Is it bad to be compulsively checking the UPS tracking page for my new laptop? Or to be a little nervous because it’s currently in Kazakhstan, and all those Call of Duty games made me a little nervous about ex-Soviet republics? Is that over-protective? It’s not even here yet, and I’m clucking over it like a mother hen.

Whatever, as long as it gets here in one piece and is suitably shiny. We’re kicking off with our new client this week, and it was immediately apparent that my current 32-bit dual core laptop (now five and a half years old) really wouldn’t cut the mustard. It was okay, just, for building for 360, because the console does all the heavy lifting. But it won’t run a PC build of anything substantial, and compilation takes an age. Not to mention the graphics flashing and sporadic unexplained hard freezes. So the new Macbook Pro kills two birds with one stone – it’s modern and chunky enough that it should build and run the client’s title, and it means Tim and I no longer have to pass the older Macbook Pro whenever there’s iOS work needing done.

To put it in some context, Tim’s machine needed a new graphics card as well to bring it up to spec. His new graphics card scored ~1600 on the benchmarks. The new Macbook Pro’s graphics score ~1300. Tim’s old graphics scored ~500, and the old MBP ~270. My current laptop (and bear in mind I got the Dell Precision M65 with the graphics ‘upgrade’) scores 71. Yes, 71. I had to go three pages down on the benchmark list before I could even find it.

Of course, even the new MBP isn’t up to the level of the monster Alienware M17X that MGS bought for me, but on the flip side, it also won’t weigh 7 kilos and sound like a jet turbine taking off. While I do still miss the glowy lights and brushed aluminium body of the M17X, the added benefit of crotch-based heat sterilisation from the MBP is surely enough to seal the deal.

It’s been a while since the last blog post though, so I’ve missed the opportunity to post this gem from back in December (and #HurricaneBawBag)

How to get poor reception

That is our back-yard neighbour’s TV and ham-radio antenna, trailing a big sheet of polythene. Note the mangled and bent spokes, as a result of the polythene catching the wind like a sail and whipping around for hours, very nearly pulling the poor man’s chimney stack over. Not that last months winds can hold a candle to today’s storm though. It seems Mother Nature is angry with us this winter.

To other news: we’ve picked up a new client for the new year which promises to be very interesting – a variety of code support work on PC/360/PS3. In addition to our existing clients, that’ll mean our own projects will have to be put to the side for a little while.

After yet another acquaintance saw fit to share their mobile app idea with me last night, I realised that what we’re short on isn’t ideas, it’s time. What with all of our client work and flitting back and forth, we very rarely get a chance to get heads-down, all-out concentrated on our own apps. There’s nobody to blame for that but me really, but we are rather at the mercy of the paying work. Tim’s been doing a bang-up job in December of bringing our latest creation up to a releasable standard, but I fear it’s not going to reach the quality bar before we have to put it back on the shelf and concentrate on our clients’ needs.

In an ideal world, we’d be able to take our time, concentrate fully on bringing our ideas to fruition, and the money made from releasing them would pay for the next round of product-making. In practice it’s not as simple as that; client work is money in our pockets now, but app sales are money in our pockets later, maybe. Of course, that’s a vicious circle, without taking a punt on our own apps, we’ll never have the opportunity to win big and break out of the work-for-hire mold. But in the meantime we take the work that keeps a roof over our heads.

We’re coming up on the end of our 7th year in business now, which is no mean feat these days. I’ve just updated our entry in SDI’s Gaming Brochure list of Scottish developers, and it’s heartening to see all the small and large companies in there. Here’s to a bright and positive 2012, and to the opportunities it brings.

I’ve the office to myself for a couple of weeks, as Tim has taken the opportunity to use up the load of holidays he’s saved up before the end of the year, and Dan is busy with both university and other projects. I’m somewhat surrounded by Amazon boxes, as my wife has been using the office as a delivery drop-off for a vast amount of Christmas presents for all and sundry; as a personal rule I don’t shop for Christmas until it turns to December, but she’s a bit more efficient and organised about it than I am. As compensation for that though, and because she’s just generally lovely, she’s also had them deliver a shiny new copy of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for the 360. There was a certain amount of giggling with glee when it turned up, as I’ve been quite jealous of all the other devs who are enjoying it: I do like a good open-world adventure. Where I’m going to find the time to play it I’m not quite sure yet, but even rationed out over weekends I’m sure it will be fun. A first quick blast in the office had me running away from dragons, which is always a good start.

On a whim a few weekends back while I was huddled up trying to beat off a nasty illness, I picked up a copy of DCS: Black Shark from Steam; I do like sim games, and the X52 in the cupboard doesn’t get a chance to come out. It was tragically disappointing though. Not because the manual isn’t the manual for the game, it’s the manual for the actual helicopter. That’s half the fun. No, what put me off was the terrible way it was presented. In a nod to playability, they include ‘game’ toggles for the flight and avionics. The ‘game’ flight mode is much friendlier to new players, but takes away half the fun and control I enjoy. However I learned my lesson with Lock On: Modern Air Combat; actually learning the radar and weapons controls for a real combat aircraft isn’t nearly as much fun! So I want ‘game’ avionics, and ‘sim’ flight, and set the options accordingly.

Here’s where it starts to go wrong. If you set either of those options, the game considers you in ‘game’ mode. And there’s an entirely distinct control configuration for game mode. It doesn’t tell you it’s in game mode, or give any indication as to which controls are ‘current’. You are just supposed to know. It’s not even in the manual anywhere, I checked. Worse, the control configuration isn’t accessible from the in-game menu. So you start a mission, take off (because that part is easy), but find you can’t operate one of the controls (of which there are many). Can you look it up? No. Because to look it up, you have to exit the mission, and go check the control configuration in the front end. I don’t even want to change it, I just need to see which button it’s mapped to.

So instead of actually enjoying the challenge of controlling a complex, agile helicopter, I find myself getting into the mission, only to find that the weapons systems are unusable, and I get shot down because I am spending a good few minutes just trying to get a particular bit of it to work. And there aren’t any missions in there that let you just concentrate on one thing at a time. You don’t get a ‘free flight’ mode, you don’t get some a mission with nice simple targets that don’t fire back right in front of you so you can familiarise yourself with the weapons systems. It’s either ‘quick start’ (which throws you into a mission assuming that you have full control over everything), or ‘campaign’. At least the first mission in the campaign takes you through some easy flying, but there’s no practicing of flight maneuvers, just ‘fly there, then there, then home’. That’s not what you need to practice. You need to practice low level flight, and going from full forward to stopped and hovering before popping up over the brow of a hill. You need to practice strafing and orbiting targets. None of which is encouraged in the missions provided.

Anyway, suffice to say that the nod towards making it ‘friendly’ very much fails. It’s not that much friendlier for novices, and those parts are ignored by intermediate or pro pilots.

Lastly, and on a completely different note, we’ve got ourselves a new accountant, who comes recommended from a couple of other game-devs around Scotland. This is a bit of a relief to me, since our filing deadline is the end of December. The previous accountants, who I’ll not name (although they do deserve to be shamed) have been informed, although they can’t have expected to keep our business, not least because they’ve been avoiding contact with me since spring (and their refusal to pay the fines they incurred through their incompetence).

Why is that relevant to object orientation? Well, because the means by which you most commonly ‘fix’ a circular dependency is to abstract one side so that it becomes unaware of the other. So your character system knows about your audio system because characters carry around audio references; but instead of your audio system being aware of characters (so that they can, say, position sounds), you rewrite your audio system in terms of ‘character-like things’. Or more cleanly, ‘things with position’. Because that’s all the audio system really needs to know about. In an object oriented system, you’d use an interface definition to say that characters can satisfy the definition of a ‘thing with position’; of course that’s not the only way to achieve the same goal, but it’s certainly a nice easy way to do it. What’s important is that the library has a nice clean interface, that expresses exactly what it needs, in a succinct way. Ideally, it is also written without explicit knowledge of any other libraries. Having a clean and clear interface is what helps you keep that lovely de-coupled code, and lets you re-use it elsewhere.

Personally, I’ve never had a problem with using interfaces or other object-oriented mechanisms. But recently Pete has been trying to persuade me that object orientation is the dark side, and that our code would be much better if we only thought about things in terms of data transforms. There’s been a lot of eminently sensible stuff written on it, including stuff by @noel_llopis over on his blog, and by @TonyAlbrecht in a talk for GCAP. I’ve read their pieces, and don’t really disagree with most of it. If I have an issue at all, it is that their concerns about OO (and C++ specifically) primarily relate to performance, and when I’m coding, performance is only one factor; an equally pressing factor is how easy the code is to write and maintain.

Here’s the thing though; object-orientation can be really bad for performance, sure. And used badly, it can be really bad for design as well. C++ has a whole lot of cruft that means that expressing the code design you want, without locking yourself into bad assumptions, is hard. Not impossible, just hard. But there are a whole lot of code design needs I have which are very hard to satisfy without the basic features of C++. Interfaces and polymorphism straight off, and probably more. Really though, my problem lies with anyone that tells me that we should all go back to using C instead of C++, because it will avoid all of that bad stuff. Well, sure. I could go back to writing in assembly and never worry about variable aliasing as well, but I’m not going to. I’ll use C-style interfaces when they help, and C++ when they help, thank you very much. Whatever gets me the simplest, cleanest, most maintainable interface, that still lets me do the work.

