For those who have been living under a rock (i.e. those of you who aren’t signed up to our newsletter and thus don’t have access to our more regular updates), we are no longer based in Cancun. After around 8 years of living there, we have officially moved on…to Mexico City. Which means I probably need to get around to updating all the “about” pages and the like on this site at some point….
It’s a move that was debated and tossed about for a good six months during the latter half of 2017. We discussed a variety of places in our search for a new home: Huntsville, Alabama; Branson, Missouri; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Austin, Texas. At the end of the day, Mexico City won out for a variety of reasons.
But first up is the “why”.
That’s a fairly easy answer, and one I’ll try to keep brief. Four years ago, when Cris and I lost our first attempt at a baby during an eptopic pregnancy, there was a lot of down time while she was in bed recovering from the surgery. I had a series of fantasy novels that I had started work on back in 2008, and decided it was the perfect time to finish them.
Around the same time, I was playing EverQuest on the Project 1999 emulator server with some folks, and we were paying attention to some of the newer games that were coming out from the independent crowd, and we found out about this game engine called Unity, which was easily accessible to folks like us.
My mind went into overdrive and I thought, “Why limit myself to only a book series? Why not build a multimedia empire with an MMORPG, comic books, graphic novels, RPGs, tabletop games, novels, and beyond”.
So myself and five other guys picked up the Unity Engine, dove in, and within a few months were sharing screenshots of our work on our Facebook pages. Which generated interest of other friends, and their friends, and eventually Stormhaven Studios, LLC was formed in Austin, Texas to serve as the production house for the Saga of Lucimia MMORPG, as well as a tabletop version.
Fast forward to the end of 2017, and we found ourselves on stage at the Austin Game Conference as part of the Top 10 games on show for the Intel Indie Game Dev Showcase. That generated interest from publishers, we found affirmation that we were on the right path as a company, and we then went out and pulled in private investors to expand the company beyond the 12 of us who were part of the core team.
But in order to handle that expansion, I needed to move somewhere with actual infrastructure, because Cancun (and the entire Riviera Maya) is severely lacking in that department. Sure, there are beautiful beaches, but there’s no real fiberoptic Internet (as of this writing), and I was finding myself more and more limited because of our location.
Which kicked off the search for “places we can afford to live which also offer decent Internet”.
At the end of the day, we settled on Mexico City. It was a combination of ticking all the right boxes, as well as being a place where Cris can go out and work, as she’s been helping me with Marginal Boundaries for the past five years, but now that gears have switched and I’m full-time on Stormhaven Studios, our travel careers are effectively “on hold” while I’m focused on being the CEO of the company and the creative director on our MMORPG.
Because while she has a visa to the U.S. and can stay for extended periods of time (up to six months per stay), she doesn’t have permission to work in the U.S., and we didn’t want to try and push our luck with multiple extended stays back to back over a period of a couple of years while we wrap up production on our various enterprises with the game studio.
That, and there’s a massive sea of potential talent I can hire here in Mexico City, for a hell of a lot less than what freelancers in the U.S. need me to pay them due to the excessive cost of living north of the border. And with a limited budget (our investors aren’t made of money), I have to be as frugal as I can when hiring talent to come work on our various projects, so it just made sense in more ways than one.
We arrived here at the first of February and began our apartment hunt, while also going out and exploring the city. We stumbled across a tamale festival, explored the breadth of Coyoacán, hiked through various parks, explored the zocalo, and eventually found ourselves the perfect little 1-bedroom apartment up in the Cuauhtémoc region of the city, in the heart of the embassy district, surrounded by hundreds of the finest restaurants in the city, and steps away from the largest park structure in the urban area.
Plus, I’ve got a 200mb symmetrical connection, which means I’m in heaven compared to what I had in Cancun, where I was lucky if I could get a few megs on my upload speeds, and I was perpetually laggy during video calls with clients, coworkers, and contractors.
We moved in yesterday, and as of this morning I’m working from the new office. Cris is heading out to get her local ID card so she can begin her job hunt, and I’m preparing for a quick flight up to Austin at the end of the month to meet with our lawyer, banker, lead programmer, and a charity organization called Extra Life who we’ll be working with later in 2018. It’s a chilly morning in Mexico City, but it’s a beautiful day and there’s a lot of work to be done!
P.S. Marginal Boundaries is no longer our full-time job as of 2018. My primary task as CEO of Stormhaven Studios means I’m full-time there. We’ll still be publishing here at the blog and on our social media, but on a hobby basis, based around weekend outings when we have free time between our jobs. We’re shutting down Cancun Apartment Rentals, and we will likely pull down our entire collection of ebooks at some point, since we are no longer actively updating them.
