not exactly aligned, but it’s close. Please checkout:

https://roll20.net

It’s really good.

Am I disappointed? No. I learned a lot about IOS, and Swift, and SwiftUI, and that has served me in my rejuvenated career as a software developer.

Could I have made this a full-time venture and got this off the ground? Maybe. The real problem is cost of healthcare for my family, and especially, me. I have some major health concerns which don’t affect me day-to-day, but which makes insurance very expensive or impossible to get. I had a potential investor, and Austin is a great place to startup a company. However, I love my full-time job, and the benefits are awesome.

What’s going to happen to the assets of Bone Jarring? I am assigning the ownership of the copyright to myself, Syd Polk. I am making all of the repositories on github public. Nobody was looking at this, but still… The website is paid for until July, at which point it will disappear.

Honestly, there isn’t much there, which is one of the problems I have. I have to pay to maintain the LLC and all of the digital assets, and I don’t want to do that anymore. If I had something close to being ready for the App Store, or if I had a service people were using, I would have explored selling the company to Roll20 or Paizo or Wizards of the Coast, but there is not enough to sell here.

For those few of you who have read along with me the past several years, thanks!

But most of all, keep playing table-top RPGs. Support your local game store, Roll20, Paizo, Wizards, DriveThru RPG, and any game companies that you love their products. It’s a great hobby!

But in this time of COVID-19, checkout Roll20. It’s really good.