That was late last week though. Come Tuesday afternoon, news surfaced that there had just been a company meeting to announce that the administrators had been called in. And not in a graceful, let’s wind things down sort of way. In an almighty, we’re all out of money, and by the way you’re not getting paid for August sort of way. While that’s not unprecedented (when VIS went down, they at least had the courtesy to do so immediately after a pay-day so no-one did any work that wasn’t going to be paid for; but DC went down with unpaid wages), I don’t think it’s ever forgivable. But the difference was, those other studios had been operating milestone to milestone for a long while, burning through their cash. RTW had their investment up front, they knew what money was coming in, and when it would stop. To go under leaving unpaid wages (and word is, a bunch of trade debt as well) is to me a massively negligent failing of those in charge.

The whole affair smacks of senior management, knowing they’d burnt through all their cash (and let’s not forget, that’s over $100m), and yet continuing to operate. APB had run over its development timescale, that was public knowledge, but if they didn’t have enough money to operate beyond its launch, this mess should have been sorted out when they realised what was going to happen. I’m sure they thought that to do so would further damage the APB launch: who would want to invest time in an MMO if it looked like the developer was going to go bust even before launch. That doesn’t excuse screwing over your employees: they chose to gamble everything on persuading new investors to save them. And since they’d already failed to show that they could deliver on the sort of projects they claimed to have expertise in, I don’t know how they thought anyone would believe them.

I’m sure there will be more details and analysis from those who saw this mess from the inside. Even last week, this RTW person let go in the MyWorld redundancies put an insightful but damning post over on Rock Paper Shotgun. I’ll come back to this one once more of the details have become clear. Sadly, even if a phoenix company does ride from the ashes (again stirring memories of DC and their similarly resurrection), it will be a dim shadow of what RTW once was. While there are still several good businesses in Dundee doing alright, the heart has been cut out of the industry, both in Dundee and in Scotland in general. We’ll lose a lot of good talented people, because there is no-where else with the capacity to pick them up. Again, Scottish development will take years to rebuild, if indeed we ever manage it.

Next time, I think, will be a rant about development budgets, and how they’re hurting us all.

In other, unrelated news, I’ve been answering questions over at the beta of the GameDev StackExchange site. It reminds me of all the reasons why I would get annoyed at gamedev.net et al; basically that since there is no barrier to entry, anyone can both ask stupid questions and give stupid answers. So you get people replying who aren’t professional game developers and have a very limited set of experience making ‘games’, but who have a very high opinion of their ability. However, since the original StackOverflow site has become a useful resource in its own right, despite the equally large numbers of “please help me with my homework” questions, and poor quality answers, I thought I would give this one the benefit of the doubt. I would heartily recommend any of my peers who have some free time to go over and contribute as well: while you can’t do much to begin with (new users can’t even vote good answers up), it only takes a couple of questions answered sensibly to elevate you from the rank of untrusted outsider to someone who can contribute. And as long as it’s people with real knowledge of the industry voting up the real solutions, I think there’s a good chance that there gets to be some content there that’s useful to the games industry in general.

Many topics are just “not there”. Huge swathes of really basic stuff are just missing (basic date formatting string specifiers – that’s pretty low level!), so that when you navigate to them it tells you the page is missing. Go online to the MSDN reference there, and you’ll find the page, just not in the locally installed copy. I thought to begin with it was just because I’d installed it badly, but even from a clean install it was still just not there. I’ve since concluded that it must be the Express versions are just subsets of the full documentation, to keep the downloads small. It’s certainly not a functionality split – like they’re only putting in help topics for things in the Express editions – because the Express editions are really quite close to fully functional. No, this is stuff that’s core to .NET and the language.

So, since I’m having to fall back on searching the internet anyway, I figure I might as well have my hard disk space back. The online resources available now are fantastic anyway, and it’s rare that I’m not connected when developing. Most often it’s the online MSDN references that show up first in the search, so in the end it’s much of a muchness – except I don’t have to use the horrible HTML help interface which has been getting steadily worse with every revision of Visual Studio.

I guess this is just another nail in the coffin of the disconnected computer: so many things now expect/assume/require you to be connected to the Internet. Which wouldn’t be so bad, but even with 3G connectivity, a network connection while on the move still isn’t something that can be taken for granted. But I’ll stop grouching about it like an old man, and go with the flow…

Basically it’s a new site to bring together many of the interesting game development blogs that are out there. Good to see a common location where you can go to read and discuss the game-dev news of the day, dip into the day-to-day life of various small developers like us, and generally learn something new. Go, read, enjoy!

Cue some virtual attendance of CS193P, the iPhone Application developer course from Stanford University. Taught by developers from Apple, and with all of their lectures videoed and put online, it has been a great way to get quickly up to speed with Objective-C and Cocoa Touch development. Of course that’s not the only way to develop for iPhone, you can (and in my opinion, should) implement the large part of any game or simulation app in standard C/C++. But for working with the iPhone operating system, and implementing interfaces (arguably where the real challenge and value in an iPhone app lies), it has to be done in Objective-C.

Stanford U

So while Tim was busy with some other work-for-hire, I took the opportunity to bash through the majority of the CS193P course, and start to tackle an app idea we’ve been talking about for a while: the Drunk Compass. More on that in later blog posts. Actually watching the lectures brought back a load of memories of university: it was nice to remember a time when all I had to do was take in as much knowledge as possible and try to retain it long enough to pass exams with.

Thankfully, as this was just one course, condensed, it didn’t last long enough to evoke the things that annoyed me about university: the feeling that I was always doing throw-away coursework. I’ve always preferred the hands-on approach, and by the time my university career ended, I was already itching to make something real, and loose it on the world. A shame then that my first shipped title with VIS didn’t see the light of day until 5 years later (although technically i-Race shipped much earlier than that).

Anyway, learning is good, and I think it’s been a welcome change of pace after the hectic nature of Crackdown 2 or our other client work. Hopefully now that I’m comfortable with the Cocoa interface tools, I can prototype our most promising app idea, and get it one step closer to reality.

Crackdown 2

It’s weird, I’ve spent the last month and a half working with the MGS and Ruffian teams to take the game they’d made and turn it into a demo form; I thought I wouldn’t want to play the demo again. I’d play the full game, sure, because I’ve never actually made it all the way through without cheating, and it’s a game where the pleasure is in the journey, not in the destination. But the demo is 30 minutes from the start of the game, and your progress isn’t saved, so I thought I’d just skip it and go to the main game. My wife and family finally got me an XBox 360 for my birthday on Friday, along with a stack of games (Halo 3, Halo: ODST, Forza 3, Bioshock 2, Assassin’s Creed 2), so I wasn’t short of things to play.

But like a digital drug, I found myself using my demo preview code, and playing the demo. I knew what to expect, and that didn’t make it any less fun. Shooting, punching, kicking, driving, exploding, all over the island. Not just once either. Four times through, to get 7 out of the 10 possible demo achievements. I even got my wife to play it through as well. That one I pretended was research for work: you don’t get much more inexperienced at 3rd person games than Vicki, and I wanted to see if we’d pitched the demo opening right. We had – she picked it up surprisingly quickly, didn’t die until much further into the demo than I’d expected. More pride – we’ve made something that can appeal to not only the hard-core, dedicated Crackdown fans, but also to newbies as well. Crackdown for everyone!

Ruffian Games

Not that I can take much credit for that really, it’s the stellar team at Ruffian who have done a fantastic job on the game. I’ve been privileged to work with them, and the wider team at Microsoft. This has been the biggest budget game I’ve worked on to date, with the highest aspirations, and the highest quality bar. It’s been a real eye-opener, and a great experience. Both teams are chock full of talented, enthusiastic folks, and my passion for the title they’ve matched and exceeded at every turn. I’ve got to give a special appreciation to our ex-colleague Peter Mackay as well – who went to Ruffian after leaving us last year. He’s done a great job on the audio for Crackdown 2, allowing the quality audio design to shine through. I was sorry to lose him as a team-mate, but I think he’s found a great new role at Ruffian.

The demo you can get your hands on tomorrow (June 21st), and the full game will hit the shelves from the July 6th. Get to work Agent!

Year Six will, I think, be far more eventful for us than Year Five. It’s too early to say yet what it will consist of, but I think there will be less X360 development, and a load more iPhone work. Of course, my prediction skills are fairly awful, so I should probably not try to guess in advance. What we do know is that we want to get our own projects out there and selling, and the iPhone is a far better opportunity for us to do that than, for example, WiiWare. And there will undoubtedly be work-for-hire as well, which is almost always interesting in itself, getting a chance to help out on other fun projects, and do what we do best – give our clients the software development help they need to ship. And if nothing else, we shall see just how furry the beard can get…

The Crackdown 2 Crunch Beard

Suffice to say that while I’ve continued to work on CruiseControl.NET plugins, I’ve yet to write up anything useful that could be condensed into a blog post. My article on employee Terms and Conditions for IndieVision.net has been shunted to one side, again. I had a productive meeting on Friday with one of the developers of Visual Studio, making an effort to persuade them to include some games development friendly features with their next version (not 2010, the one after); hopefully one or two of them will make it in and I’ll have improved the development eco-system just a little bit.

But in general I’m still struggling with the long commutes to Dundee, and the limited amount of time in the evenings to be productive. So on that rather downbeat note, I shall finish up, and place a tick in the entry on my task list for “Development Blog”. Hopefully future entries will be more avuncular and jolly. Wow, how long have I been waiting to use that adjective to describe myself…

That’s right folks, we’re now all set up for iPhone development, MacBook, iPod Touch, iPhone, and a raft of ideas. As I’m swamped at the moment, Tim’s taking the lead on all this, and our first project will be a small productivity app that he came up with. More details and screenshots as we get closer to completion…

There are certainly good books on games design, GameCareerGuide.com I think has a few articles listing good titles. I couldn’t judge their quality as I’m primarily a programmer rather than a designer. However I’ve always thought that trying to learn games design by reading books (or even going to lectures in a design course) is a flawed way of doing it. You wouldn’t try to learn to play chess by watching videos of someone else playing; maybe once you’ve already got a good grounding in the subject and you know enough to realise how much more there is to learn. But until you’ve got a good handle on the fundamentals, it would just be a deluge of information, with very little context.

My take on it is that, rather than spend a lot of money on books on the subject, that one of the best ways to learn about game design is by evaluating games. That is, playing a wide variety of games, and taking the effort to critically evaluate and compare titles. There are titles held up as great examples in their genres, like Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Halo, Command and Conquer, Call of Duty, Fallout 3, etc. There are also games which try hard but just aren’t as good. As a designer, you’re expected to know why some games are good, and why some are bad.

If you can take a pad and pencil and write down what are the good and bad points of these games, and compare them against other games, then you’re learning the fundamentals of game design. Does the user interface feel good, or is it confusing? Look at the challenges in the game and evaluate them – are they fun? Do they allow players to learn skills, and feel like they are progressing?  Is the difficulty curve sensible? Is there sufficient challenge and variety in that challenge?

You can play a game and look beyond the immediate experience, to see the mechanics behind the game, and judge whether they work or don’t. You can look at several different games in the same genre and pick out what they have in common, and where they are unique. You can spot bad design just by playing a game, and then think of ways that you might avoid those flaws. Anyone can do those things, but a good designer is great at doing them. A good designer does that without even thinking, they celebrate the good in games they’ve played, and vilify the bad. And no-one can be a good designer without experience of games, lots of games, all different sorts of games. If you want to be a games designer, you should be playing as many games as possible.