I have no doubt that using C-style library interfaces would avoid a lot of unnecessary object-orientation. @PetMac is trying to persuade me though that a C-style interface is just plain better, and not only that, but that the inputs and outputs should only be structures defined in the library interface. So an audio transform would be ProcessAudioEmitters, and if you want to process a bunch of positional audio emitters, one for each character, you have to marshal an array of audio emitter structures, and copy the position from your character into its audio emitter. Which doesn’t sound so terrible, if it leads to a cleaner interface. I’d probably be fine with that. At a simple level, for core systems like audio or rendering, where the inputs and outputs are clear and rarely change, I think that would probably work well. Best of all it makes the audio library completely independent – it knows nothing of the things that it’s working with, except the data the other systems choose to feed it.

My problem comes when I consider how I would make that approach scale to all the other systems I need to build. The example I posed to Pete was one of an AI system. To use Pete’s preferred paradigm, and think of data transforms, the AI system would be a DecideWhatToDo transform. Great. What are the inputs and outputs? Well, that depends on the AI. One type of AI might want just a list of character types and positions. Another might want to know about the environment as well. Smarter AI might want character positions, damage levels, movement histories, factional allegiances; as well as the ability to co-operate with other characters. The outputs of the AI are just as bad – they can affect everything from the desired target position, to queuing animations, in fact pretty much anything a character can do might be an output of the AI.

I would describe Pete’s system as a ‘push’ system. Everything the system needs has to be fed to it explicitly, in terms it can understand. The problem with push systems though is that when the number of inputs goes up, the amount of code you have to maintain just for the marshalling of the push grows with it. You find yourself implementing the same code several times: you add the notion of damage to the character, then you have to add the ability to marshal the damage information into a structure the AI system would understand, then you have to add the notion of damage to every single AI interface that wants to know about damage. And in a system with dozens of different sorts of AI, that might be a lot of interfaces.

To me that smells wrong. It means that you’re baking implementation details (like AI ‘X’ cares about damage) into the interface. Conversely, the ‘pull’ system stays relatively clean. You simply pass the list of characters to the AI, or the environment, and allow the AI system to ask the character interface for only the data it needs. Characters might provide a vast array of query-able state, and the AI can pick and choose what it asks for. Of course this comes with a down side. The AI system now has to have knowledge of the character system (or at least, provide abstractions which the character system can fulfil). It’s no longer truly independent. The performance impact of lugging over the entire character object, when perhaps you only want to access a few small parts of it, is very real. But in terms of the ability to write clean code, without a massive amount of interface book-keeping, it’s a big win. That said, I’m open to persuasion. If someone can describe to me how they would write a succinct AI library interface in a C-style, for a few dozen varied and sophisticated character AI, without giving the AI library knowledge of the character interfaces, I’d be happy to change my point of view.

There will be those who say that if your structures are that complex, you’ve already done something wrong. That’s very idealistic thinking. The simple fact is that we are often writing fantastically complex simulations. Sometimes the ‘pure’ systems that you’d need to build to support the level of complexity the design calls for are just far more effort than the benefits they would give. When it comes down to it, we need to write code effectively more than anything else. We need to be able to code quickly, cleanly, and flexibly; especially when the game design is changing quickly as well. It’s of no benefit at all to spend months building a fantastically clean engine to support one game design, only to find that in the time it took you to build it, design changes have rendered it obsolete.

To sum up, because I’ve gone on for a long time: the one thing I like less than being accused of ‘drinking the OO kool-aid’, is the notion that there’s only one right way to do things. As a coder, you should be constantly and critically evaluating all your systems and interfaces. Sometimes a data oriented approach is better: consider the purity of the interface and the vastly improved ability to parallelise and minimise your memory accesses. Other times the structures and inter-dependencies are simply too complex, and object orientation is the most effective tool at keeping your code clean and versatile. I won’t claim to always get it right (as Pete and Tim have both at various times pointed out, I tend to over-structure my code), but I’d hope I always aim for clean code as best I can.

The iPhone app we made for PASG has finally launched – Hold’em Manager for iOS. That was our focus for much of late last year and this first half of this year, so it’s nice to see it out in the wild. It’s a partner application for users of the Hold’em Manager suite of apps, which are a great tool for any serious on-line poker player. Mind you, I do have to persuade our accountant that the money paid to on-line poker sites during testing are in fact valid business expenses. Not sure exactly what category that comes under in our year end accounts.

I took some time out in late July to tackle something I’d been meaning to do for a while: get us some official Company t-shirts. Here’s me modelling the black version:

Very ‘man from C&A’, I know. I’d never make a model.

Our month long experiment with allowing people to comment on the blog without registering first is now done with, as I’d suspected, it didn’t really help much with the spam. Instead of a few dozen spambots registering on the site and needing deleted, we got a few dozen spambots registering on the site and needing delete and a few hundred spam comments which Akismet blocked before ever seeing the light of day. We don’t see a lot of discussion here on the blog, so the increased maintenance effort on my part wasn’t really worth it. Back to registration first for the foreseeable future.

Too much time this month was wasted trying to rebuild Dan’s PC, which had taken to freezing on boot and blue-screening. After swapping out every single component (graphics, PSU, motherboard/CPU, HDD, heck even the keyboard and power cable), we eventually figured out it was the DVD drive. Operated as a DVD drive perfectly, but if plugged in would cause failures. As a result we’ve got pretty much all of the bits of a new machine, so now Dan has his own, entirely rebuilt machine with Windows 7 (instead of a hand-me-down server machine running XP). I also get my XP server back, which I’d been missing as it’s nice to have a box I can run Cruisecontrol and background tasks on. It’s doing a sterling job with our tools work for Sumo, which is occupying most of my time right now.

Team Bondi went into administration. Not entirely unexpected, but still not nice when the livelihood of people is on the line. Hopefully it will serve as a warning to other studios as to what happens when you mismanage a project so badly with regards to working hours. However more likely it will all be pinned on Brendan McNamara, and the crunch part will be played down. The people I really feel sorry for are those at KMM (the only other sizeable employer of digital art staff in the area), who escaped Team Bondi and its management, only to find that their nemeses have now followed them to their new job.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it for now, back to tidying up all the boxes of PC components strewn around the office.

“So, you’re basically making killing people and stealing cars in GTA more realistic.”

At the time it didn’t even seem like too bad a response. In some ways it was a fair trade. Computer graphics are clearly not one of his interests, and insurance is most definitely not one of mine. What he said was somewhat true in its sentiment, but it remains a rather depressing way to look at it.

And I can’t help but finding myself wanting to fight the fight. I wish I could bring more people around to the art, observation, maths, science and problem solving behind graphics! Even gamers see graphics as a very linear and steady progression. You buy a better graphics card – you get better graphics. At the end of the day few care, or really want to know about the details.

To me the fascination is exactly in the details. Sometimes I feel like I’m viewing the world in twice – there is so much more I see! I could tell you the type of shadow your laptop is casting – I could give you the component parts of that shadow and outline them for you. I could tell you why your fingers glow red when you put them right up to a light, and how headlights reflect across a wet road. But graphics gives you even more than that! It tells you so much about the world in general. Through building virtual objects you learn about the real ones. I could tell you about the different ships in the 15th and 16th century, their parts, purposes, strengths and weaknesses. I could tell you in depth about renaissance sword fighting techniques, about the anatomy of a goat, the ways birds can fly and the mechanism for wheellock rifles. Of everything I’ve studied, I’ve found nothing more enriching to my world view.

In my opinion computer graphics is one of the most interesting fields in computer science. It has huge amounts of investment, research and some exceptionally smart people at the forefront. Progress is made by brilliant ideas over processing power. My favourite example is a new technique used to emulate a phenomenon called radiosity. This technique is called Sphereical Harmonics (or Precomputed Radiance Transfer if you like). The effect it emulates, radiosity, is basically when light reflects off a colored surface onto some other surface, lighting that up with some of its own color.

This technique was first developed in 2002 by Peter-Pike Sloan, Jan Kautz and John Snyder at Microsoft. It combines maths from all kinds of research areas, in some spectacular ways. But the real core of up and coming research is what is fascinating, because it’s borrowing from various quantum physics papers that are using similar Spherical Harmonics models for looking at the rotation of quantum particles. There are stories of e-mail exchanges between the physicists and the programmers, with the programmers requesting help mapping the maths from complex-number space to real-number space so that it can be done on a processor.

All this is where virtual reality will come from. Not from the CGI movies, but from games, because they are interactive, and render images at 60 times a second. This is how I like to look at real-time graphics.

If I became a billionaire overnight I would hire the world’s greatest environmental artists and graphical programmers and my game would be a recreation of all the most beautiful places on earth in stunning realism. Because, if I can settle down for the evening in my living room and experience in true virtual reality, with feeling smell sound and sight, the the sun set over the Himalayas – a casual walk along the Great Wall of China early in the morning, then why would I sit down and slog through several more hours of the next GTA?

The final note comes from John Carmack, the real inventor, and prolific innovator of, real time graphics. As well as his primary hobby being rocket science (proving computer graphics really is more interesting than rocket science!), he provides a quote which I think most people involved with graphics can really relate to.

“…after so many years immersed in the science of graphics, he [John Carmack] had achieved an almost Zen-like understanding of his craft. In the shower, he would see a few bars of light on the wall and think, Hey, that’s a diffuse specular reflection from the overhead lights reflected off the faucet. Rather than detaching him from the natural world, this viewpoint only made him appreciate it more deeply. ‘These are things I find enchanting and miraculous,’ he said, ‘I don’t have to be at the Grand Canyon to appreciate the way the world works. I can see that in reflections of light in my bathroom.’”

Crunch is avoidable. But it requires a level of maturity and acceptance that the game industry sorely lacks. People argue that there’s always a period of crunch necessary at the end of a project. But that’s not true, either. If you are disciplined enough to accept deadlines and understand that there’s a point where you have to stop adding features, schedules can be planned with some lead time for debugging.

