Quick rule of thumb for anyone wanting to court Scottish games (or regular) developers: If you promise coffee and/or breakfast, make sure 1) the coffee doesn’t run out, and 2) the breakfast consists of carbohydrates. And no, chocolate Hob Nobs don’t count as breakfast. Bonus points for the saw player though, she was good, and it was a suitably random intermission!

Some pictures from the mingling here. I’m not in any of them thankfully, as I was somewhat hung over (and the short supply of coffee wasn’t doing anything to help matters), but you can spot Mr Baglow of Indoctrimat/SG.biz and Andrew Richards of CodePlay in the background of one picture at least. Still, some interesting mingling and people to meet, including the folks from Glasgow-based WeeWorld and some other small local developers who I didn’t know existed.

Interesting article here from the Rampant Coyote; also on our blog-roll, so I thought I’d jump them up the order. Basically it is bemoaning the fact that games developers are in a losing business right now. Well, those who are in the traditional publisher-fronts-all-money-as-advance-against-sales model are at least. I wouldn’t like to speculate on whether or not other developers are profitable or not, but the sales input versus development costs mis-match is something I’ve harped on about here before.

Rampant Games itself is an indie games portal/developer, with a wide range of games, all developed by independents. I haven’t actually played any of the games I must admit, but I still cheer for independent developers who stake out their territory and do well there. The blog is a mix of opinion pieces and development stories, but personally I like it for the in-depth coverage of the progress of their new game (Frayed Knights), which looks quite fun and is just entering the beta stage now.

JC Barnett’s Japanmanship is our next link from the side-bar. One of the more widely read developer blogs, not just because the content is funny and insightful, but also because it’s one of the few insights that western developers can get into the sometimes impenetrable world that is Japanese games development.

It seems that although a few hardy souls have emigrated to Japan for development jobs, it’s still very hard to get accepted there. Personally I don’t see the appeal, especially given the way that foreigners get treated by the natives, but there’s no denying that Japan has always been a significant centre of gaming. The fact that western developers are generally unable to sell significant numbers of games (or consoles, in Microsoft’s case) is indicative of the culture mismatch between us that even these days of globalisation hasn’t diminished.

Regardless, the blog is a good read, and mixes tales of life of a gaijin in Japan with gaming chat and insight. Particularly funny to read are the tales of passive (and not so passive) combat on the subway.

So, despite the fact that the blog looks no different on the surface, we are actually running on Wordpress 2.5 now - the latest and greatest update to the blogging software. The Control Panel in which I write all the posts now looks radically different though, it looks much snazzier and dare I say it more “Web 2.0″. Which of course is a farce, as what I really wanted was something that was fast and slick and quick to use, rather than shiny with rounded corners and draggable buttons. Still, it does the job, so I’ll stop being so cranky now.

Don’t be put off by the pictures which make him look like Vic Mackie from The Shield, this is in fact another game developer blog, written by Jake Simpson. (Sorry Jake, I couldn’t resist). Much like Dopass, this blog is heavy on the opinion pieces - but Jake has been around the block enough times to give those opinions weight. Midway, Maxis, Raven, and now Linden Labs (on which he wrote a great write-up on The Chaos Engine - sounds like a great place to work). Jake’s opinion pieces tend to be written whole cloth rather than just opinion notes on articles, but they’re all worth reading, and again I find myself agreeing with much of what he has to say.

Continuing our trip down our blog-roll: Dopass, written by Snipehunter who always seems to make insightful posts on The Chaos Engine forums. A designer for games, based in the US - the blog has plenty of opinion pieces, based mostly on articles from the web. It’s an interesting take on games in general, with a generous dollop of insight. Of course, like most people, my opinion of authors is generally based on how much I agree with what they say, and in that respect, Dopass does pretty well.

Next up in our game-dev blog linking frenzy: Headlam, written by my old associate from VIS, Larry Docherty. Larry and I worked together on Brave for a long while, and we was a great guy to work with. As he was a filthy weegie ;-), he trekked through to Edinburgh every day - a trauma which I certainly didn’t envy. But he more than made up for that affliction with stories of neds from Glasgow which kept us all entertained (and a little worried). Since then he’s moved on to pastures new with SCEE in Liverpool and Amsterdam (lucky bugger), He’s always had a passion for music, and so his blog (while just getting started) promises to cover games development and music trivia in equal measure.

Yes, we’re not just taking on one new staffer, due to a fortuitous mix of circumstances we’re bringing on two! We have Charlotte Moseley, a graduate developer with knowledge of C# who is coming on and getting up to speed with our Evolution work; also we have Tim Angus coming to join us. Like Pete and I, Tim also worked at VIS until it went out of business - had things gone differently a couple of years ago he would have joined us much earlier, but instead he ended up in “regular software land”. Luckily we’ve tempted him back to the straight and narrow of games development, although in truth he’s never really left: he’s been driving Tremulous in his spare time!

Both of our new people will be coming to the new office close to the start of May, and I shall harangue them until they introduce themselves properly here and get added to the about page.

The currently running set of articles on Bruce’s blog are focusing on his time at Codemasters, from its humble beginnings on the home games machines of the 80’s up to its less than illustrious current state (it’s drawn criticism in industry circles for its treatment of staff and management decisions widely seen as poor). But aside from that the blog covers industry topics far and wide - pretty much whatever Bruce thinks is interesting at the time. He is a marketer by trade, so the blog is well written and updated daily (whereas most of the blogs in the sidebar update far more sporadically like we do), and while I don’t always agree with his views, there’s no doubting that the blog is written from a wide range of experience and covers topics of importance to game developers with insight and detail.

More crucially though, Bruce is the one who has been poking all of us with game-dev blogs to cross link and raise each others profiles (hence the impetus for this series of linking posts). In general we’ve shown ourselves to be pretty poor at getting ourselves noticed and heard, and for small developers and indeed individuals at larger studios, a higher profile is rarely a bad thing. I’ve always been a fan of championing the people behind the games, so it’s good to see some ‘class action’ from my colleagues in the industry.

Not just, as the title might suggest, all about survival horror games, this blog covers some wide ranging points on game design, horror movie reviews and other topics. The articles about the evolution of the horror game genre are the most interesting though, and cover a massive range of games dating back decades. Although I must admit, the only horror I remember feeling when playing Alone in the Dark was horror at the camera that insisted on changing angles just when I was trying to sneak somewhere, and leaving me unable to see my character while it was ripped apart by dogs or some such fate.

Definitely worth a visit, although I’d say take the time to subscribe the feed in something that allows you to keep posts as new - the posts can be quite large, but it’s worth saving them to read for when you have the time.