The only other thing I would say, and it may sound harsh to those who come here hoping for insight because they want to jump straight in as a designer, but it’s better to clear up any misconceptions now. Practically no-one becomes a games designer as their first job in the industry. Really. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who was a designer as their first job in the industry, and I know a fair few designers.

The competition to become a designer is fierce, and it is very hard to prove your worth in an interview. Most often, designers start in another facet of the industry – most commonly in the art or programming side, but also sometimes from QA / testing – and while they’re at a studio in that role they can demonstrate their ability as a designer and persuade the management that they would be useful in a design role. And even then there are dozens of people at a studio, all of whom have varying amounts of talent in design, and only room for a few people in actual design roles.

So if you really, really want to get into games, then don’t focus solely on design, you need another role. At most studios, in most roles you will have some design input into the game you’re making, especially if you are keen and get involved in design discussions, even more so if your ideas are good. But if you’re expecting that you’ll do a Computer Games Design course at University X and then swan straight into a straight design role (even a junior one), then you are going to be sorely disappointed.

There are a wide variety of pre-built plug-ins already available, for source control systems like Perforce and Subversion, and build systems like Nant and MSBuild. These usually work pretty well straight out of the box, if you’re building a vanilla continuous integration server. That is, every change made to source control results in a build of some sort. I’m not going to dwell on why that’s a good idea (it is), I’m only going to say that there are times when you need something different. There are inelegant ways around this, but in truth CC.NET has all of the customisability to let you do this properly within the system – by defining your own plug-ins.

Reading the documentation on CC.NET, you get only a single page of documentation on custom plug-ins, and that page is pretty spotty at best. It shows you a “hello world” plug-in, with no clues as to what information you get into the plug-in, when your plug-in’s methods will be called, or how you’re supposed to pass either status information or logging back to CC.NET itself. In short, it’s pretty useless, other than to highlight that the facility is there, and give you enough of a pointer to get you into the code and poking around.

Sure enough, with Auto-complete on, you find that there are lots and lots of information passed to you, and by debugging and breakpointing inside your plug-in, you can get a feel for when your code is called. Making CC.NET load and unload your plug-in is refreshingly easy and fairly robust, and once you figure out how to pass parameters to your plug-in by specifying them in the config file, you can see the possibilities open up. More importantly than the sample building plug-in though is that, through a bit of digging, you find you can also define your own custom source control plug-ins, and with the combination of those two things, you can do pretty much anything you want.

In one particular situation, I’ve been working with a Perforce (p4) source control system, and a rather black-box build system for the game itself. Rather than wanting a build made of every single commit to the p4 repository, I needed it to make only particular builds – those marked as verified by the developer’s internal test team. This is a pretty common situation when you’ve got an automated build system – you have a raw source control system that lies underneath, which operates at the level of atomic commits. But above that is a logical structure, which only people understand – that operates at the level of ‘nightly builds’ and milestones. You have custom logic which you can apply to the system, using some basic rules. So in essence you have a virtual source control system, built on top of the raw version. By writing a custom source control plug-in for CC.NET, you can expose an interface to your automated build server, so that it recognises when something new is available from that virtual source control, and only builds exactly what you want.

CC.NET offers great flexibility, and those people who develop it, know all about that flexibility. But information on what you can do, and how, is rarer than hens teeth. So over the next few weeks, I’m going to write up and publish here some examples of real-world plug-ins that I’ve written. That should hopefully give readers enough context to go off and write their own plug-ins, to suit their own needs.

Disclaimer: all of the points made here refer to CruiseControl.NET 1.4.x, not the later versions of the system. There are some big and eagerly awaited advancements in the newly released 1.5 version, that many people like myself will have to avoid for now, until it’s bedded in.

Unfortunately, the heating in our office is less than stellar at the moment. Our part of the office is fine, but the people we share an office with (Alban Books), have little to no heat at all. They’re all huddled around electric heaters, and still cold for it. Worse still, the thermostat for the entire office is out in the hall, which is poorly insulated from the outside. So the thermostat is convinced that the entire office needs heating up, so our part of the office gets baked, and Alban and the hall remain frigid. And if I’m up at Ruffian, their heating is all screwy as well – with people wandering around with hats and gloves and scarves on all the time. But sadly I keep forgetting  my hobo gloves, which are in the office with Tim! So Waverley Gate is the only place with a reasonable temperature at the moment.

So to brighten up the blog, here’s a picture of the lovely rooftop garden at Waverley Gate. I don’t spend much time out on it, due to the aforementioned cold, but I do like to look out onto it while I’m making coffee or reheating last night’s leftovers for lunch.

This week’s blog entry finds me back on a train to Warrington to visit Evolution, a newly married man. My honeymoon, last week, was spent pleasantly disconnected from the wired world, in a forest cabin in Argyll. Not totally electronics free, of course, the laptop went with me and I had a chance to play through some Sam & Max, Spore, and replaying Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in advance of picking up the sequel which should be out around now. Other than that though, I left things in Tim’s capable hands. My boss at Microsoft, in addition to the shiny new laptop and office provision in Edinburgh, kindly consented to giving me a couple of weeks off around the wedding. I’m not really accustomed to taking time off any more though, so the weeks leading up to the big day I was still remotely monitoring the build systems down in Reading and keeping things ticking over. Happily the systems I’ve set up in the previous few months don’t require much maintenance, so this time away has been good in that it’s proved the reliability of the build setup.

TIGA

Near the end of October, I also attended a panel discussion at the Scottish Parliament that TIGA was pushing. This was partly for them to push their tax-breaks agenda in amongst Scottish politicians, but also a good opportunity for the Scottish games industry to show their faces to the wider world. We do tend to suffer from our normally clandestine dealings; if you’re in the industry everyone knows each other, but it was usually hidden away from the media or non-industry observers, except in small, tightly controlled PR moves. I’m glad to see that the industry has reached a level of maturity where discussing our needs with politicians and other interested parties is feasible and useful.

I’ve been down-beat about the merits of TIGA’s tax-break lobbying, both from a personal political viewpoint (I don’t like subsidies) and from a small business perspective. The tax breaks proposed seem to be of most benefit to larger companies, to encourage them to set up large studios in the UK. While I like that idea from the point of view of improving the general health of the development community here, it’s unlikely that we as a small outsourcing studio would see any direct benefit from these policies. I was uncomfortable to think that I would be the only nay-sayer in the room, but I was glad to find that the other smaller studios are similarly cynical about the policy.

More interesting to me was the other topic dwelt on by the panel – the push towards better education and training for new developers, and better opportunities for students to secure a role in the games industry. I’ve been worried for a long while about talent draining from the industry, for various reasons, and recent business conditions are making developers less and less likely to take risks on graduate developers. Anything we, the government, or the educational institutions can do to make it easier for developers to take on graduates is a win in my book, both in the short and long terms. I was very interested to hear some of the programmes that Abertay has been developing along these lines; reaching out to industry with prototyping teams (I’d imagine making use of the White Space facility), helping students get placements inside studios, etc. While I’m not in favour of any one institution being the only place to go to get into the industry, it’s good to see them leading the way. I made a point of saying to the politicians in the room that if they wanted to really support the long term development and stability of our industry, they’d do well to support and extend these programmes. Especially if those programmes were also made available to students/graduates across the higher education field. I’d love to see an avenue for straight Computer Science students to get into the industry, without them having to take the risk of doing such a specialised degree as a games industry course.

Anyway, it was a good panel, with interesting points all round, and while I don’t think that anything new or earth-shaking was said, I think I’m more positive about the long term prospects of the industry as a result of attending.

This week is back to work properly though; this day down with Evolution to demo the stuff that Tim’s developed the last few weeks, and the rest of the week settling into my new routine with MGS. That will be splitting my time between Edinburgh (I’ll try to get a few pictures from Microsoft Edinburgh’s lovely roof terrace with its wonderful views over the Waverley valley) and Dundee. As is usual with any time off, especially when I’m disconnected from the Internet for any length of time, I’m itching to get stuck back into things and start delivering useful stuff again. There were quite a few things on my list leading up to leaving Reading, but none that could be started in earnest until I was back. Hopefully now that I’m not exiled in Reading, I can settle into some sort of sensible routine, and still leave time for more regular blog posts here than I’ve managed recently.

Windows 7 is working out really quite well as well – the new taskbar system is very much how I think of things when I’m working with many windows. I was always quick to turn off the grouping of windows under Vista, because it was just annoying. The grouping under the large icons in Windows 7 however seems a lot more natural, and I no longer have the “so many windows the taskbar gets flooded” effect I used to suffer from. I’m trying awfully hard not to be a Microsoft corporate shill, but it does feel like this is thankfully a better successor to XP than Vista was. We’ll see how things pan out with driver support and Nintendo, but I’ll probably upgrade the office soon enough.

Not much else to say really, I’ve been under the weather a bit, so fairly unproductive, but I’ve been fine with that for a while. I’ve been working on our Space prototype and sorting out some really interesting problems to do with scale and large objects, but I’ve reached the point where I need a few hours with some whiteboards, some loud music, and some serious thinking time, before I can progress to the eureka solution which feels like it’s hovering just beyond my grasp.

In the meantime, I’ve been killing time with Edge (the subject of the shenanigans from Tim Langdell, which are now thankfully almost done with – in case you haven’t heard, he’s losing), iBASS (a legacy from my younger days, which has been somewhat disappointing in it’s obtuse puzzle design), and a return to Left 4 Dead prompted by testing out my super-powered laptop (which by the way runs L4D like a dream, as long as I remember to put earphones in because the fans are super-loud).

As I write this, with clammy skin and fuzzy-head, I’m thinking that my current trip back to Edinburgh is going to leave me with some unwelcome left-overs. My fiancée has picked up a horrible and intense cold-like illness, and as I’ve been providing care, it’s pretty likely I’ve now got it too. I can feel the start of it – the back of my throat starting to rasp, the contents of my head feeling like they are swelling to a size bigger than my skull. And as I’m heading back down to Reading tomorrow, I think I’m going to end up suffering through the worst of it on my own.

As bad as mooching around the house in Reading while ill will be, it will give me a good excuse to take some time off and relax; something I’ve not managed to do in a while now. I’ve been working pretty much flat out on Microsoft related work, culminating in this trip back home (well, technically Dundee, but I’d be in trouble with the missus if I didn’t use it as a reason to have a long weekend back in Edinburgh). While there’s been time off, it’s been wrapped in working weekends to make up for the time lost. I don’t really like doing that, but I’d committed to getting something achieved by today, and working through was the only feasible way to get that done.

So it’s probably good if I’m forced to slow down a bit and return to some sort of normal schedule. I’ve come to the end of the initial contract with Microsoft, but since I’ve been doing useful work, we’ve agreed to extend it further, with some conditions. Namely, that I no longer have to be living and working full time in Reading. Hallelujah. I’ll be getting married next month, and I wouldn’t rate my odds of seeing 6 months married if I was still living away from home. Instead I’ll be based in Edinburgh, with some significant amount of time on-site with the developers, and regular visits back down to Reading.