Anyone who tells you crunch is unavoidable is a fool. It might be that the games being made just now are unprofitable without crunch, but that’s not a reason to crunch; that’s a reason to change the way we make games.

On a similar note, you will find a couple of opinion pieces from me over on I <3 Crunch, a new blog set up specifically to raise awareness about articles on crunch, studios who are crunching their staff (and those which aren’t). I hope that by talking about this more we can put to rest this ridiculous notion that crunch is somehow acceptable or something we just have to live with. It’s the industry’s dirty secret, and the more we bring it out into the open, the better we will all be.

My issue with the way the IGDA work with regards to these reports of crunch is pretty much the same every time. They don’t seem to do anything unless someone makes a formal complaint to them, and even then they seem to put the onus on the individuals at the studio to be acting on it themselves. To me, it should be the other way around. There should be a ‘report a company’ button on their website which is 100% anonymous, and really simple to find/use. Once pressed, the IGDA (or whomever) would come along to the company and ask the company if it’s true. Either:

1. the company says it is, and they’re not ashamed
2. the company says it is, and they’re sorry, and here’s how they’re going to address it
3. the company says it isn’t.

In 3) the IGDA can then ask if it can speak to employees at random for their opinion. The company can only really refuse if they’ve got something to hide. The company won’t be allowed to know who said what, and they’ll have to ask enough people so that the employees can’t be threatened or accused of ‘ratting the company out’. The employees will either:

1. confirm that there’s no crunch, and the original report was bogus
2. confirm that there is crunch (and ideally give details), showing that the company is both deliberately crunching, and deliberately lying about it.

In most of those outcomes, they can publicly state the results of their investigations. It doesn’t have to be a big fanfare or singling particular developers out (at least to begin with), just quietly announcing what they discovered when they asked the question.

• If a company is never reported on, you can take that as a good sign.
• If a company isn’t crunching its staff, it can be held up as a good example.
• If a company is crunching its staff and isn’t ashamed, the IGDA can publicise that fact (and discourage potential applicants).
• If a company is crunching its staff but wishes it weren’t, that can be publicised, and the situation monitored; if they have a plan to fix it, the IGDA could go back in a year or two and see if they’ve made progress, and if so hold them up as an example to others as to how to get out of crunch mode.
• If a company is crunching its staff but pretending they aren’t, that can be publicised as well, including the fact that their staff say something different, all of which will discourage potential applicants.

Even those at the IGDA who are convinced that the “40 hour week” is some crazed ideal that not everyone agrees with can’t really argue against that, because you can do it neutrally, without stating categorically that crunch is bad. Even if you think crunch can be a good thing, it can be highlighted in the findings. What matters is that the situation be made clear to one and all.

It only relies on the simple fact that any organisation can ask a question of another publicly. The respondent is then put on the spot, either they have to ignore the question, lie, admit it, or deny it. Failure to answer the question is damning enough in itself. An organisation which doesn’t crunch has nothing to fear, an organisation which crunches and doesn’t care (like Team Bondi) won’t mind the question being asked. The only organisations which would be disadvantaged are the ones who are crunching and trying to hide it. In which case simply asking the question is enough to bring it out into the light.

Our real problem is that the press and the IGDA and others aren’t talking about it enough. Not in general terms (‘crunch is bad’), but in specifics (‘the kind of crunch being talked about at Bondi is bad’). If no-one asks the awkward questions until after it’s been so f*(&ed up for years, then it’s only going to continue.

Curse you and my steel (tin) prison...

At least the squirrels have the decency to stay on the outside of the office though. This little gent (or lady, I didn’t get close enough to check), was the second littlest of a family of mice that have been tormenting us for weeks now. Leaving little presents on our desks. Something in the last couple of weeks must have driven them out looking for nesting material though, because they were all inexorably drawn to the box of packing peanuts that lay out in our office. Bold as brass, we found them rustling around in the box, and popping out the top with a polystyrene peanut in their mouth, trying to get away. Thankfully, their attraction to the box made it much easier for us to arrange things in such a way that we could more easily trap them when they did show themselves. At the current count, I’ve caught four of them, and Tim caught one [Hah - I win!]. We’re presuming the one Tim caught was the daddy, as he was much larger.

All of them were released into the wild (or as wild as it gets 100 yards in either direction along Belford Road), as we’re both softies at heart and couldn’t quite bring ourselves to kill them. Tim’s catch was released on the Dean Bridge itself, much to the amusement of passers by – hopefully it won’t have decided to end it all and take the leap off the edge. They probably have a homing instinct of some sort, but we figure as long as they find a similarly attractive home somewhere along the way back we’ll be rid of them for now.

The second area is in the modding scene. This consists of unofficial add ons, changes and modifications to the games called mods. The modding scene has existed since PC gaming began. It has had wavering popularity but game developers such as Epic with the Unreal series still herald their games “moddability” as a selling point.

The interesting thing about these two scenes is their complete isolation from each other. It sometimes even goes as far as hostility. Modders can see indie developers as stuck-up and pretentious – working on mediocre puzzle platformers with pixel graphics. Indie developers can see modders as simple fan boys, making Call of Duty machinima videos set to “let the bodies hit the floor” and yet more tedious realism mods.

On course, in reality, neither of these are exactly true. My background is the modding scene, so perhaps I have a natural bias toward it; but I’ve been lingering in the indie gaming scene and increasingly I’m seeing the void between the cultures as doing increasing damage.

Artists and Programmers

One of the major differences is that the indie scene is largely constituted of programmings – often contracting out artwork for games. The modding scene, on the other hand, has an abundance of artists, across all skill levels, willing to get their hands dirty.

It isn’t really the obvious benefit that could be gained by a more balance skill set that bothers me most. What I find most annoying is the disjointed and boring artistic direction in both scenes. In the modding scene I don’t want to see another Star Wars mod, another Lord of the Rings mod, another Graphical Enhancement mod – and this is coming from someone who loves all these things like no one else.

In a similar way, in the indie scene I’m so bored of pixel graphics, cartoon graphics, crappy looking 3d games, terrible assets.

In both scenes we have very uninspired and boring artistic direction, with poor technical features due to the tiny number of graphical programmers working with, or being, artists.

More collaboration, sharing of ideas and passions, would be amazing great!

Individuals and Teams

For the modding scene the de-facto standard is to bring a team together to put our your mod. This is seen as essential on anything large at all, and timescales are assumed to be as short as possible. Indie development is the opposite.

I’m not going to discuss if team development or individual development is better or worse. That is one for another time. They clearly have their strengths and weaknesses. Team development is all but useless without someone in charge who is organised and knows what they are doing and individual development is powerful but suffers from burnout.

I think both sides just need to view (or experience) the benefits of the other. Indie developers seem unkeen to share their vision with untrusting individuals, missing out the benefits of a shared workload and new and interesting contributions. Modders set their sights too high, assuming the team will carry the weight, just to fall at the unreliability of others.

More importantly though, I think there needs to be more communication from those with successful and released modding projects and indie games – giving insights into what is needed to finish a product.

Money

For many indie developers making games is a way to make their living and the idea that they are developing for money is a no-brainer. modding on the other hand is almost always free and has a feel about it akin to the open source community.

The result of this is that modding can be more fun – you don’t feel the pressure, and legal complications are greatly reduced. The problem of course is that there is a huge uproar when someone wants to charge for their mod – they are often benefiting off much previous development made by other teams in tools, tutorials and tips. There are strong feelings of betrayal and greediness.

The ideal situation would be that modding remains fun, with reduced legal issues, but developers are more motivated due to potential of making money. The modding community needs to have a serious think about this if it wants to progress, and there are lessons to be learnt from indie developers. I don’t want to make games if it isn’t fun, but I, like everyone else, am sick of failed projects.

Unity

So this is my modest proposal: A community for indie developers and modders to get together and find ways of working on projects that everyone is excited about.

So here is a guide, intended for those readers who want to try to understand exactly what is going on with their computer, and why it’s gone wrong. You’ll have to be prepared to stomach a bit of technical jargon, but I’ll try to be clear. I can’t claim full knowledge on this, but I’ve been working with PCs for over 15 years, and I’m pretty confident I understand what is going on.

My problem arose when I was shifting my existing stuff to a new hard drive, as the only one was reaching the end of its life. I’d like to write up my situation and how I fixed it, in the hope it will be more useful for others than the internet search results I came across while figuring out what I needed to do.

The Situation

Some time ago, I upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7, and at the same time bought a small Intel SSD to put it on. I’d heard bad things about the upgrade procedure, and felt it was time for a clean install anyway, so I installed W7 on the SSD from clean, no upgrade. The fact that it was an SSD isn’t relevant here, this would happen with regular hard disks too. But what that meant was that I had two operating systems available on the computer. To its credit, the W7 installer was fine with this, and once installed, I had the option of booting either operating system. I got my W7 installation set up the way I liked it, and eventually deleted the XP install. Again, all was well.

I have several disks on my machine, but only two are relevant here: 1) the SSD with a single partition on it (C:), and 2) an HD with two partitions (D and F). Crucially, the D partition was where the XP installation used to reside, and the C partition is where the W7 installation lives. I wanted to migrate the D and F partitions to a larger new disk, and simply remove the old drive. This I did, with the help of Norton Ghost and it’s drive copying functionality. So at this point I had partitions C (SSD), D & F (HD1) and K & M (HD2). I would then reassign drive letters such that the new drive would have partitions called D & F, and the old drive would have no letters at all (and could be quietly removed from the system).

The Problem

As soon as I removed the old HD (HD1) with the D and F partitions on it, the machine would no longer boot, prompting me to insert a system disk. Explicitly choosing the SSD from the machine’s boot menu or reordering the boot order made no difference. Re-connecting the old disk, everything was fine again.