It’s been very taxing trying to maintain things in Edinburgh remotely, on top of a full time contract at Microsoft, and visits to Evolution. I seem to spend all of my time on trains. But the new working arrangements should be much more manageable, and allow me to get back some semblance of a normal life. If nothing else, it will allow me to get some time in the same office as Tim – who’s done a sterling job avoiding going stir crazy being in the office all on his own for almost 6 months now.

Symptoms

You’ve got a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi card, and you’re running Windows Vista. It’s got the latest drivers installed. Probably it was working just fine up until the end of August. Windows Update prompted you with an update to your sound card, or maybe it just got installed automatically. Now the sound card is producing no output. Windows Media Player fails to play movies and audio with cryptic errors that basically boil down to “can’t play file”. If you right-click on the Speakers or Microphone in the Sound control panel, and select Test, it pops up a message box saying “Failed to play test tone”, and stays resolutely silent.

Annoying, huh? So you go searching on the web, and find a bunch of posts talking about Audigy cards, and “failed to play test tone”, which recommend that you disable this or that setting in the Creative volume panel, or in the sounds control panel. None of this helps your problem at all. And that’s probably right – because the “failed to play test tone” message could happen for a bunch of reasons – all it really means is that Vista can’t talk to your sound card properly.

As far as I can tell, this is some specific problem with the Windows Update to the sound card. Not sure what, or how, but we have two similarly configured machines at the office, and they both went in the same way, over the same period. Thankfully the fix is a straightforward one, and it’s to re-install the drivers.

Solutions

First off you’d probably just uninstall the drivers and then reinstall, this you can do quickly. We found it didn’t help. Then you think “oh, I’ll go to the Creative site and download the drivers manually”. Great. Except there’s like a dozen versions of the SB X-Fi, all with different connectors at the back, all with slightly different names, and all of which have different drivers. And here’s you looking at device manager which just says “SB X-Fi”. But which one!

So after trying two different versions and getting it wrong (it tells you it can’t find a device of that type on your system), I decided to try a different tack, and this worked right off the bat. Here are the steps:

1. Start Menu -> Computer, right-click and select Manage
2. Select Device Manager from the left hand side
3. Go to Audio devices in the right hand tree
4. Right click on the X-Fi device that should live there, and select Uninstall Drivers
5. It should ask for confirmation – tick the check box that says “delete drivers” – you don’t want the same old drivers to be reinstalled (this is the key step)
6. This should take away your X-Fi, and leave you with no audio device (or even if you had onboard audio like we did, shouldn’t make a difference).
7. In the device manager, right-click on your computer and select “Scan for hardware changes”
8. This should bring up the usual hardware detected icon in the task area in the bottom right. Let it do it’s thing
9. When it prompts you about drivers – let Windows find the drivers for you. It should either download fresh drivers, or download a slightly older driver which comes with Creative’s auto-update software. But basically follow through with the driver install process, and you shouldn’t need to do anything special
10. It’ll probably prompt you to restart your machine. If it doesn’t, restart anyway.
11. It should reboot and finish up the driver installation when it restarts – now you should have your sound back just as before.

Hope this helps people (and if the solution works for people, feel free to link it elsewhere).

Day 1 (Evolve)

10 Things Nobody Tells You About Digital Distribution and Self-Publishing That You Must Understand to Succeed

A forthright talk from Martyn Brown, one of the founders at Team 17. They’re wading into self-publishing with a vengeance, ostensibly due to their inability to sign Alien Breed through normal publishing channels. And that’s fair enough, if they believe strongly enough in the product to publish it, they shouldn’t have to satisfy a close-minded publisher’s idea of what the market wants. Admittedly, it’s a lot easier when you’re sitting on the big pot of cash that is the proceeds from Worms XBLA, but fair play to them. They did stress the point that self-publishing brings with it many of the same challenges that regular publishing does (e.g. marketing, QA, platform certification), so if you don’t have the capability in-house to tackle that like they do, then you’d better be prepared to deal with others who can provide those services.

Evolve: A Game is a Game is a Game

A reassuring talk from Dave Thomson at Denki, that can be summed up quite succinctly: make the games that you’re interested in. While it’s not a guarantee that others will like the same things that you do, it’s a safe bet that if you don’t believe in the games you’re making, no-one else will either. While I have reservations about this – there still has to be a business case to support making a game. So maybe I’d paraphrase slightly and say “if you’re relatively normal, then the games you love to make and play will appeal to lots of other people too”.

Evolve: Panel: After the iPhone Honeymoon:Where Next for Apple’s Mobile?

This one was of interest because I’ve been thinking about the merits of developing for the iPhone. While I’m definitely a convert to the use of one (I bought a 3GS recently), I’m still not convinced about the merits of the app-store as a distribution platform. And sure enough, the panel were quick to agree on the difficulties of reaching your market. The driving down of price to the 99c point, while bemoaned by some small developers, is indicative of what the market wants. Too many consumers have been burned by poor apps (even ones with good reviews), so they’re not prepared to risk higher prices to be burned. Lite versions are key, but care must be taken not to give away too much. Marketing is key, although it’s very much about advertising through social networks and similar mechanisms. Allowing people to share knowledge of your app through the phone itself is a good thing. There is a market for niche titles, but it is substantially smaller, clearly the cheap/small titles which make high volumes is an easier strategy. If you’re happy with a niche and higher price point, the quality has to be high enough to justify that higher price point. That needs to include update support. Getting the first few positive reviews up there is key, so giving away the first few hundred units to friends for positive reviews is a useful tactic. Above all though, the platform is still the limiting factor in getting true volumes – you need to crack the top X lists to get any sort of decent volumes. Which says to me that the search functionality is still too weak to truly support a quality based market.

Evolve: Panel: Crossing Over: How Working With Other Industries Can Improve Your Games and Your Bottom Line

I’ve talked on this blog in the past about the overlap (or lack thereof) between television media and games. Ofcom’s Public Service Publishing talks in particular have been frustrating to me, because there is clearly money, concepts and talent there, but what is essentially a language barrier prevents us from collaborating. Games developers can’t relate to the funding models, and the glacial pace of motion getting projects going. TV people get the idea of ‘games’, but are unable to grasp what goes into making them, their limitations or the practicalities of producing a title. So this talk about organised brainstorming workshops which aim to get people from all industries together, piqued my interest. Basically locking people away in a hotel together for a week, forming teams with a spread of talents, making them brainstorm ideas for interactive entertainment. Everyone on the panel was overwhelmingly positive about their experience doing it, and it sounded like it did exactly what was needed – breaking down the communication barriers between those in the different industries, and allowing them to collaborate to deliver something interesting. Schedules willing, I’m definitely enthused about the idea of attending one of these workshops, and see what I can get out of it in terms of a better perspective on the wider media industry.

Evolve: KEYNOTE: The Long Tail and Games: How Digital Distribution Changes Everything. Maybe.

The long tail. A lot of this felt like Eberly marketing his own services, but there were some good points, backed with stats. Basically the gist of the talk is that digital is great, it’s the future, but it’s not perfect. There was a lot of puncturing of the idea that digital is without drawbacks, which I think is something that is needed. It’s way too easy to pin all your hopes on the next platform. I think he draws an erroneous conclusion from the current platforms that digital distribution isn’t valid; because he’s basing it on platforms which are severely lacking in the fundamentals needed to make for a healthy digital distribution platform: search, navigation, rating and cross-linking. Amazon has those, but the current games platforms don’t. I don’t believe that we can write off digital distribution as a viable market for the small studio until we see a platform which has all of those things and still fails.

Day 2

CONFERENCE KEYNOTE: Online functionality for your next game? Why not go 100% online

“Hey folks – look, isn’t APB shiny?” Okay, maybe I’m just bitter I got there a little late and couldn’t even get in the room, but it didn’t strike me that the talk had a lot of content. APB did look very shiny though.

Designer mash-up: David Braben and Dave Jones play Elite and GTA

Basically two old school devs playing each others games. And I’m a sucker for an Elite talk. The actual playing of the games, lots of faffing around and not much shown. I think had they prepped a bit more and showed a bit more of the strengths of the respective games. But it was still interesting to hear stories from the old days. Clearly the majority of the people in the room were Elite fans though; although there were a decent amount of questions for Dave Jones, most of them were about Elite and all of the various things. And of course every time I see Elite again it makes me want to make that sort of game again. Someone on The Chaos Engine made a good point – the fact that Elite 4 hasn’t been made has probably been the best thing this industry could hope for, because it’s made everyone else want to step into the gap and has resulted in a bunch of good games. Had Elite kept churning out sequels, I think there might have been that little bit less enthusiasm in general in the industry.

Business: Panel: Why Grey Matters – How to Grow Your Business

This was an interesting and frank panel talk, with some of my colleagues from the Scottish industry – notably Brian MacNicoll and Paul Farley. They talked about the merits of the scheme, which pairs up experienced business people with directors of newer start-ups, giving them an opportunity to benefit from the others’ experience and an independent point of view. It sounded like a fantastically useful programme, I can’t count the number of times when I could have used an outside opinion as to whether I’m doing the right thing with the business or not. I can only hope that TIGA or another UK body will be continuing the scheme once the pilot is complete, and encouragingly the TIGA contingent was present at the talk.

Design: The Life Cycle of The Bonsai Barber for WiiWare

Fun looking little game this, and I can respect the deliberate choice of design principles to keep the gameplay simple and clean. Interesting choice to limit the amount of time the player can play each day, which is a risky tactic, but good if it pays off. Similar to Car Jack Street’s tactic of using real world deadlines to encourage you to come back at least once a week, Bonsai Barber has the opportunity to to make the game more attractive by rationing out the gameplay. While you might easily glut yourself on the game in the first day and never return, by restricting what can be done, you leave the player that little bit hungry for more. Of course, it only works if the game leaves you with a good feeling at the end of each play session, but I think I shall pick it up to see.

Develop Awards

Thanks to my benefactors at Microsoft, I managed to get a seat at a table at the Develop awards, which was nice. Lots of hob-nobbing with industry legends, and a nice meal to go along with it. Sadly I had to leave after the main course to head back to Reading, so I missed the awards themselves. I gather that Media Molecule cleaned up some, but then that’s probably not much of a surprise; these things rarely are. I couldn’t help feeling like something of a small fish in a big pond though, and I’d probably have made more useful business contacts drinking out in the bar with the other indie devs. Still, I got to chat some with David Braben, and avoided gushing over the original Elite, so that’s something.

Day 3

Coding: The Wizards of OS: I Don’t Think We’re in C++ Anymore

I was somewhat hung over for this one, so thankfully it’s on a topic I know well. Looks like the Eutechnyx guys are going through pretty much the same learning curve we did with Brave – the initial excitement of wanting to write all of your game logic in script form, discovering the performance and practical problems with maintaining things in scripts, and shifting some part of the way back to logic in C++. They’ve come to many of the same conclusions I did, which is pretty much that you should use scripts for what they’re good for: broad, high level glue logic, fast iteration without recompiling, and expressive forms for structured data. Scripting is no silver bullet, and its pros always need to be balanced quite carefully against the cons. I think this is an interesting topic, and I’ve some thoughts written up on it that I’ll put into blog form at some point soon.