Diagnosis

To boot from a hard disk, a computer needs an ‘active’ partition (active or not being a property set in the partition, usually when it’s created). Normally there is only one active partition on a machine, but if there is more than one, the order in which the computer looks at the disk becomes important (hence the setting in the BIOS to change the boot order). On an active partition, the computer expects to find a Master Boot Record (MBR), which will tell it where it should look for a program which can start an operating system. In a typical, simple setup, the MBR lives on partition 0, the C drive, along with the operating system. But there’s no reason it has to. You can have an MBR on one partition pointing to another partition altogether. And that is what happened here.

Originally, the MBR lived on the partition now called D (it was C back then), with the XP operating system. When it came time to install Windows 7, the W7 installer put itself on C, but it didn’t make a new MBR (because there was already one available). Instead, it simply modified the existing MBR so that it could boot either W7 or XP. Whenever the machine booted, it would look at the SSD, find no active partition, and move on to HD1, where it would find an active partition and MBR, which then pointed it back towards partition C and the W7 install. Everything happy.

When I removed HD1, I was left with the SSD and HD2, neither of which had an active partition or an MBR. So the system did not know where it could boot from, and complained.

Solution

I needed to make the W7 partition active and bootable again, so that the system would operate even if the old disk was disconnected.

To do that, I dug out my W7 installation CD, and put that in the drive (making sure that the BIOS will boot from the CD before trying the HDDs). After starting and selecting a language, you are presented with the installer, but under that is a repair mode. Selecting that, I could tinker with the existing setup. It tried to find a viable OS to repair, but said there were none available (even though I knew the W7 install was still there). I’ve deduced this is because an OS not installed on an active partition doesn’t count. However it still lets you click Next, and gives you various options to work with. Startup Repair (the user friendly option) didn’t work, basically because there wasn’t anything to repair because the repair system didn’t realise the W7 install was there. Again, advice on the internet seems to be just ‘run Startup Repair a few times and it will fix it.’  That’s bad advice, you’re much better off trying to understand what’s currently wrong, because that will guide you as to how to fix it.

From the command prompt, you can run various tools to interrogate the current setup. With other MBR related problems, the advice is usually to just run ‘bootrec /fixmbr’ and ‘bootrec /fixboot’. For me, /fixmbr did nothing (presumably because there was no MBR to fix), and /fixboot gave the error ‘Element not found’. I think the former problem is because there wasn’t an MBR available to fix, and the latter was because bootrec relies on knowing which partition to put the new MBR on. Because the W7 install hadn’t been detected, bootrec had a choice of several partitions, and didn’t know which one to use. It may be that it would work just fine if the W7 install had been detected (if the partition was marked active).

However, from the command prompt you get access to the diskpart and bootsect tools, which are more helpful, even if they do require more technical savvy. I had two immediate problems, 1) the C partition wasn’t active, and 2) there was no MBR on the C partition even if it was active. Both problems needed fixed before I could progress.

Bear in mind, when running from the installation/repair CD, the drive letters your drives are assigned may not correspond to their normal assignments. So I’d advise the following steps:

• At the repair command prompt, run ‘diskpart’
• Type ’list volume’ to get a list of volumes. One of these will be the CD/DVD drive, note which one (for me it was H); another will be the partition you want to boot from (for me it was D), note that one as well.
• Type ’list disk’ to get a list of disks. One of them will be the disk you want to boot from (you’ll have to recognise it based on size / brand).
• Type ’set disk X’ (replace X with the correct disk number).
• Type ’list partition’ to get a list of partitions. Again, one of them you want to boot to.
• Type  ’set partition X’ (replace X with the correct partition number).
• Type ‘active’ to make the right partition active.
• Type ‘exit’.

Now your boot partition should be active, but it doesn’t yet have an MBR on it. To get that, you need the bootsect tool. That tool is on the installation DVD, but in a subfolder.

• Type ‘H:’ (or whatever your DVD drive was called.
• Type ‘cd boot’ to move to the subfolder containing the bootrect tool.
• Type ‘bootsect /nt60 D: /mbr’. This will write a new boot sector / MBR to the partition called D. The /nt60 is for Vista or later operating systems.

This should result in the computer now finally being able to boot from the local disk rather than the CD.

New problem

When booting, the message ‘BOOTMGR not found’ is displayed, if you try to boot from the disk you just made active / bootable.

New diagnosis

Now we have progressed a stage. Instead of the BIOS telling us that it didn’t even know which drive to boot from, instead now it is telling us that the drive we told it to boot from isn’t as bootable as we claimed it was. Booting a drive is really just running a particular program – the information in the MBR is not just ‘what partition do I boot from’, it’s also ‘what program do I run from that drive’. For Windows, that program is BOOTMGR, which it expects to find in the root of the bootable partition.

So when I installed W7, not only did it not make a new active partition or MBR, it also didn’t put the bootable software in the new partition. Instead it just modified the configuration for the old (XP) BOOTMGR which used to live on D, and told it about the W7 installation on C instead.

New solution

We need to get a copy of the boot software onto the bootable partition. Thankfully, this is the job of the operating system, and if we boot into the repair disk one last time, we can get it to help us.

Boot from the installation CD, and go to the repair menu. Now we’ve made the W7 partition bootable and active, it should be correctly found by the repair option, and show up in the list of operating systems. For me it was marked as ‘recovered’. There was also another ‘recovery partition’ recovered as well (I believe this is used for other sorts of system recovery, although it was useless in this situation), which I ignored.

On selecting Next, we get the same list of repair options as before. This time, we can select ‘Startup Repair’, and let it do its thing. If you click on the option to view more details about what the Startup Repair is going to do, it should list all the things it checked. For me, the file system and various other things were fine (reported as error code 0×0), but it correctly detected that the boot software was damaged/missing, and needed replaced. Allowing it to proceed, and restart, and hey presto: after a reboot, the W7 partition is correctly booted from, and normal operation is resumed.

While the market for such an app is obviously limited to those people with iPhones either in Edinburgh, or planning to visit and drive, it’s a simple enough design that we’re thinking of making equivalents for other cities with similar parking systems. But we shall see how people like this one before we tackle that.

Next for us? Well, we’ve got a very promising game design in a pretty functional state right now, so hopefully we’ll be able to polish that up and release our first game title! I’ll perhaps share some sneak preview screenshots next time.

The real trouble is that we here at Black Company make terrible cold testers. We’re technical, so we tend to focus on the implementation details rather than the broader feel of the interface. We’re advanced users, used to knowing everything about the software we use; being forced to learn a whole new interface makes us grumpy, but not nearly as grumpy as having not having all of our usual tools to hand. So as I usually do with such things, I hand them straight to my wife without saying a word, and simply watch how she uses it. The question was, really, would it find a use naturally, or would we be using it for the sake of it? And what would that use be?

Put simply, it did, and the use is: content viewing. I had thought that my computer time was read-write, but in reality, outside of work, the majority of my time is spent consuming content and not creating it. Facebook, Twitter, blogs and RSS feeds obviously, but more and more with on-demand video services like iPlayer. The iPad keyboard is, frankly, not pleasant to use (I’m writing this blog post using it as a proper test), but for the majority of content viewing we do, that’s not an issue. In fact, in the few months we’ve been using it, the biggest annoyance has been the fact that much of the on-demand TV we want to watch is on Channel 4, and their web solution was Flash based (i.e. not available on iPad.

And it was what we had to do when we did want to watch those things that drove it home to me. The iPad lies around the living room happily. It’s discreet and portable. To get the laptop out, plugged in, booted, takes a good 5 minutes, not just because it lives in a bag in the other room. So it’s a new way for us to experience the content out there, that we just wouldn’t have done before, and I don’t think I would have appreciated that without properly field testing it (or at least, allowing Vicki to do that).

That’s not to say that there aren’t other lessons to learn too. The bad apps we’ve found are the ones which simply take an iPhone user interface and make it bigger. But the key thing to appreciate about the iPad is that there’s likely to be only one in the household. Whereas the iPhone is a naturally single user device (not just because it’s something you keep on you as you move around), the iPad is passed around amongst the household. So apps like Facebook and Twitter have to account for the fact that you’ll want to easily pop back to the top level and switch users; as well as some loose protection against accessing other people’s accounts. You trust the people you share the iPad with, but not that much. And of course, it’s far less likely to be moving around out in the world, so apps that focus on the geo-location data are far less useful. On iPad, the value is on it’s versatility to display content in a relaxed environment (not necessarily at a desk). The larger display is key to that versatility.

The trick will be to take the things we understand about how the iPad gets used, and use it to inform our app designs.

I loved the original, even though I wouldn’t have bought it were it not tacked onto Half-Life 2: Episode 2. It always struck me as a wonderfully weighted title – just the right length, elegant in its simplicity, and with a level of polish that larger titles just don’t achieve. More than anything though, it was a title that left me wanting more, not because it was too short, but because it was so good. Much like a wonderful novel or film where I get immersed in the universe and characters, the end comes with both a warm glow of satisfaction at the conclusion, and an aching for more. More of the characters, more from the rich universe. It’s a rare creation that brings that level of quality to the observer, and both Portal incarnations have that quality in spades.

I’ve been ranting somewhat about the poor judgement of top-end games development recently. Quality of Life and financial issues are just one facet of a deeper problem: that we’ve been trapped into an arms race of scope. To justify a ‘full-price’ cost, developers feel they have to match or out-do each other. Worlds grow larger and larger, not even bound by memory constraints, since every large game streams their environments off disc. Stories grow more and more epic, and require game-play lengths to match. More characters are wedged in, even though there’s not enough time to get to know them in any great detail. Their voices are provided by more and more famous actors. Cut-scenes get flashier and longer.