BUSINESS KEYNOTE: Ship Your Game On Time, On Budget: Seven Highly Effective Practices

Not really much for me here – very much a talk from one of the old school development houses; how to manage large teams, business relationships with large publishers. Nothing too surprising either – knowing when to cut features, knowing how important it is to hit your dates (the developers don’t see this as nearly as much of an issue as the publisher does), and how to manage communication and planning with your publishing partner.

Coding: CODING KEYNOTE: Playstation PS3: Cutting Edge Techniques

Someone here at MGS pointed out to me that Kish Hirani is the same Kish that used to be mentioned a lot at VIS; for some reason I never connected the two names. Now that I’ve seen one of his talks in person, that makes a lot more sense. Some interesting displays of the new motion tech which we weren’t allowed to photograph. It has its own pros and cons when compared to Microsoft’s Natal, but to be honest I think both platforms will stand or fall on the quality of the games made for them, and the PS3 is still fighting its price and install base handicap.

More interesting was the definite sense of sharing, that Sony have a lot of library and middleware code, all of which they’re throwing at developers for free. They don’t want developers suffering on their tech, they know its hard. While the libraries approach might be a little disjointed, it’s good to see that they’ve thrown themselves into developer support so wholeheartedly, and it certainly makes their platform a lot more attractive to us as a small developer now. I can’t quite see us pitching a PS3-only title, but I’m a lot less downbeat about the platform than I was 6 months ago.

Design: DESIGN KEYNOTE: Building LEGO Worlds – online, offline, and everything in between

This talk was mostly only interesting to listen to some of the challenges involved in taking an underlying core concept (LEGO’s concept of play) and applying it to a variety of games, and trying to maintain that concept through-out everything they do. I’ll be interested to see LEGO Universe when it comes out, but mostly only because it will need to do well if NetDevil are ever to put the money into Jumpgate Evolution that they need to. Especially now they’ve saddled themselves with the ailing Codemasters as a publisher.

Design: Rethinking Challenges in Games and Stories

I know a lot of people at TCE are dismissive of Ernest Adams’s credentials, but to be honest I’ve always found his articles to be interesting and well written. His talk at Develop was similarly interesting, covering a lot of topics relating to play mechanics, and exhortations to designers to break out of the traditional stifling models of play. But to be honest by this point I was exhausting from a gruelling week, and was happy to just listen to a fun talk before heading back to Reading.

My boss at Microsoft was kind enough to let me go through them for a pass, which allowed somewhat cheaper rates, at the cost of having all of my independent developer peers see my badge and run screaming from the representative of the big-bad-evil corporation. They were mostly tempted back with sweet and soothing words, but I did have to spam business cards as far and wide as possible to reinforce my credentials as a similarly small and indie business.

Sadly the last train back from Brighton was too early to partake in the kind of party networking that goes on after conference hours, but since I’m a total lightweight, that’s probably a good thing. Less potential business partners scared away by Professor Drunk and all of his loud and firmly held opinions on the failings of the industry.

That said, I was pleased to find kindred spirits amongst those I talked to in the early evenings – conferences are always a good way to gauge the general sentiment of the industry, and get a view from your peers untainted by media bias. Of that, the main themes I took away this year were: a) boxed retail games are not a good place to be, b) digital distribution of smaller titles is the only way to go, but is sadly lacking in many respects, and c) the funding gap between the retail behemoths and the self-funded indies is ever-widening, and still a barren wasteland.

Most of those are things I’ve been saying for a while now, but I’m glad to hear that it’s not just us, and these are industry wide issues. There is much optimism, and cause for hope. But the market we operate in is still settling, and no-one has any sure wisdom. What has become clear is that Nintendo’s strategy (or lack thereof) with WiiWare has condemned a promising opportunity for indies into something of a dead end.

While it’s cheaper to develop for the Wii, it’s still not ultra-cheap; the massive install base is very much skewed towards non-traditional customers who are unlikely to hunt out WiiWare and the Wii Shop in the same way that a traditional gamer would; the Wii Shop itself suffers from all of the terrible navigation issues that I’ve complained about before. The simple fact is that it’s an effort to buy things through WiiWare, and the only way we could tempt all those Wii-Fit to part with their cash is if it were suggested to them as part of using the system. Of course, I realise that we could reach them with targetted marketing, but let’s be frank, if we had the money to do targetted marketing we wouldn’t be in this position.

What we’d like, as indies, is a marketplace with customers actively searching for goods; where the quality of our titles is the differentiating factor, and the cost to bring games to market is as close to the cost of producing the titles. When you’re as small as your average independent, cost to get to market is key. Let’s imagine a title that costs £150K to develop. If we pitch it at a platform which requires £500K of advertising or other costs to get it to market, it doesn’t matter that would return £800K. Sure, that’s a decent return, but we don’t have £650K to put in. We’ve probably got the £150K, if not in cash then at least in sweat equity. But there’s not a queue of financiers out there willing to front the additional costs to get to market.

Although on this note I was chatting to Chris Swan of Blitz, without even realising who he was. And I must give much kudos to Blitz for being one of the few players prepared to put their money where their mouth is, and work with small independents.

So I’m both heartened and disheartened by my time at Develop. Heartened by the young and successful independents who I had the pleasure of meeting and drinking with, but disheartened that there are no platforms (or platform holders) with the vision to foster a market where smaller independents can operate

Sadly, after 3 long years with us, we must say goodbye to Bertie, our faithful and loyal company mascot. Your tank was never too smelly, your incessant sucking and dropping of the gravel never too annoying, and your occasional freaking out and bopping your head off the top of the tank was always a welcome sound to startle us from otherwise mundane work-based reverie.

A picture from happier (i.e. less dead) times

Yes Bertie, you shall be sorely missed. It may seem as if we are replacing you, with a slightly differently coloured, and hopefully more hardy version, but you may rest assured that no fish will ever hold quite the same level of affection in our hearts. Apart from Tim’s heart of course, he never took to Bertie like the rest of us. In fact, if I wasn’t so sure he understood that his job was on the line if he were to kill Bertie while I was away, I might have suspected foul play.

But no, it was simply Bertie’s time. He has lived a long and full life, amongst those who cared for him, and has now gone to that great big fish bowl in the sky, with a slightly superior grade of coloured gravel, and somewhat less algae and fish crap in the water. Farewell dear friend.

Definitely looking forward to meeting up with my contemporaries who I have been sorely neglecting, and finding out about new opportunities, and just generally being nosey about other people’s business (and in certain cases, other business’s people).

It might just be my Scottish breeding showing through, but when it’s hot like this, I just want to curl up into a ball and die. It doesn’t start that way; I just wince a little at the bright sunshine and shade my eyes. After that, I gripe a little when it feels like the sun is scorching down on me when I have to go to or from the office. And the sweaty back from hardly any exercise makes me grumpy. But after 6 solid days of unrelenting, stifling heat with no respite, I start cursing the sky and generally rambling on and being  this mad old bastard that is having trouble dealing with the world.

I think it’s the fact that I’ve done everything, up to and including lying in a bath of cold water, and it only gives me a temporary break from the heat. I do realise there are many places hotter than 30 degrees out there, that’s fine, I wouldn’t want to be there either. I like Edinburgh’s climate. It’s cold and it’s grey and it’s windy, but you know what? I never find myself sitting in a chair in a stifling room, knowing that every other room in the damn house is worse, thinking about how  nice it would be to just get a single bloody nights sleep. Against all my pre-conceptions about the way the world is supposed to work, it doesn’t get any cooler at night. I can’t even see the sun, why is it still so damned hot! Anyway, you get the picture. Heat = grumpy Chris.

I made a trip into London on Saturday (where it was equally hot) to meet up with some folks from The Chaos Engine, which was nice (if too hot). I made the joke with Professor Schminky that a meeting of industry people who know each other only through an anonymous internet forum was bound to be fraught with issues, but it turned out my suggestion that we all wear paper bags over our heads with our forum avatars printed on the front was unnecessary. Thank Jeebus for that, because it’s really hard to drink wine through a paper bag.

That’s about all the interestingness I’ve had the mental capacity for recently. Tim tells me that Edinburgh is suffering the same blistering heat that Reading is, but at least he’s in a basement office with a north facing window. Right now I daydream about being back in the office, just because I know how lovely and cold it can get. Mmmm, cold…

My problem, as is pretty typical for a task tracking system, is that it needs to be a matter of habit to check my task list every day. Which I do. But the very act of having a task list is by definition a triage action for managing things I need to do, and so if I’m not tackling the tasks quickly enough then they start to accumulate. If my list of due tasks is clear, then it’s fine, because I then look ahead, see what’s coming and act on it in advance. But every task has it’s own priority level – 1 means ‘can’t afford to let it slip’, 2 is ‘must do, but the world won’t end if it is delayed a little’, and 3 is ‘needs done when you get a chance’. So when time is pressing, the priority 3 items get left, and so my overdue tasks list is no longer clean and empty, but now has an item lurking there, untouched.

Once that psychologically important barrier is breached, then it’s oh so very much easier to let the next item on the overdue list slip as well. After all, I know I’ve fallen behind, but it’s okay because they’re all low priority. Before too long, the overdue list has a dozen items, and I’m no longer tackling tasks in advance, I’m just picking off the important ones when they appear on the overdue list. Some of the items on there are 2 months overdue, but even though they’re low priority, I don’t want to just change their due date to the future. That would be hiding from the problem – they are two months past due, and I should really tackle them.

And so, since I’m down here in Reading this weekend, and I’ve already done most of a day on our Evolution work, I’ve taken some time and made a concerted effort to tackle every last item on the list, even the low priority ones. Including the last one – “write blog entry”.

Done.

To be fair, this girl's been hard done by, as this image is used everywhere despite being a blatant photoshop job. But to indicate idiocy in all its forms, you can't beat it.

I refer potential applicants again to this post, although it should be noted that the unspoken rider to that post is that morons need not apply.

This post is written courtesy of the wi-fi in a B&B in central Reading, where I’ve been installed for the last week. It’s not my favourite accommodation in the world, I’ll admit (far too many chavs hovering outside the window when the pubs kick out). Luckily, I’ve found a decent room to rent which I’ll be taking up from the end of next week, where I’ll be for the majority of the next few months. Why? Our new client of course – the behemoth that is Microsoft Games.

This is indeed the tools gig I hinted about previously, but sadly that’s as far as I can go in terms of details; not because I’m working on anything super-secret, but because the contract is just generally confidential. Suffice to say it will allow me to indulge my passion for making process improvement tools and automated build systems, and deploy them on a scale that is far beyond our range as a tiny software shop.

Sadly though this requires me to be away from Edinburgh for much of the time, which I’m still getting used to. I’ve lived in Edinburgh for so long it’s hard to adjust to living elsewhere, it’s a city that spoils you for anywhere else. This will also leave Tim minding the office in Edinburgh on his own, but hopefully he won’t be rattling around the place too badly. I’ll still be working with him remotely on our work with Evolution, but he’ll have to keep Bertie alive on his own…

On the bright side, since I’m kept away from all of my usual distractions in the evening, I’m hoping to use the time productively to get some serious effort into our internal prototypes. That being said, in the 3 weeks away so far, I’ve managed no more than a few hours, but I put that down to the fabulous selection of pubs in and around the Rare studio in Warwickshire where I spent the first fortnight – it’s really hard to feel creative and productive when you’ve just had an exceptionally tasty portion of steak and chips for dinner! I’ve settled for keeping the usual pile of paperwork under control. Speaking of which – I must sort out last quarter’s VAT return before I miss the deadline…

Why don't you have a decent search facility WiiWare? Why?