The problem is that the underlying mentality to it all is ‘go big, or go home.’ Budgets spiral upwards, or if they don’t, then quality spirals downwards. Both hurt a title’s chances of success. But more quality doesn’t justify a higher price tag to match the increased costs. The players have shown in a wide variety of ways that they’re not prepared to pay any more for games than the already high cost. Second-hand sales and rental mean that the RRP quickly gets turned into the ‘real’ price – far lower. Popular titles drop slower than unpopular ones, so market forces still apply. But as an industry we still delude ourselves that we ‘deserve’ the RRP times the number of units sold.

That’s not the real madness though. The real madness is that despite all our profitability numbers showing the decline, developers and publishers keep on down the same path. They know how much more it costs to increase the scope of the games we make, but they do it anyway. Why? Because they know if they don’t invest enough in titles they flop, because they are competing with other titles on quality. But they don’t know how to turn investment money into quality. Quality is hard. It’s intangible, and you don’t always know it until you see it. So they put the money on things they can understand. More levels, more characters, bigger worlds. They set themselves a benchmark of their competitors, plus some. Because if X was a success, and we have more of everything than X, then we’re as good as X, right?

So when a title like Portal comes along, I regain a bit of hope for our industry. By showing that you can make a massively successful title, not by making it bigger, or more complicated, but by making it good, it’s a bit of ammunition for the decision makers. They can point to Portal and say “it doesn’t need to be big, as long as it’s fun”, or “let’s find a mechanic that works well, and just stick with that”. And maybe we can halt this crazy race to massacre our industry’s profit margins.

[EDIT: the original draft of this article did not mention the IGDA press release made a week after the Rockstar San Diego Gamasutra post mentioned. Thanks to Erin for pointing this out in the comments, it's definitely pertinent information, and in the IGDA's favour.]

Credibility Hit #1: Mike Capps and working hours

This was the incident which prompted my previous posts: a board member, who had become aware of the IGDA’s efforts to work towards more sensible working hours, and didn’t agree with those efforts. Now, fair enough, the best (indeed only) way to influence policy in an organisation like the IGDA is to get involved, and he’s forthright about why he joined though:

But yes, I’m familiar with that [IGDA QoL white paper]. In fact it’s one of the reasons that I joined the Board in the first place. Because when I ran for the Board it was right around the time of “EA spouse” hitting and there were certainly organizations that were not taking quality of life seriously. But I thought that the efforts of the IGDA SIG task force were really misguided.

His stance ran completely counter to what the IGDA had been campaigning for. When pressed, the IGDA had the choice of standing by their original position, or defending what Capps had said and done. They chose the latter, which to me invalidates all they’ve stood for. Worse, individual board members made statements which pretty much supported Capps’ views, although many of them were later retracted.

Credibility Hit #2: IGDA and Rockstar San Diego

A chance to redeem themselves came in early 2009, when the wives of various R* San Diego employees got together and threatened legal action against their husbands’ employer. Not the best of moves admittedly, but a move borne out of frustration and an inability to help their situation any other way. After a week, the IGDA posted a press release which nodded to the Gamasutra article, and re-iterated their position on QoL, without outrightly accusing R*SD of anything (understandably so). This I can’t disapprove of, although I felt it could have been far more critical, and should have called for R*SD to respond publicly to the accusations made against them.

However I was worried by the immediate response (on the day of the article) from the IGDA, in the comments, as represented by Erin Hoffman. In it she voiced vague moral support, followed quickly by claiming that things were better than they were 5 years ago, defending the IGDA against criticisms about its inaction, and seemed to be blaming the developers for not asking the IGDA nicely for help.

It is an inflammatory red herring to call attention to the IGDA in this case. I have sat on the IGDA’s Quality of Life committee since it was formed and the ECQC since 2005 and its formation. No one from Rockstar has ever once contacted either group, nor, to my knowledge, sought advice from the IGDA on this issue at all. I have individually spoken with multiple Rockstar San Diego developers over the years and have known that this was brewing, but until someone was willing to do something about it, there was nothing to be done from the outside.

The QoL SIG has achieved very little over the years, and it seems very much that it is content to sit and debate the issue, without taking any active steps. What role does it have, if not to act as an independent voice through which the development community as a whole can criticise the actions of studios who abuse their staff’s quality of life? They shouldn’t be waiting for permission.

If there’s even a hint that conditions like this exist at a studio, it’s time to make a carefully worded statement condemning such practices, and asking the studio in question to defend itself: either by debunking the accusation, or by coming clean and apologising for the way things are (and explaining what they intend to do to fix them). The IGDA is one of the few organisations in a position to bring these practices into the light, and by doing so help us start the conversations needed to fix them. I was cheered to see their statement in January about Kaos studios and a similar situation. This should be the norm, and I hope to see more of it in the future.

But at its heart, the IGDA’s position is inherently unclear. Are they representing the individuals, the staff, who develop games? Or are they representing the studios (a large chunk of the IGDA membership is from ‘studio’ memberships, where every developer at a studio is a member only because their studio is a member). When it comes to Quality of Life, those two groups are in tension, and in trying to represent both, the IGDA would represent neither.

Credibility Hit #3: Tim Langdell

More trouble on the IGDA board. A member who not only does not represent the games industry, but indeed is someone whom the games industry is actively ashamed of. Someone quite happy to use the fact that he was an ‘IGDA Board Member’ to bolster his own reputation. Elected in March 2009, eventually forced to resign in late August 2009. His underhand tactics and practices regarding abuse of tenuous trademarks have since been thoroughly exposed, documented, and now thanks to EA of all people, consigned to history. But I mention this here not for those reasons, but because even once the full extent of Tim Langdell’s business practices were exposed, the majority of the IGDA board not only condoned his actions, several of them even defended him. Much like the Capps affair, it seemed clear that the IGDA board would stick together, regardless of their members actions.

The resulting furore and outright uprising on the IGDA forums should have been ample indication to the board that they had royally pissed off their membership, and that they needed to do something. What they did, sadly, was to first ignore, then to suppress the discussion, by locking threads and deleting the increasingly shrill posts condemning their actions. Month after month, it dragged on. Those most passionate about the whole affair demanded that Langdell be removed from the board, but the board refused to do consider this, stating that the IGDA membership would have to raise a petition before they’d consider it. But, they wouldn’t consider the forum thread a petition, nor would they consent to actively poll their members on it. Eventually, those involved had to scrape the membership’s email addresses from the website just to solicit the membership opinion. Very quickly thereafter, the support for Langdell’s removal (or at least a proper vote on the matter) was irrefutable. Only then was the IGDA board even starting to acknowledge that Langdell’s position might be untenable.

Throughout this whole affair, I was flabbergasted by just how disconnected the board was from its membership. If this is how the IGDA as an organisation responds (or fails to respond) to a matter where their membership is clearly polarised, how can they be expected to reach a representative decision when the matter is less clear cut. As a democratic organisation, it is continually struggling to reach quorum on its votes, and as a result very little can be actioned. Even board membership elections fail to reach quorum, but by convention the board accepts the votes anyway (otherwise the whole thing would fall apart). So how it can claim to represent developers, I’m not entirely sure.

Website

Ironically, the mechanism by which the whole Tim Langdell debacle really kicked off: the forums, is also one of their most chronic failures. For several years, a new website had been promised, all bells and whistles, which was to transform the IGDA website and how the community interacted with each other. To say that the website, when it was finally delivered (late), failed to deliver would be an understatement. The old forums weren’t great, but at least it worked. The complaints about new forums are so bad, it’s no surprise that conversation has dropped off to a pitiful amount. Which I suppose is great for avoiding controversy and criticism by your members, but much less so if you want to maintain a thriving community which promotes communication amongst your membership.

Benefits

It would be remiss of me to write a post like this without talking about the up-sides to membership of the IGDA. For an ‘international’ game developers association, the benefits of membership are largely not that international. The biggest tangible benefit: health-care discount, is only applicable in the US. The discounts on conferences are mostly for US conferences, except for GDC Europe. There are discounts on books and they provide web resources though, which is very likely useful.

There certainly are useful SIGs as well: the Toolsmiths SIG is a gold-mine of knowledge, a great place to bring some very good and very experienced tools developers together to share knowledge.

But the biggest benefit of the IGDA in my eyes however has always been the social aspect. The local chapters are where the real value of the IGDA lies: getting game developers to come together, share knowledge, and get to know each other. That is why, for all the organisation’s flaws, I’m still happy to see efforts to restart the IGDA Scotland chapter. As a banner to rally under, it’s a pretty decent one – well known and easy to find.

The vast majority of usefulness I’ve seen come out of the IGDA has been voluntary work, done by chapter organisers for the benefit of their local community, not paid for by the membership dues. I want to know how I can support those people, not the IGDA. Absolutely, let’s get together and get involved: the more we work as a community the better we’ll be. But that doesn’t need to involve paying $48 dollars to a US-based organisation, for some intangible benefits. Especially when that organisation gains both cash and credibility by counting you as a member, but is not actively working in your best interests.

Some people think the IGDA’s day is past, and the declining membership is a sign that a new organisation is needed. I don’t agree. There’s a new crop of board members elected, that know fine well what has gone before. Some of them (like Darius Kazemi) have been open and honest about the organisation’s flaws, and are working hard to make things right. I want those people to succeed, and restore the IGDA to being something I am not only happy about, but would actively support. And in taking a stance against Amazon’s app store policies, it looks like they’re heading in the right direction. I look forward to the day when they sort out their work on Quality of Life in the games industry, and I can reconsider my stance.