It’s true. One of my biggest issues with the games industry as it stands today is with the digital distribution stores (DDS for brevity) in place on the various platforms. I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon with others who have predicted the imminent death of physical retail stores; I think there’s still a large place for brick-and-mortar game shops, and they’re certainly not going away any time soon. But I think a large part of the continuing need for retailers is down to the failings of the various digital providers. Let’s list the most relevant ones:

• Amazon
• Steam
• WiiWare
• XBox Live Arcade
• Playstation Network
• iPhone App Store

Amazon of course isn’t really a DDS, although I believe they’re changing that. It’s really just a retailer of boxed products – the shop-front might be on-line, but the products are generally posted to you; however the problems it faces and has overcome are very much relevant to all of these services. Steam is much more relevant to the discussion here, as it’s a proper DDS, and it has learned from many of Amazon’s lessons; sadly it is let down by uncompetitive pricing and the lack of community integration.

Really though, my irritation comes from the remaining 4 DDS – each of which is the only means of buying product for their respective closed platforms (Wii, X360, PS3, iPhone). All 4 suffer from the same problems, all of which have known solutions as demonstrated by Amazon, Steam and others. And the 4, together or separately, represent a massive market of game-hungry users, with cash to spare, who just want to find the good games and ignore the crap.

Here are the main problems, in order of importance to me (the user):

1. Navigation: How do I find games that I want to buy
2. Selection: How do I choose when I’ve found those games
3. Purchasing: How hard is it for me to buy the games once I’ve chosen them

Navigation is the real fundamental problem here. All 4 providers suffer from the same issue: their services are popular, so developers make many titles; users are then swamped with choices. Without any external information (reviews, friends’ recommentations), all products look mostly identical, with only a superficial information (title, image, etc.) to distinguish them – assuming the user wants to read through every title’s description in the hope of finding something they like. If the average quality of titles is low (i.e. shovelware), then great titles are lost in the noise of rubbish, and customers are forced to take a punt on titles when they have little idea of their quality. Once they get burned once, they’re reticent to come back, and likely to dismiss the entire shop as shovelware.

All 4 holders recognise this as a problem, but take varying strategies to get around the issue:

• Top X lists (sales based): Popular products are easy to find. Great. New products have little chance to generate sales because the titles in the top X list keep selling (because they’re the only ones the user can readily find).
• Title searching: Allow the user to search for a keyword in the title or description. Great. As long as the user knows what product they want in advance. Little to no chance of discovering relevant products.
• Limit the number of titles in the system: The console DDS do this more than the iPhone, simply by maintaining high barriers to entry (requiring approval prior to development, enforced QA standards, etc.). But at best this delays the problem from becoming serious. XBLA recently wanted to implement a policy of culling poorly reviewed/low selling titles which was a clear attempt to tackle this issue, they’ve since backtracked on this in favour of better searching (yay!)
• Highlight particular titles: XBLA prefers this approach – titles get a week of being featured prominently on the front page. Great. Now you have to make enough sales during that crucial week to build enough momentum to get onto the top X list. Miss your week, and you’re shafted. Better hope you’re not featured during the same week that GTA4 comes out, eh?

The approach of limiting the amount of titles in the system is pure short-termist madness. Maybe it is just a short-term fix until a proper storefront system can be made, but XBLA has had what, 3 years now to mature their navigation systems? The solution is one already demonstrated by Amazon. Navigation is the key issue. Searching is only one potential fix. Products need to be categorised into groups so that users can find the set of products they like by interest. Products need to cross link to each other: “Liked this title? Why not try X and Y, also from this developer?” “Customers who looked at product X ended up buying product Y and Z.” “Customers who viewed these titles,” etc.

Random title prominence: this is so underrated. Sure, the front of your store is prime real-estate, and you probably want to sell it, but you can come up with a system which allows games to be featured if they’ve paid, or if the users have rated it worthy.

I can see the DDS people’s defence: “that’s too complicated a UI to put on a console, it needs to be kept simple”. Well maybe you’re right. That brings us straight to point 3: ease of purchase. Why is the game store only on the console (or phone)? It needs to have a properly integrated equivalent on the web. Customers like shopping on the web. They prefer it. They’re used to it, it’s more flexible, and it supports a much more pleasant experience. Ever tried to enter your credit card number using a joy-pad? It’s not fun. Why are you making me do it? I want to be able to browse a game-store on my PC that gives me as much functionality as Amazon, purchase my game, and then press two buttons (Shop, Download Purchased Titles) on my console to get that game downloaded.

Sure, some times it’s nice to be able to buy direct from the console, but it’s not my first choice. Keep it there as a more limited option and I’d be fine with that, as long as the web-store was nice. But as a developer, I want to be able to publish links to my game on a web-store, so they can get straight to our games, and get them onto their console in minutes.

Back to point 2 though – choosing products. I don’t trust reviewers as to what games are good. I certainly don’t trust the platform holders, since they have a financial interest in the products doing well. I trust the customers. Not individuals, because there are clearly nut-cases out there that rate highly or lowly depending on whether they took their medication this morning, but aggregate ratings over time.

Tell me what games sold big in the last week, or month (doesn’t have to include numbers). Tell me the average rating in the last week or month, and how many people rated it. Publish customer reviews, and professional reviews, and metacritic scores. Put all of the rating functionality into the search system, so you can find titles that rated over 4 stars in the last month in the flight simulator genre. Show me the all-time classic RPGs, based on ratings since the store first open. Maybe I’ve a hankering for high quality old-style adventure games, let me find those.

None of this is crazy blue sky thinking. It’s all been done, it’s all been shown to have worked. Build a better DDS, and you’ll sell more products, we’ll sell more games, the customer gets more games, and they get better games so they come back and buy more. I can’t think of any good reason why they wouldn’t want to fix their stores, other than to make little kittens cry.

First off, this implication that number of hours you work has absolutely zero relation to the level of talent you possess. I’ve worked with talentless hacks that “worked” 60-80 hour weeks and still achieved less than everyone else. I’ve worked with amazing people who worked bang on 9-5 Monday to Friday and were some of the most able and committed developers. Of course there are extreme cases – talented folks who love their job so much and are willing and eager to work extra hours, just as there are people who are so apathetic about their work that they don’t even want to do their contracted hours, and coast at every opportunity. Talent and the number of hours worked are independent variables. To try to connect them is not only foolish, it’s selling your employees short.

The coasters need to be sacked, plain and simple. Those who work extra hours but aren’t very good should be given the chance and help to improve, but if they can’t they need to go too. Those who work the 40 hour week and produce are the core of your business, and need to be treated like the stars they are: not only are they good at producing, they are sensible enough to do it in a sustainable way. Those who are great and want to work all hours can be gems, but only if they are managed properly. Try to keep them to a sensible working week, and they’ll stay gems for longer; if you don’t they’ll last a while, and then burn out.

Burning out

We’ve all seen it, many times. Constrain their hours and they’ll find other ways to excel; they’ll cram the same amount of work into the time they have, or they’ll go away and enjoy their evenings, eager to come back in the morning, brimming over with good ideas that they’ve been thinking up while they were away from work. But most importantly they’ll have had a life outside of the work, and that will make them happier with their lives and happier with their jobs. If you let them work those crazy hours, you are both taking advantage of their generosity, and setting an unreasonable precedent that other individuals on the team should be doing the same. No matter how much you tell your employees that 9 to 5 is fine, they’ll look at the long hours those few are putting in, and feel that by not doing those hours they aren’t pulling their weight.

Most of all I detest the idea that making games is special, and that somehow by getting to make games we forfeit some of our rights because we get to do work that we enjoy. Screw that. I make games for a living because I love it. I’ve already sacrificed the higher salary I could get in the regular software world. I’ve sacrificed the stability you get outside the games industry. Now you’re trying to tell me I should sacrifice my quality of life as well? And to top it all off, I should be thankful to those who pay my salary for the priviledge of doing my job? No thank you.

When I’m making games, I’m doing a job. I deserve to be paid for the job I do. You want me to sacrifice quality of life, you pay me for the priviledge. My love for what I do comes out in the quality of the products I make, and that’s the only outlet there should be for it. Making games needs passion because the games themselves need love to make them good. By asking for ridiculous working hours or low wages, you are asking me to be less passionate about my job because to do it I need to accept being screwed on pay and conditions.

I’m not some idealistic student, I know that it’s not as simple as just clicking your fingers and suddenly we’re all working standard hours for good wages. The business needs are always going to come first. Sometimes the deadline will loom, or things will go wrong, and we’ll have to work long hours to put it right. We are dedicated people, and exceptional circumstances require exceptional measures. But right now, the individuals working in games development are being regularly asked to subsidise their employer’s costs by means of their own time and effort. Worse than that, many of those employers think this is fine and right and just the way things are. Wrong. The sooner we accept that abusing our staff is unprofitable in the long term the better off we will be as businesses. The sooner we accept that the 40 hour working week is the norm, and everything we do should be trying to get us closer to that norm, the better off we will be.

Slaves to the Grind

There are two parts to this issue really, the first fairly obviously is the problems that this has raised in the IGDA itself. Rather than take what seems to me the obvious route (make a public statement that Epic, while being free to run their studio any way they see fit, is choosing to operate in a way at odds with the IGDA’s stand on quality of life for developers), when pushed on the matter, the rest of the IGDA board has essentially folded, almost entirely on their QoL position.

Now for an organisation that has put QoL very high up on its list of priorities, this is a real problem. The developer community (or at least, that part of it that I hear from and talk to) has always struggled to see the value in an IGDA membership; it doesn’t provide much in the way of tangible benefits, and the social and networking aspect varies massively based on the activity of the local chapter in your area. Certainly the IGDA doesn’t provide anything like the benefits that a union would, as it’s specifically written into its constitution that it cannot become a union or anything like one. But the IGDA’s advocation on quality of life issues has always been one of the big pluses for it in my book – it occupied a niche in that it is placed to represent the best interests of its member developers in campaigning for a better industry for us all. To take away that advocacy position seems to me removes the biggest reason to support or recommend membership to others.

The furore surrounding both the original statement by Mike Capps, and the subsequent IGDA refusal to condemn his stance on general principle is what confounds me though. There is no reason why individual members of the IGDA, even board members, have to work for studios that slavishly follow ever policy that the IGDA might recommend. And with that in mind, it’s perfectly acceptable for Mike Capps to remain a board member, even when his employer’s position conflicts with the recommendations of the IGDA. The next time the elections come around, the IGDA membership will think long and hard about whether or not it’s a good thing to have a board member whose personal policies conflict with such a high profile policy of the organisation. Great. That’s democracy in action.

No, what bothers me is that the other IGDA board members have steadfastly reversed their own organisations positions rather than criticise another board member. They even seem to have gone so far as to implicitely defend Epic’s policy. What, exactly, is the point of saying “all studios should aim for a 40 hour week, because it’s better for everyone involved”, if you then follow it up by saying “oh, unless you’re an IGDA member already; in that case you can run your studio however you like, and I’m sure Epic have a good reason for preferring a longer work week, they do seem to be quite successful and all.” The whole discussion on the IGDA forums has been flabbergastingly forthright in its defence of the over-working of individuals in games development.