In the meantime, I haven’t much that I can interestingly write about here. We’re juggling now 5 distinct projects (6 if you include the much neglected internal prototype work), none of which I can freely write about here. Well that’s not true, of course I can talk about our own project, but right now I don’t quite want to, at least not until we can put up some interesting looking screenshots. But more importantly for us is the fact that we’re actually progressing one of our ideas, instead of continually putting it off till the next bit of down-time between client work. I think that’s good, both because it’s cool to be doing our own work, but also because it keeps us from going a bit mental with an seemingly never-ending pile of work-for-hire. As much as we like our clients, their work is theirs, and it’s hard to get super-enthusiastic about other peoples’ projects.

I’m personally feeling a bit of burn-out, largely because I’ve been working solidly since before October, with no breaks of more than two or three days, and there’s not likely to be any let up for the next month or two at least. So refreshing our heads with a bit of our own work is a good thing to stave off the madness. Sadly the same lack of available energy is the reason why the scarcity of posts here. There have been plenty of interesting topics come up, I’ve just not been able to find the time to write them up for here.

It’s funny, because when I was working as an employee for someone else, it never occurred to me that I needed a holiday. I threw myself into the work, but not completely, there was always room for personal stuff. Since starting up for myself, the greater focus on work means that I’ve had little creative energy left over for anything else. And if I want to refresh my batteries, I think I need a proper (i.e. not thinking about work at all) holiday. But I should stop dwelling on that now, because I find myself staring out of the window here at the pretty sunset, day-dreaming about what I’d do on a holiday, and that’s just rubbing salt in the wound.

It concerns a mother who is indignant that Microsoft are ignoring her complaints about her 11 year old child being ‘allowed’ to spend over £1000 on XBox Live. Over the course of six months as well, so it’s not like it was a spending binge.

Some choice quotes from the article:

“It is ridiculous to allow someone of his age to make payments without any checks being done,” out of pocket mother Dawn Matthews told the Daily Mail.

Indeed. Lucky there are several checks in place to ensure that children can’t spend someone elses money. All of which you bypassed for him.

“When he is in gaming mode he can’t be thinking about the money. You can’t put all that responsibility on a young boy.

Yes. Heaven forbid a child understand the concept of money, and the spending of other people’s.

“It is impossible to monitor everything your children do. These companies should take some responsibility. They take advantage of vulnerable people.”

Well, someone should certainly take responsibility. I’m going to go with the person who gave the child the ability to spend that money, and to a lesser extent the child for actually spending it.

“A thousand pounds isn’t that much to people like Bill Gates,” concluded Dawn Matthews, “but for a single mum it is a lot of money that I don’t have.”

Okay, well a) Bill Gates has been gone from Microsoft for a long time, and b) if you don’t have the money to spend, then you should be careful about how you allow it to be spent. Six months went past before this was stopped. That’s six credit card bills with their contents ignored. If you don’t understand what you’re doing with your credit card, then maybe it’s not a wise thing for you to have a credit card.

As if the refusal to accept responsibility for disabling all the parental controls and putting her credit card details in wasn’t enough, a cursory examination of this 11 year old’s public gaming history shows a slew of 16+ and 18+ plus titles.

1.1 You’re an employee, we’re your employer. Welcome aboard. Get to work.
1.2 If you’re too sick to work, don’t be surprised if we get a temp in to cover. Don’t worry, you’re not being replaced.
1.3 Just to make sure – you’re okay to work here, right? You’re not also pretending to work somewhere else? Or claiming benefits from being out of work?

2.1 We expect you to work a typical week, but when the s&*^ hits the fan, we might need you to stay late.
2.2 If you’re putting in a regular day, you can totally take some time out for lunch. Just don’t eat anything that stinks the office out.
2.3 We can’t / don’t want to pay you money for overtime. But since overtime is definitely over and above the call of duty, we want to recognise that, so if we do need you to do it, we’ll let you take time off later, as much time off as you put in extra now. That doesn’t mean you get to take the piss and work silly hours for a week, and then not come in for a week. What it does mean is that, if the business needs it, you and your manager can work out when you’re going to work extra, and when you get to go home early (or stay off) to make up for it. Even at that, we’re going to cap it at 20 hours in a month, because that seems like a reasonable amount; anything more and you’d not be usefully working anyway.
2.4 Don’t f*(& around. Really. We pay you to work, we expect you to work. Don’t take the piss, and you’ll do just fine. On a more serious note, this is really how we want you to work. We don’t want you working stupid hours into the dead of night to hit our deadlines, we want you in and focused 100% on your work for the 8 hours you’re in the office each day. We’ve already said we’re going to send you home at a sensible time every day, and we hope that will help keep you sharp and eager to work when you’re at your desk. Obviously there’s some give and take here, but it’s at the discretion of your manager. Rest assured, he’s probably occasionally web-surfing too, but within reason, and he expects the same of you.

3.1 This is obviously a condition written when we were still all working from home (we have an office now). We’re not going to up a move to Guadalcanal without some notice, but if we do have to move, we don’t expect you to come with us without being paid to relocate.

4.1 You get paid! Hurrah. You get paid after you do a month’s work, at the end of the month. (If we didn’t pay you at the end of the month, you’d be within your rights to not come back in at the start of the next month until we did).
4.2 We’re not going to fix you on this salary for ever, but we can’t say when or how we’ll change it next. We will however work out when that’s going to happen with you in advance, usually when you take the job.
4.3 Legal stuff.

5.1 If you’re working for us, and you pay money out of your own pocket to do that work, we’ll pay you back later. But you’ve got to do it by the book, so receipts, and get the claims in sharpish. And for goodness sakes, clear it with your manager first.
5.2 Company credit card? How much do we trust you? Okay, so we do, but you’d better not abuse the trust, and it’s still ours.

6.1 Details
6.2 You get a certain amount of holidays a year, and you earn a fraction of those holidays for every day worked. This is to stop you from joining the company, then trying to take all 30 days holiday in the first month. Holidays come after the work, not before.
6.3 6 weeks holiday – but bear in mind that includes the what, 8 days of bank holidays that some other places add on top.
6.4 You have to let us know when you want to get off. Usually that will be fine, with advance warning, but sometimes we need you in the office for certain deadlines. The farther in advance you let us know, the more likely it is you’ll get to take it; if something comes up for the business then so be it – we won’t ask you to cancel a big holiday planned in advance because the client pushed the deadlines forward (or back)
6.5 (see 6.3)

7.1 You’re never so sick that you can’t make a call to the office and let someone know. NB: Emailing is not letting someone know! You have no idea if that email’s been picked up, maybe the person you emailed is sick as well. You have to have made a sincere effort to let someone who has made it to the office that day know.
7.2 Doctor’s note if you’re really sick – we need the paperwork to cover us for sick pay reasons, etc.
7.3 More statutory stuff that says we’ll still pay you if you’re long term ill, but in line with government rates
7.4 same again
7.5 and again
7.6 If you’re getting a wad of money from sueing the drunk driver that knocked you over, some of that money comes to us to cover anything we’ve paid for your convalescence.
7.7 We might need to check your health, for our own insurance reasons, or because we’re trying to stop all of you sedentary developers from keeling over with heart attacks due to your bad diet and lack of exercise. Don’t worry, we’ll pay for it all.
7.8 Just because you’re ill, doesn’t mean that we can’t terminate your employment. In fact, whether you’re ill or not should have nothing at all to do with us letting you go.

8.1 We might, at some point, need to sack you. Might be your fault, might be a decision we have to make for other reasons. If we do, we’ll tell you about it a month in advance. If you want to leave, you also have to give us a month’s warning. If you’ve breached these terms though, we’ll put you out right away.
8.2 If you’re leaving, for whatever reason, we might want to just pay you for your notice period without actually having you around. Don’t take it personally. Whether we do or not is up to us though, not you.
8.3 If you’re leaving, and we keep you around for your notice period, then we don’t have to give you any real work to do, or even let you back in the office.

9.1 We might give you some kit to do your job, but if you’re leaving us, then you have to give it all back, including any copies you’ve made
9.2 And you might have to swear that you definitely have done this, so if it turns out later you were lying we have something we can point to and moan about it

10.1 If you are involved in any other business that might relate to us in any way (like a competitor, or even a similar business), you have to let us know. We might not mind, but you definitely have to tell us. That includes your direct family too.
10.2 Once you’re working for us, you agree not to start anything like that either. We don’t mind you buying shares in a business like that, as long as it’s not a very big stake.
10.3 Stuff defining some examples of how we mean ‘involved’ in those other businesses.

11.1 You’ve got to tell us if you were a crook, generally a dodgy character. And if you find out that a bunch of your colleagues are planning to leave and strike out in competition with us, you’re obliged to tell us as quick as you can. And if you know that one of your colleagues is screwing us over, tell us that too. Otherwise we’re going to believe that you were helping them.

12.1 Don’t tell anyone else things you know because you’re working with us. That includes other business’s secrets – our company has agreed to keep those secrets, and that includes you.

13.1 Any ideas or content you come up with “while working on activities for us”, belongs to us, wholly and completely. That applies whether you’re in our office our out on a client’s site somewhere, or even if you’re working on company stuff in your home. Conversely, if you’re not working on activities for us, your ideas are your own. Bear in mind, you shouldn’t be working on activities of your own when you’re at work at all – we expect you to either be at the office, working, or at home, not thinking about work at all.
13.2 If you do come up with something at work, and we really don’t want it, you can ask, and we might just give you all rights to the idea. This will basically take the form of a signed document that say exactly which idea we don’t want and we’re handing off to you.
13.3 Some copyright specific stuff to make clear that we, the company, is the author/originator, and not you, when it comes to IP
13.4 We might need you to sign your name and generally take part in the process of sorting out trademarks, patents, etc, that you had a hand in creating with us. That’s true even if you’ve left the company’s employment since you did the work. You won’t be able to do those things on your own, it will have to be us that drives the process.
13.5 You’ve got to do everything you can to make sure that the IP rests properly with us, and not you; even after you leave us.
13.6 Don’t steal anyone else’s work and pass it off as your own (and so ours), or make some libellous or obscene content in our name.

14.1 You’re going to be exposed to at least some level of our company’s secrets – you’ve got to keep them. If you do divulge anything, you’d better have our written consent first.
14.2 You can’t start a business in competition with us. But we don’t mind you owning shares in a publicly listed company that competes with us (that’s just investment). Shares in privately held companies are out though.
14.3 You’re not allowed to poach recent (in the last 12 months) customers from us
14.4 You’re not allowed to poach recent (in the last 3 months) employees from us
14.5 You’re not allowed to use any confidential information you have as a result of working for us, or tell anyone else that information (apart from tribunals or courts that you’re obliged to tell the truth in)
14.6 You’re not allowed to record details of what’s going on inside the company, unless it’s to benefit the company
14.7 You’re not allowed to pretend to still be working with us after you’ve quit
14.8 We know this legal wording’s pretty complicated, and different situations lead to different justifiable periods, so if this contract would be valid if we took out some of these restrictions and/or reduced the times involved, then that is the contract instead. I.e. you agree not to try and work around these agreements by finding a loophole in an otherwise reasonable clause.

15.1 Don’t do something on our behalf that would tarnish the company’s name. We’ve written down how we expect you to behave, roughly, so you should read up on that so you know what to avoid.
15.2 If you’re new, then we might skip the more rigorous disciplinary procedures; but you can take your complaint to the company director, if you’re not happy with the way you’ve been treated.
15.3 Please be sensible, and work things out with your line manager before starting the formal grievance procedure. But if you do want to do it formally, make it in writing.
15.4 If you’re formally doing things, you have the right of appeal of your decision
15.5 If you’ve since quit, please still raise the grievance with the company director.

16.1 Legal statement that nothing else interferes with these terms
16.2 We might need to change these rules, but if we do we’ll let you know a month in advance.
16.3 Where to find the employee handbook

17 Legalese

18 Legalese

I was recently discussing the new GTA facial animation technology with some friends and someone made a comment along the lines of “Meh. It’s a shame people will be praising this, the gameplay will no doubt  suck.”

Hearing a comment like that isn’t uncommon, and nor is hearing support for it. There have been a bunch of memes with a similar attitude flying around the internet for the last few years, so I figured I should give a go at dispelling some of the main ones in the chance for some unity and piece of mind.

Modern games just focus on graphics instead of gameplay

This is by far the most common one to hear, and though there might be some truth in it, it’s just a gross dismissal of the issue. The statement is purposefully ambiguous – as to actually use a word other than “focus” ties people down. For these people graphics have just become a scapegoat for bad design.

Most commonly by “focus”, people mean that more money is being spent on graphics than is justified. While games do have much larger budgets for artwork now – budgets across the board have increased. Programming teams, too, are larger, with a requirement for a much vaster selection of technical skills. These teams have had to deal with increasing expectations from the industry as well. The building of expansive maps and characters, which is often the standard now, isn’t just an artistic burden! Design teams are larger too, with a host of new dedicated positions for mapping, scripting, writing and many others. The idea of this paradigm shift by funding toward “having to be the best looking game” is simply a myth.

Even more to the point – does anyone really believe money can simply be thrown at good game design, and if it was the case, with the kind of sums made from WOW, wouldn’t developers and publishers be doing it already?

All my old favourites were just about gameplay

Recently I went back and looked over some old reviews of one of my favourite games, Populous: The Beginning. I expected it to score well overall, being a fantastic game. But what I wasn’t expecting was the fact that in almost every review it scored 10/10 for graphics.

Thinking about it afterwards, it didn’t seem so odd. The graphics for the time were amazing. Deformable terrain and flowing lava, as well as a beautiful world which felt alive with a host of subtle touches. Thinking about it even more I realized that almost all of my favourite games are in the same boat – Quake, Black & White, Sonic 3, Half Life, numerous others. I couldn’t even think of an example with graphics significantly worse than average. Developers have been pushing both graphical and technical bounds since the beginning of gaming.

Graphics are largely unimportant in a game

I think most people would agree, that almost by definition, gameplay is the most important part of a game. But pretending that graphics are unimportant is simply ridiculous. Atmosphere is one of the key parts of a game, and is deeply tied to the graphical style and quality. Immersion also is important, and while this doesn’t really relate to the number of polygons a game can draw, the consistency of the visuals are hugely important.

Developments in graphics are a hugely important device in opening up doors and new opportunities for game designers. It isn’t just coincidence that the vast majority of games for early systems were very similar, and usually tile based or 2D scrolling platformers.

Perhaps in the near future we’ll see another shift in game design and development, similar to what happened when 3D worlds became a legitimate mechanic. I, for one, want to be around when that happens, not lamenting over my Sega Mega Drive.

I don’t care about graphics providing the gameplay is good

This one is most commonly heard from the die hard fans of games such as Dwarf Fortress and the various MUDs and Roguelikes out there. There are grains of truth in this statement but most advocates seem to just be picking and choosing what they consider to be “graphics” when it suits them.

Gameplay and graphics can’t be separated so easily. Interaction, the key element of games, requires graphics at some level, and if it is impossible for a person to relate to this representation of interaction, the game is bound to fail.

The origin of this meme appears as an attempt to distance oneself from the typical screaming Call Of Duty kid, but just because a game doesn’t look like a generic Gears Of War clone, with bloom and HDR turned up to 11, doesn’t mean it isn’t impressive graphically or technically – often quite the contrary.

A good example is the indie gem Minecraft. Perhaps suprising to some, most artists would agree Minecraft has excellent graphics – and the progammers are reasonably impressed too. The whole game is soaked in atmosphere, the style is charming and consistent. There isn’t much more you could ask for.

Look on the net and you’ll find hundreds of instances of most incantations of puzzle and platformer games. It isn’t a surprise that the most popular version is usually the one with the most charming graphics ( N,  Orisinal come to mind).

Number of polygons might not matter to some people, but the ultimate system for how interaction is achieved, does.

So whose fault is it

One of the common trends I see in great games that stick in your mind, is an approach where by the essence of the game appears to be drawn out from the world. Populous, as mentioned above, is a good example of this, as well as another old favourite, Dungeon Keeper. In games such as this, the world and gameplay go together so beautifully that it isn’t even possible to quantify the gameplay mechanics without including the graphics, the atmosphere, the story and all the rest with it.

It seems that many modern blockbusters have a focus on “features”. Fallout 3, for example, feels very odd to play because it is set in this wonderful rich universe, but the gameplay is still more or less completely separate and abstracted from the setting. In a similar way, you could name a number of other recent titles, that seem like basic first person shooters with a graphical setting, and a number of “features” tacked onto the side – and none of that holds together very well.

Graphics and gameplay aren’t these two brothers competing for attention, and if you intend on making a truely great game, act like the responsible parent and don’t send them to their individual rooms – force them to play nicely together.

Conflicting Interests

[clauses 10.1 through 10.3, and 14.1 through 14.8]

Oddly, as an independent games developer, we’re not really in competition with our peers in the industry. Rather, we tend to work with them, collaborating where possible to help game ideas come to life, and celebrating their successes. But like any creative industry, the value in a company is in both its ideas, and its team. As such, there are issues which can arise that may cripple a business. A dispute with an employee may arise, causing them to leave the team acrimoniously. Any employee will take with them knowledge of titles under development, they may also have a close working relationship with a third party like a publisher. Such information can be abused such that the company loses out on business, and a healthy development can quickly turn sour. It’s not unheard of for a senior team member to leave, set up a new studio of their own, and not only poach staff from their previous employer, but also use their pre-existing relationship with a publisher to pick up a development deal, while the original developer implodes due to the sudden loss of staff.

In practice, such a situation is rare, and such a drastic failing would only be possible if the situation inside the developer was already problematic. But even on a small scale, such an event can be enough to seriously damage a studio, and so these clauses attempt to make clear what is expected from the employee. To summarise, the employee must a) not be involved (or get involved) in a competitor business, at least without declaring it to the company, b) not interfere with any of the business’s existing business relationships (i.e. no poaching work), c) not attempt to coax any staff to leave the company (i.e. no poaching staff), d) not give away any confidential information that might harm the company and e) not pretend to be part of the company after they’ve left it.

These clauses are more generally referred to as non-compete clauses, and can be difficult to enforce, as it depends on a judgement on what is fair and reasonable to both parties. The final sub-clause (14.8) reflects this, and essentially says that while the contract is trying to be reasonable, if any single part of the contract is deemed to be slightly unreasonable, then rather than rendering the entire thing null and void, the next most reasonable interpretation should be enforced.

This is especially important because employees cannot and should not ever be prevented from working after they have left the employ of a business. For this it is crucial that companies not try to enforce these clauses without good cause, as a loose interpretation of “competing business” would include every other game developer out there, and it is entirely unreasonable to try to prevent an ex-employee from finding work elsewhere in the industry. These clauses are there to get the employee’s agreement that they will not actively pursue a course of action that will damage the company.