The board members, and other senior figures in the IGDA, all seem to be quite surprised at the vehemence with which they’re being attacked. They don’t seem to see their own stance as hypocritical, but attempts to get them to justify their position have resulted in only anger and latterly heavy-handed moderation to quell the continuing argument on their own forums. More recently they have come out with public statements to clarify their position, and to attempt to re-assert their original position on QoL issues, but it all smacks of too-little-too-late unfortunately. The board’s own defence (both implicit and explicit) of Epic’s practices have in my opinion exposed their stance on QoL as nothing more than lip-service towards the ideal, despite the obvious importance the issue has with their (non-management) membership. If that membership hasn’t already voted with their feet and left by the next elections, I hope they show their dissapproval and vote out the incumbent board members in favour of some who actually believe in the policies the IGDA publicly endorse.

All that said, I’m not an IGDA member, and with all of this, I have no intention of becoming one now. No, what worries more is the attitude shown originally by Mike Capps, and latterly people on the IGDA forums. That somehow a person who only wants to work a 40-hour week is just a jobsworth, there marking time and collecting a pay-cheque but with no real passion or involvement with the work they do. That somehow the number of hours you work is linked to your talent. That somehow the fact that the job is making games makes it special, and exempt from all of the normal moral implications of taking advantage of your staff. 

(continued in part 2…)

My problem comes in that pretty much all of the functionality I needed from the tool has been present since version 3. Sure some of the new features are nice, and the overall application is prettier now. But mostly what has come in subsequent versions has been for me superfluous bloat. It means the installer is bigger, it means the application is slower to respond, and more complex to navigate the interface. And really what I actually would most value is if I had pretty much the exact same set of features, but a) bugs were squashed and no new ones added, b) the support for the underlying system (in this case Subversion) had been kept up to date, and maybe c) the interface was improved and streamlined.

It’s not just SmartSVN though, it’s lots of applications. GetRight, ACDSee, Word/Excel/Office, all of which have gone through many revisions, each one adding more and more features that I don’t really need or appreciate. In the case of ACDSee the later versions actually made the interface worse, which effectively removed the one feature that people bought it for – the quick and easy way to mouse-scroll through whole directories of images.

The problem here is that what the end users want is fundamentally at odds with what the business needs to do. The end user would be quite happy having the same application and just keep using it forever. But for the business that authors the application, that’s a losing proposition. They’ve made one sale, and they get no more. What they really want is to be able to sell more things to the same user. If they make a new version of the tool, they can put enough new features in to persuade the user that it’s actually a new application. The user isn’t an idiot though. They know it’s not a whole new application. Maybe they need or would like some of those new features, maybe not.

Most likely they’re buying the new version because it fixes bugs in the old version, and is better supported. I’d even go so far as to say that they’d be willing to pay for those bug-fix and maintenance updates – not as much as they’d pay for a whole new version, but something at least. Some companies, like Whole Tomato (who make Visual Assist) have a refreshingly straight-forward approach to this: you buy the application, and you get X months of updates along with it. After X months, you have to pay again a smaller amount to keep getting updates.

Even Whole Tomato though are guilty of the most annoying of the application developer’s sins (from an end user’s point of view at least) – feature creep. Every development has a Request For Enhancement list which is used as a back-log of items that might make their way into the application at some point. Anything reasonable the end users request goes on that list. And because the developer is a business, that makes its money from cranking out new versions of the application, they work through that list, pretty much endlessly. So an application which is clean, usable and decently featured in version 3 can turn into a Swiss-Army-Knife of an application by version 8; bristling with functions, features and options, which the majority of users, other that one user who requested it originally may never touch.

It seems that very rarely is the decision taken to just draw a line in the backlog and say “it’s good now, let’s just stop adding features”. Keep selling it, keep maintaining it, putting out bug-fix and maintenance upgrades, but no more features. What, I ask, is wrong with making compact applications with specific and targetted functions? Even if there are valuable features to be added, why not ask if there is value in maintaining a Core and a Premium version of the application? Or even multiple Premium versions? Find your users and target the groups who want to buy your product. Give them each their own version. Discontinue versions that don’t sell well, and maintain versions which have.

A well architected software development can maintain development on multiple branches simultaneously with not too much extra effort, certainly there is a cost but I believe there is also a reward. Give your users exactly what they need and no more, and you avoid becoming the behemoth application that is under-cut by a spunky fresh new competitor, that didn’t have all of your features but had “just enough” to be valuable, was cheap enough to develop to undercut you on price, and flexible enough due to its small size to adapt quicker and better to changing technology than you did.

In summary if you don’t want to follow the link though, I’d say code reviews are a good thing, especially as teams scale and there are differing levels of skill and familiarity with the code-base. They get everyone on the same page about what is being written and how it is being built. Pretty much all of the criticisms levelled at the process are from people who have had bad experiences due to issues completely outside the scope of the process. If your code review was useless because the reviewer was being a) petulant and petty, b) disinterested, or c) unable to comprehend the issues involved; then the issue is with your team ethos and make-up, not with the review process.

I want to write up my thoughts on the ongoing IGDA debacle, but suffice it to say for now that any interest I had in re-kindling the Scottish chapter have been well and truly snuffed out.

Isn’t that one chubby squirrel? Tim reckons that he just does the rounds of all the windows nearby, and lives off the generosity of the locals who like cute squirrels. He certainly doesn’t seem afraid of us…

Since rebuilding the repository revision by revision is always a massive pain, I’ve done some mucking around in the guts of the repository to get around the problem. And since my Googling of the issue has been less than helpful, I thought I’d post here to give a reference for anyone else with a similar issue.

Symptom:

Running svnadmin verify on the repository results in a “Checksum mismatch while reading representation”. The output here is misleading, because it will say something like “* Verified revision 23″ on the line before the error message. This means that it is in fact revision 24 which is bad. You will also find that if you try to dump the repository, it will successfully dump revisions 0 through 23, but then fail on 24. If you try to dump revisions 0:23 and then 25:HEAD like I did, you’ll probably find that the 25:HEAD revision doesn’t work.

Diagnosis:

One (or more) of the changes to files in the revision that is causing problems has a different checksum than the one that the revision file recorded at the time. So when svnadmin verify looks over the contents of the revision and recalculates the checksum it finds that they don’t match and tells you. This means one of two things: 1) the checksum recorded at the time was wrong, and the data in the revision/file is valid, or 2) the data in the revision/file is corrupt, and the checksum at the time was correct.

If the file generating the bad checksum is a text file, you might be able to look at the contents of the revision file and check if it’s noticeably corrupt. If the file is binary as mine was, that’s probably not an option. Even more so if the file is large (mine was several hundred MB).

2) seems to me more likely, so chances are the file in question is corrupt and you need to fix the data. But if 1) is the case, then all you need to do is fix the checksum. Either way you probably can’t tell at this point – so best to assume it’s gone and work from there, or at least treat it as suspicious and verify it against other sources for the data if possible.

Possible Solution:

If you’re happy to assume that file is corrupt, then you can get your repo back to a verifiable step by changing the checksum saved in the revision file to match the checksum which will be generated from the data as it is now. The data won’t change so you’ll still have to verify it manually or delete it later, but at least you can persuade the repository that you don’t care.

Process:

I’m assuming here you’re working directly with the server on Linux. I use Debian, so tools like grep and hexedit are usually available (although I had to install hexedit).  The same principles would apply on Windows, but the tools would have to change.

1) Identify the revision which is corrupt. This is straightforward – it’s the revision after the last successfully verified revision

2) Identify the file in the revision which has the bad checksum, and find the bad checksum in the revision. This is harder – the revision files (stored in /repository/db/revs) are binary, and in my case, huge. But grep is your friend here. svnadmin verify gives you the checksum that is currently recorded – this is stored in the revision file, right next to a description of the file. Here’s a grep command that searches the particular revision file for the checksum we’ve been given:

grep -e "79a1686d0dfb8618b8ccfc9eb7d74759" -A 3 -B 3 -b -a main/db/revs/24

384989609-id: 5cu.0.r24/384989609
384989633-type: file
384989644-count: 0
384989653:text: 24 75689685 293851064 294285337 79a1686d0dfb8618b8ccfc9eb7d74759
384989724-props: 24 384989543 53 0 113136892f2137aa0116093a524ade0b
384989782-cpath: /path/to/the/bad/file.exe
384989842-copyroot: 0 /

The number at the start of each line is the offset, we’ll use that soon. The cpath line is most interesting – this is the file you can expect to be corrupt. But it’s the :text: line that we need to change to get things working. As described here, (look for the section on the revision file format) this line is of the form “<rev> <offset> <length> <size> <digest>”. We don’t want to change the first 4 parameters – they’re most likely just fine. But the 5th parameter is the bad checksum, and we’ll need that in the next step.

3) Change the bad checksum to match the “actual” checksum which the svnadmin verify process is coming up with. Again, this is printed out when you run the verify. To make the change, I used hexedit, which thankfully doesn’t try to load the entire (huge) revision file into memory. You just fire it up, and press Return to enter the offset within the file to jump to. It wants it in hex, so a quick conversion turns 384989653 into 16F279D5. From there you can press Tab to switch to ASCII editing, quickly find the offending checksum and overwrite it with the new, valid checksum; then press Ctrl-X to save out the file and exit.

4) Re-run svnadmin verify. It should now successfully verify the broken revision and move on. If it doesn’t, check to see if the revision and checksum it’s failing on are the same – if they’re not then you have more broken files/revisions, and you should repeat steps 1 to 3 until they’re all gone. Hopefully there won’t be too many of them. And remember – just because your repository is now verifiable, doesn’t mean that your data is valid. All you’ve done is told the svnadmin tool that the checksum for the data you have is the same as the checksum it expects.

For us, really, it was a convenience thing. I studied in Edinburgh, and my first job (VIS Entertainment) was based in Dunfermline, so I commuted there for a while before they moved their office to Edinburgh. For 6 months or so I was seconded to the Dundee studio for a project, and the 2 hour commute each way took a real toll on my quality of life. Compared to that having an office in Edinburgh was a breeze, certainly much more social.

I’ve always loved Edinburgh as a city, it is an amazing city, with the warmth and personality of a smaller town, combined with the incredible history and range of night-life and culture that I think comes from it being a capital. So the best of both worlds I always thought. Glasgow is larger, but for me lacks charm and friendliness; Dundee has that charm and friendliness but lacks the same range of things to do that Edinburgh or Glasgow offer.

So all business motivation aside, I’ve always much preferred Edinburgh to the other options. When VIS went out of business in 2005, I had just moved flats and was committed to at least another 5 months of the lease. With that in mind, it was either Rockstar North, commuting to Dundee for a position with one of the various teams there, or trying to start my own studio as I had been thinking about for a while. With my own quality of life firmly in mind, I chose the latter, and started the studio, running it out of our spare room. The first 9 months or so was a struggle to find work, but I realised that there was a niche here in Edinburgh, for those developers who didn’t want to disappear into the behemoth that is R* North, but who (for personal reasons like me) couldn’t face shifting to Dundee, either relocating or commuting.

So rather than follow the herd and shift up to Dundee, I was determined to take advantage of both the personal enjoyment of living and working in Edinburgh and this talent pool. I figured that I would have a better chance recruiting people if I was running in Edinburgh, both experienced developers who wanted out of R* or Outerlight for whatever reason, and other people who would like to come and live in Edinburgh but who might not want to live in Dundee.

Of course, most of our business involves dealing with other games developers, and we do have a good working relationship with several studios up in Dundee. I do find that I spend a non-trivial portion of my time on the train up to Dundee to meet with those people, and that would be much easier if we were based up there with the other small studios. But many of our clients are down south as well, and so Edinburgh is well placed as a travel hub to get to all of those destinations.

Aside from the potential of easier collaboration with the many studios who are Dundee based, the other important consideration is premises rent. I gather that many of the studios who are tempted to the Seabraes developments are given massive discounts on the rent there, due to the council/Scottish Enterprise’s efforts to create a digital media hub. That’s a great thing, and certainly must weigh heavily on any manager who has to find space for their team. But for us, especially since we started out working remotely from home, this was never a pressing issue. When we reached a sufficient size where a shared team space was a good idea, we shifted out into our Palmerston Place office. By that point, with two developers, the proportion of our monthly outgoings which were rent was very small; with four developers it is even smaller. Salary has always dominated our cash-flow, and so rent price is less important than quality of life for the team.

We’ve been especially lucky in that both of our offices have come in at around 100 UKP per person per month, which even for Edinburgh is very cheap. Largely that is down to good fortune and timing, but it’s also because we’ve been prepared to look at non-traditional office spaces. Our first place was a room in a Georgian town-house in the West End of Edinburgh. The décor was fairly shabby, the services provided were minimal, but the place was nice; it had real character, and it was in a central location so that everyone on the team could get to it easily. There are plenty of pubs and shops and bus stops nearby, which makes it much nicer to work because you can get life stuff done. The new premises are set to be much nicer, the space is larger and it has a nice comfortable feel to it. The place is still being done up (hence the bargain rent), so it has many rough edges, but it feels like a good creative space. And again they are central so that quality of life is high.

The key thing I think for us is that the common feeling about Edinburgh (that property prices and rent are high) doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. We had quite a few options for office space, all within easily affordable price range, all central Edinburgh, all spaces in old buildings. The impression I get is that the myriad of old buildings in central Edinburgh have many quirky, odd spaces, which don’t allow the big, open-plan offices that companies seem to like these days. As a result, once your business expands beyond a certain size (10 or so people), it is very difficult to find a single space to suit, and so businesses have to go out of town, to spaces like South Gyle and Leith, before they find modern office-space that fits their specifications. And so the prices out of town rise, and there is a glut of small-sized offices slap bang in the centre of Edinburgh which keeps their prices reasonable.

As a small, creative business, we can make pretty much any office space work. We don’t have to have an open plan space, we would have been quite happy taking two mid-sized rooms in a town-house next to each other, and just wandering between them. So by being more flexible about the types of space we rent, we can fit into any of the odd shaped offices which central Edinburgh offers.

I realise of course that your questions are all relating to Dundee, and I’ve only talked about Edinburgh, but the answer to me is clear. We are based in Edinburgh, and unlikely to move, because:

1. Edinburgh’s great
2. Edinburgh’s cheap (enough for us)
3. Edinburgh has a talent pool we can take advantage of that a Dundee company can’t
4. Shifting to Dundee would make it easier to work with other Dundee businesses, but harder to work with everyone else

There are many good people and businesses that work in Dundee, and they probably disagree with me on the personal preference for Edinburgh as a city (in fact I can think of several off-hand who do, and tell me so on a regular basis); they would be better people to ask about why Dundee has been such a success. As an outsider, I certainly feel that incentives have played a part, but I think that probably a bigger factor is that the studios in Dundee are often started by Dundonians. And there are some very talented Dundonians, and the very fact that there are a lot of talented teams there already encourage more teams to set up alongside. So Dundee has a critical mass of talent, which itself helps to keep other talent nearby (its nice to know that if you’re relocating to somewhere like Dundee, that even if your new job goes belly-up, there’s plenty of other jobs nearby so you don’t have to relocate again).

The telling fact is I think that when one of those studios dies (e.g. Visual Science), the people involved with that will start up new businesses. The fact that those founders choose to start up again in Dundee and not relocate somewhere else does suggest that Dundee is a good place to run a creative team. Whether the incentives are forming an unnatural situation (i.e. those businesses would have moved elsewhere had incentives not been offered) or not is an interesting question, but one better answered by someone who’s started a business and chosen Dundee.

I think that’s possibly why I like to spend time on improving our pipe-line at the weekends or in my off-time; even though I could spend more time on the big pile of client work that needs done, I find myself tackling little bits of our own pipe-line because I know it’s a task I can get done without any other input.

On that note, with some more collaboration with the developers on some little niggles, we finally switched our creaky old makefile based system over to using JamPlus properly. Both build processes still run side-by-side, but the JamPlus version has a fraction of the number of lines in the makefile, runs much faster doing dependency checking etc., and in general is much cleaner and will be more maintainable going forward. I’ll have to walk the guys through what’s there so they can maintain it too, but after that I should be able to scrap the makefiles altogether.

Next step is the art/audio asset to platform binary conversion process, and this is why I really wanted to switch over to JamPlus. Our previous art pipeline would always rebuild platform assets, even if the source assets hadn’t changed. That was fine early on, when all of our tools ran lightning fast and we had few source assets, but very quickly it grinds when you introduce slow tools (such as our font encoding tool that does smart packing of glyphs and colour conversion), or many assets. Also the build scripts which make those assets are all Lua based, and so we have different technology for building code than for building art and audio. I’m pretty hopeful that we can make JamPlus fulfill both functions, and in the process get fast dependency checking for our art assets so that only the assets that have changed get rebuilt. But for that I’ll need a free day, and those are few and far between right now.

We’ve finally shifted to our new place in Belford Road. It’s really just around the corner from our old place, but is generally much nicer, larger and more flexible than our old place. If you look back at the pictures of the Palmerston Place office it’s clear that we struggle to fit all four of us into the room, what with all the boxes and kit and other things. The new place has a lot more room to breath and so everyone gets more space. Plus we have a whole wall that we can have nothing but white-boards on, and I won’t need to hover behind Pete’s desk to draw on the white-board while he’s trying to work.

Enough talk – some pictures and a movie link:

Exactly what we’ll do with all this space I don’t really know yet! Obviously looking at the movie you’ll see the place is still being worked on – thankfully that just means that we get a good deal on the rent in return for putting up with dust and loose ends everywhere. But even with that, it feels like a much more creative space than the last office, a place that I can see us making games in.

In less upbeat news, we’ve been somewhat idle over the holiday period; one of our more important clients has had to stop giving us work due to a publisher they’ve been working with having trouble. So we are currently casting around for new clients and opportunities. Sadly that does mean that we’ll probably have to trim sails for a bit to get through the rough patch, and exactly what will happen we can’t really predict. And in the meantime we will just have to fill in our time by experimenting with some new gameplay ideas that we keep talking about but never get any proper time to do anything about.

SomeObject::GetID method

Gets the ID for the object

Does not mean that you have thorough documentation. Seriously. That is all.

My fiancée took this to the next level though, as we’d been playing Rayman over the weekend, and one of it’s mini-games involves slapping choir-boysrabbits singing out of tune. The Wii-mote’s got such a nice motion for slapping, including a little noise/rumble when you connect. And so “Celebrity Slap – Wii” was born. All of the most annoying celebrities in popular culture today, moving around the screen. You wouldn’t need ultra-realistic models, just inflated mug-shots on wobbly-headed avatars – it’s the face you want to slap really.

You could have all different sorts of scoring modes: “Slap the Talent/Popularity Stars” – where you have to only slap celebrities who’ve been on X-Factor or Strictly Come Superstar; “Slap the Slappers” – where you have to only slap celebrities famous for their ridiculous love-lives. The possibilities are endless. You’d have to localise it of course, every country has it’s own set slappable figures; you could have a nostalgia version where you get to slap Timmy Mallet and Noel Edmonds and the like, or a music version with Britney Spears, et al.

Sadly though, the copyright and libel issues on this one put me off actually making it, so I’m giving this idea away free to the world. All I ask is that I get a free copy, so that if it does appear, I can have an enjoyable half hour slapping the Gallagher brothers.

We’ll probably not be moving until mid to late January though, as I’ve yet to get a final move date confirmed. BT and Eclipse assure me that if we give them enough warning then we will be able to switch our phone and broadband over without any hassle, which is nice. Even better though is the ability to keep the same phone number. Not that we use the office line for much except giving us a route to put broadband through, but I like minimal changes. It’s going to be annoying enough handling all the change of addresses as it is.

Still, I’ll be sad to leave the current office, it’s been a good home for the last 15 months. It’s a little hard to remember that right now though, given how cold it is. It will be nice to move to a place with working central heating and some well sealed windows! And of course we will miss the grumpy cat from the courtyard outside, who spends all day meowling loudly because it’s been left outside in the cold.

Grumpy Cat

Mind you, once it’s been let back inside (as I assume it must be occasionally), it probably takes about 5 minutes for it to start meowing and griping until it’s kicked back outside again. Such is the life of an outdoors cat.

[in reply to the implication that really good employees are the ones who work extra and late to deliver over and above expectations]

While I heartily acknowledge that it’s daft to just up sticks and leave at some arbitrary time and break your flow, I think that its still going to be the exception rather than the rule. You don’t always hit your peak productivity at 4:30 only to have to leave at 5. Certainly there are some days when I’m just getting going when I really should be going home – I find a good point to shelve it and go home. And when I come back in the morning, I’ve had a whole night to ponder the work and generally do a better job of finishing it up than had I just forged ahead.

That said, I don’t want my team feeling like more hours = better work. The only way I want to see productivity improved is for people to work smarter and harder for those 8 hours. I want people to go home feeling like they achieved lots, but still get home at a sensible time that leaves them free to enjoy their own time. I want people to come in and focus, so we’re all in that intense zone of getting s&*^ done at roughly the same time.

We all spend time during the day surfing the web, emailing others, etc., and it eats productivity, and doesn’t necessarily improve the creative atmosphere. I don’t want people staying late to get their stuff done because they have only done 5 hours of effective work in the 9-5 period. Then they end up getting home late, and blame the job for sucking up all their free time.

I want a team that burns bright during their work day, and finds that balance between producing volume, and feeling the creative spark that gets them producing quality. If the only way I can improve the team’s productivity or quality is to increase the hours worked, then I’ve failed. If we’re really at our peak productivity in that 8 hour day, then I’m due to hire someone else. I’m pretty damn sure that if we every got even close to that zone we’d be one of the most effective devs around.

In other news, our prototype games on WiiWare are now looking like actual games, although I’ve left it in the capable hands of Pete and Tim while Charlotte and I have been taking care of our clients. So as not to be left out of all the fun though, I’ve taken on a bit of hobby coding and am converting our somewhat ungraceful build process (a combination of Lua scripts, makefiles for Wii/PSP and Visual Studio projects for Win32), and am converting it over to use JamPlus. There has been a lot of debate on the sweng-gamedev mailing list and elsewhere about getting build systems which cope with the rigours of game development. Jam had the most potential but development of the main version of it has pretty much died off, and the patches and work required to get a Jam build suitable (performance and flexibility-wise) for games development is enough to put everyone else off.

The helpful Joshua Jensen however has done some sterling work in putting together all that existing work in a practically off-the-shelf tool called JamPlus. I’ve been most impressed with its speed and flexibility so far, and thanks to Josh I’ve learned enough of the scripting logic to convert our quite specific build needs into Jam logic. Once it’s done I’ll publish our scripts to serve as an extra example for folks (minus all the Wii and PSP stuff that’s covered under NDA of course), hopefully that will help others and get it to be a well accepted tool. As always, I think anything that helps efficiency of games developers in general is good, but really it’s because as our prototype games have grown, it’s become clear that we need a proper dependency-checked build tool to manage our asset->game toolchain.

Anyway, ecological rant out of the way for today, here in the office we’ve probably burned quite a few kilo-joules of energy keeping ourselves warm, as a cold snap here in Edinburgh has alerted us to the fact that the radiators in the office are no longer working. While I used to happily sit and work with a fleece and fingerless hobo-gloves on, I’d feel bad about making the team suffer the same. So instead we’re all kind of clustered around a little electric fan heater that must be costing the earth (literally).

We’ve had a stay of execution on the move away from this office however, previously we’d been told we’d have to move by late November, but now we are safe until February. That said, we’re looking at a nice new place in a basement on Rutland Square that fits our needs quite well – not sure if we’ll be taking it because I don’t know the cost yet, but it would be not too far from our current place, and crucially much closer to the nice pubs of the West End. Not that that affects my decision at all, no. That would be bad.

It’s with that in mind though that I’m throwing up a link to Fustian Future, a relatively new (3 months or so) indie developer whom I know via The Chaos Engine (hang out for games industry folks from all over). Yacine Salmi, the one man team behind Fustian, is of course far more dedicated to updating his blog than I wasam, so there’s a lot more to read over there. He’s mixing up the regular indie developer chat with some interesting stuff on new and potential technologies, and more general games industry stuff. In particular I’d point you to this post on a GDC talk/round-table on unions in the games industry that sadly won’t come to pass. It’s certainly raised some interest on the Chaos Engine forums as it’s a contentious subject; however pretty much everyone is open to more discussion on the issues, so it’s sad to note that it won’t go ahead. GDC organisers take note – this is one more voice suggesting that you do the talk next year!

That being said, I’m always torn on the unionising issue. It’s been done to death on the TCE forums, and very little new gets said about it. There are a few (quite vocal) advocates of unions as a serious answer to the issues of overworking, crunch and general poor employee rights that plague some of the larger (and not so large) studios. There are others who a) don’t see the value in a union, b) don’t trust any of the existing unions to properly represent our issues, and c) don’t think that game-developers on the whole are the sort of people who would organise into a union.

But there is a definite chicken and egg problem, which the discussions we have make readily apparent. Most game-developers have little to no knowledge of unions, so their objections are rarely based on informed choice. There is no union which caters specifically for games developers, although several of the more general ones would happily expand to cover the industry (BECTU being the most obvious choice). By and large though, not enough employees at games studios are members for the union to actually properly represent them, so no-one can relate stories of how being a union member was obviously advantageous. Because there is no anecdotal evidence that being in a union is useful, not enough employees join. And so on.

At this point in the discussions, the cry is usually “why don’t you just join and start the ball rolling”, which for me is equally frustrating. Of course, I am in fact management, and not just an employee. So it doesn’t make sense for me to be a union member. And my team, not being generally mistreated, feels no need to join a union either. Many of the voices on the TCE forums echo similar stories. Those employees who might actually benefit are the ones that need to be persuaded by the discussions, and for some reason they are absent from the debate. So while I’m still ambivalent about the idea of unions in general, I’m keen to see the idea discussed more widely and openly amongst developers, so the people who could benefit may consider it an option, or discount it as unsuitable once they know the facts!

I’m fairly sure that I’m not an especially lucky traveller. I have a decent share of missed or late trains, and while it doesn’t exactly make me the cheeriest soul in the world, I try to bear it with good grace. But I’ve never had a problem with luggage space, or seat reservations, or half of the things that plague these passengers, so I can’t help but feel that there’s some sort of karma working itself through there. It might seem petty, but I find myself thinking “Good”, when someone has missed a connection and has decided to take it out on a conductor who clearly has nothing to do with their problem.

As troubling as it is to witness the sheer unbridled ignorance and lack of concern for the effects their actions have on others that some of the passengers show though, it is at least comforting to see that the majority of my fellow travellers are actually just nice people. They just want to get to their destination with the minimum of fuss, like me.

You can spot the regular travellers of course, they tend to be quite quiet, keep to themselves. They know exactly where they are going, they know which cars on the train are which and how the seat reservation system works. In general they get on the train and settle down quickly, surrounding themselves with the trappings of the regular traveller – the laptop or MP3 player comes out instantly and gets arranged artfully in front of them. On the morning trains down to Cheshire I’ve seen people get on, set up their space and have their head leaning against the window close to snoring, before the train has even left Edinburgh Waverley. Now that is a professional traveller.

On the flip side you get the occasional travellers, who are easily marked out early on by the fact that they come on, wandering down the aisle and staring at each and every number in turn for a few seconds before moving on. Which is odd really, given how little information is on there. Read the number. Does it match your number? No? Then keep moving until it does. There’s four seats in every row, if your number is 48 and you’re just passing 4, then you don’t need to stop and check every row, you’re at the wrong part of the carriage. If it matches? Then sit down, or at least move out of the way so the dozen people patiently (or not so patiently) standing behind you waiting to get past to their own seats can get along. In particular, don’t stare at the seat number, look at the seat, at the seat number again, then look around and see if you like the other seats nearby better.

Couples and families are especially bad for this. It’s not rocket science, you’d think, getting to your seat and sitting down. But watching a pair of grandparents with a young child going up and down a carriage, dithering over where to go, because there’s someone else  sitting in the unreserved seat of their table for four; well – it’s excruciating to watch. Sometimes the conductor happens along while they’re still dithering, and I don’t envy their job at all. You can see the distress on their face as they try to resist the urge to shake the errant passengers by the shoulders and shout “Just sit down! It’s not that hard!”

Families are also the worst for the crazy bag sizes, which is great fun to watch, as long as you’re not sitting by the luggage racks. At a distance though, it’s great to watch them trying to manage with a bag big enough to fit a small child in. From the moment they get on the carriage and struggle to even get their bags through the doors, you know there’s going to be a dilemma before they get to sit down. And sure enough, they eventually get to the rack, banging peoples elbows and ankles along the way, only to find that it’s already pretty full of normal sized bags. Then they huff and puff and half-heartedly push other bags around, even though it’s clear that the only way they’re getting their bags in is to throw all the others from the train and hope no-one notices. With couples and families though, you get a further treat, which is to watch them turn to each other and start complaining that there’s never enough room for bags on the train (or for bonus points – complain at their partner that they’ve packed too much stuff). As if it’s somehow the train company’s fault for not accommodating their giant-sized luggage. The more belligerent amongst them will even start asking around if other people could move their bags instead – only to be greeted with shocked stares and disbelief at their gall.

(to be continued…)

Anyway, that paranoia aside, I certainly got less blogging than I wanted to done, as I was going to catch up on my backlog. That in itself was probably good though, in that I got more time enjoying the holiday (and the generalised madness that is being a tourist in the USA) instead.

Everyone has seemed to get along just fine without me anyway, the clients all seemed quite happy with the work getting done, none of the team got ill or went crazy, and the office didn’t burn down. So all in all a successful trip away. Lot’s of paperwork and admin to catch up on though, and getting back up to speed with our 3 projects.

Couple the illness with preparations for an upcoming three week holiday around the US, and I’ve been run ragged for the last month, which really isn’t good. On the other hand, it’s forced me to make sure that the rest of the team are good to keep working on their own without me micro-managing everything.

Being ill has radically cut down on my ability to tackle the little additional things that I normally do in addition to the regular day-to-day work of the Company though, hence the blogging hiatus. It remains on the to-do list, every day taunting me by being something I really want to do, but never being high enough on the priorities to actually get done.

It’s also meant that my enjoyment of the EIF this year was radically cut down. But thankfully the venue was just a few hundred yards along the road from our office, which made it much easier to both attend and still be on top of our normal work. I’ll write up my impressions from the talks as usual, but that may have to wait until later in the week.

We’ve also taken on work for a new client – another WiiWare development, which is good as it helps us cement our understanding of the platform. But that is mostly going to rest in the hands of Tim and Pete as I go off travelling from Friday. Our hotels mostly have wi-fi connections (I think I’d probably go insane if I didn’t have net access for three weeks) so I’ll be talking with the office over Skype and email in case of emergencies. But hopefully I’ll be able to relax and remember what life outside of work is all about!

A decent profit was made this year, despite my best efforts to hide it with last minute devkit and hardware purchases, so our money-grubbing government will take a slice of it this year (boo, hiss). Somehow I’ll find it in me to live with that though.

Just been looking over the E3 content from this year though – so thoroughly un-inspiring that I’m not even going to bother linking to any of it. Suffice to say that there’s not really anything that I’m head over heels about, although id’s new trailer was good-looking enough to raise an eyebrow, even if I’m not convinced that it’s anything other than a tech demo at the moment.

Things in the office are trundling along much as usual, with our previous prototypes close to running properly on the devkit. We’re toing and froing about the direction the prototypes will take at the moment, but I’m just eager to get stuck in and try new things.

Nothing that I’ve seen in the last 2 years has shifted my views on the likely fate of big-budget retail titles, although we haven’t seen a wholesale collapse in that sector of the market, so its likely things aren’t all that bad. Down here at the shallow end of the pond though it is small affordable to develop (and buy) titles all the way. We’re getting ever closer to getting our prototypes up and running on the console kit, but I won’t be happy until I can start tinkering properly and see the results on the television. Our story-board is shifting nicely over to the ‘done’ column though, so it will soon be time to re-fill the board with more significant and less engine-related stories.

Note to self though – follow up our post on the one true handed-ness with one on the one true endian-ness. Big endian is not our friend!

Conjures up all sorts of images. So yes, the development kit has been dusted off, the stories board has been cleaned out and refilled with relevant story cards, and we are ploughing through the mountain of documentation for the Wii and getting stuck into getting our test game ported over. Much fun!

In other news, since he made grumbling noises when I asked him to write a blog post, I feel compelled to announce Pete’s news that he managed a First from his Software Engineering degree – we’re all quite proud. So I think that’s three Firsts and a Masters for Charlotte: I wonder if that qualifies for some sort of tax break. Probably not. :-/

So yes: new staff! As I mentioned before, Charlotte Moseley and Tim Angus have joined Pete and I, to make a nice round number of four. They’ve both been beavering away in the office since the start of May.

Even better, now Pete is finally putting his degree course to bed, he’ll be joining us in the office full time as well. So definitely a full house, since our office is only really big enough to fit four people comfortably. We shall have to see about some bigger space at some point soon, so we have room to grow when we next feel the need to.

We couldn’t let the first day with all four of us in the office go by without marking the occasion though, so I shooed everyone out of the office and round the corner to the Mercat for some celebratory drinks. The wonderful thing about having an office in the centre of Edinburgh is the ready access to nice places to eat and drink after work. Apologies for the grainy picture quality, but I only had my phone camera with me, having stupidly forgotten to bring the proper one! And of course I’m the cameraman, so it’s not a proper team photo. I’m sure we’ll sort one of them out soon.