Confidentiality

[clause 12.1]

Lastly, it’s worth noting that the employee is bound not only to keep any internal confidential information a secret, but that they are also bound by any confidentiality agreements entered into by the company. That is usually things like platform confidentiality (no talking about closed platforms like Sony and Microsoft’s), as well as any business to business agreements (no announcing to your friends that your team has just landed the next instalment in MegaFranchise, before it’s even been announced to the press that a sequel is on the way). And of course these obligations exist even after the employee has left the company, and there is no limit on how long they must be kept for. It’s also worth noting that if information becomes public through other means, the employee can talk about that – so when MegaFranchise 2 is announced to all and sundry, the employee doesn’t have to pretend they know nothing about it.

Summary

I hope this series has been useful, both to other small developers and to games industry employees alike. I found that, when we started out, all of this information was lacking, and we would have to hire lawyers to get set up. Even then, there are few games industry specific lawyers, so any information you can get for a reasonable price is usually from places which have no idea of the nuances of games development.

Lastly, if you are put off by the legalese in the document as is, you can go here for my rather irreverent but much more succinct summation of each of the clauses in the document.

Intellectual Property

[clauses 13.1 through 13.6]

Pretty much most of game development is about creating things. Creating content, creating game ideas, and creating code to realise the vision. Often the work is done on behalf of another party – a publisher or other client – who will actually retain the intellectual property of that work. If a developer is lucky, they are working on their own properties, and will retain the IP themselves. But in both cases, it is important that the relationship between any employees and the studio with regards to IP ownership is made clear. I won’t claim to be an IP lawyer, or that our T&Cs cover every facet of IP ownership. But they do lay out a clear basis for where the IP rests. Since each sub-clause covers a different major point, I’ll go through them in detail.

13.1

Basically, any IP created by employees, either on their own or as a team, needs to rest with (be owned by) the business, and not by the employee. Also, there is never a point at which the IP is owned by the employee, and then transferred to the business. All the IP created by the employees in their day to day work is the studio’s. This is not just a nicety for the business, it is a requirement, usually stipulated in all of the contracts with other parties. If you are developing a title for a publisher, the IP is passed to the publisher as part of the work for hire contract between the studio and the publisher. There is no room for some of the IP to be held by the employees, it has to all unambiguously be held by the studio, so that it can all be transferred to the other party.

Note this vital part to the clause: “while working on activities for the Company at whatever location“. One of the most important parts of the IP protection is that it balances the employee’s ability to create, with the company’s need to retain its IP without ambiguity.

I have in the past signed a contract which stated that whatever IP I created, regardless of whether I created it on company time, on company property or not, everything I did was owned by the company by default. Of course that means that any work I did at home, on my own machine, at the weekend, was theirs as well. This is unacceptable to most game developers – we all have our own hobby projects, and it’s vital to our morale and sense of personal creativity that we be allowed to develop those ideas. To have your employer effectively grab those ideas away from you, even if they don’t want them and never use them, such that you have to beg just to get them back, is stifling, unfair, and counter-productive.

I can understand the reasoning behind it: the same contract I signed also had the clause which said that I could be asked to work any hours, in any location, if the business needed it. If the company asserted that only work done during normal hours or on company property was owned by them, then any work I did on company projects on my home machine, or off-site in some way might be considered to be mine rather than the companies, even though I was clearly working on company business.

The phrase “while working on activities for the Company” is key here. IP created whilst working on company activities belongs to the company, regardless of when it happens, or where. IP created under any other circumstances may remain with the employee. While there is still scope for ambiguity, this should be minimised by having a clear separation between work activity and personal activity. Employees may do whatever they want on their own time, including being creative on their own personal projects. If they want to be creative on their own time that’s great, but it should be done outside of the office and on their own equipment, so they are safe from any possible insinuation that their work belongs to the company. In turn, the company can benefit from having motivated and creative individuals who don’t feel that their employers are heartless IP-stealing bastards.

13.2

This is a clause about fairness for the employee. If they come up with an idea or other piece of IP which they think is valuable, but which the company does not, they may ask the company to relinquish the rights back to them, so they can then use them as they see fit. This is often the case with game concepts – a game studio might see dozens or hundreds of game ideas from their team. Some are taken up, some might be taken up at a later date, but some might just be the wrong fit for the business, or just not something that can be made the most of. The company loses practically nothing by giving these ideas back to the employee, but gains good favour from that employee. Crucially, note the “for no consideration” part of the clause. Basically, if the employee asks for it back, it’s most likely they aren’t going to pay to do so.

If any IP is given back to the employee in this way, it should always be done so in writing, to make it clear what ideas are being handed off, and so that there are no repercussions at a later date. For employee hobby projects this isn’t a big deal, but any project that is a potential money spinner might cause legal wrangles at a later date if the relationship with the studio turns sour and the exact IP that was transferred wasn’t well specified.

13.3

Not just intellectual property, but also copyright needs to be transferred. Specifically, the business needs to be treated as the author of any created work, as it pertains to copyright legislation. So in this clause the employee is agreeing to relinquish any authorial rights they have. I’m not entirely clear on the details, but I believe that authors have the right to stop certain ‘detrimental’ things being done to their works by others. Obviously again this is a right which would make things messy unless the employee agreed up front to relinquish this.

13.4

Certain parts of intellectual property protection, such as trademarks, patents, etc. do need the involvement of a creator, in person. This clause stipulates that the employee must join with the business in securing those items, and in protecting the business’s interests (for example if the business needs to litigate against someone else who is infringing a trademark). There are two things that are key to note here: 1) the employee needs to help with these applications even after they have left the employment (crucial since such applications can take a long time), and 2) all the expenses and decisions are the employers (i.e. the employee shouldn’t be financially impacted by this responsibility).

13.5

This is simply a reinforcing clause like 13.4, pointing out that the employee needs to do whatever is necessary to make sure that the IP is assigned to the business properly, even after they’ve left, and that the business should carry any expenses incurred to make it happen.

13.6

This clause is the flip side to IP creation – it requires the employee to ensure, to the best of their abilities, that they aren’t infringing anyone else’s IP. As long as they exercise due care, they should be immune from any legal action directed at the business. That is, the studio can’t turn around and simply blame the employee for any infringement unless it is demonstrably their fault.

Next Time

And that’s it for IP. In the final post in the series, I’ll cover the remaining clauses which are games industry specific.

Our T&Cs have been ratified by our employment law consultants as being compatible with all current UK legislation, but they did not write more than a few sentences of it. The majority of the interesting clauses are very games industry specific, and on that they could provide no advice, other than to say that the clauses that were there did not affect the contract’s enforceability on unreasonable terms.

There are basically two thorny issues when it comes to employee terms: working hours, and IP ownership, each complex enough to warrant their own posts. There are also some basic company issues, which I’ll cover in a final post.

Working Hours

[Clauses 2.1 through 2.4]

For working hours, there are two main issues: 1) flexi-time/working-hours and 2) overtime. We state that our working week is 35 hours, Monday to Friday. Our office hours are 9 to 5, although in practice I don’t hold our team to that. Flexi-time is a good arrangement, but I believe it should be agreed amongst the team rather than trying to lock it down in the T&Cs. What is important is that teams know what hours they are expected to work, in any given week.

It’s not uncommon for companies to want to specify potentially unlimited working hours, for obvious reasons. The terminology to note, which we also use, is: “the demands of the business necessitate a flexible approach. This may require the Employee to work overtime and/or unsociable hours as required by the Employer”. Obviously this opens the door to massive abuses of the employees. The fact is, this is to cover the employer for when the s&*^ hits the fan. The critical milestone or gold master build absolutely has to ship on Sunday night, and all the stops must be pulled to get it done, or else the consequences for the business are dire. As much as we’d all like to get rid of it, in our industry we play fast and loose, and end up too close to the wire. What this requirement is not, and should never be, is a licence for the employer to have the employee working massive numbers of hours, week after week.

In the UK, the EU’s working time directive should kick in to prevent this, by insisting that no matter what, an employee can’t work more than 48 hours a week. In practice this is averaged over the last 17 weeks, making it somewhat tricky to find out just how many hours an employee is allowed to work next week. In the past there has been an opt-out, which employers have encouraged employees to sign, on the grounds that when they do need those last minute crunches, they don’t want to get caught out because employees have already worked too close to the limit. It’s important to note that a) you don’t have to sign the opt-out at all, b) any attempt or coercion by the employer that implies that you won’t get the job if you don’t sign it is thoroughly illegal, and c) even if you have signed it, you can retract that and opt back in at any point, by giving your employer a weeks notice. It’s all explained very thoroughly here.

I believe quite firmly that the opt-out shouldn’t even be considered. It certainly shouldn’t be mentioned in the T&Cs. I understand that it’s being removed anyway, and UK businesses will have to comply like everyone else. The plain fact is that employees shouldn’t be working anywhere near to the 48 hour limit, so there shouldn’t be any issue for the employer.

So back to our T&Cs – there is a note stating that we may need the employees to work over and above the normal week, but only in an exceptional case, and in those exceptional cases, the limits and consequences are clearly laid out. There is no room for abuse of the employee if the T&Cs are set out well. Exactly how the business chooses to deal with the situation is different for everyone, but it needs to be crystal clear a) exactly what the normal working week should entail, and b) what the employer and employee can expect if they need to work above normal hours.

We are a small business, and can’t afford to pay overtime to get things done. Instead, we operate a time in-lieu policy.

2.3 In the case of overtime, the time spent over and above normal working hours in any given week will entitle the Employee to time off in lieu of work to be done in future weeks. All overtime is at the discretion of the Employer, and must be agreed in advance. No more than 20 hours may be accumulated in any one month, and the time off must be taken in the following month. No entitlement can be carried forward without prior agreement. Any entitlement not taken will be lost.

In practice this gives us a lot of flexibility. If we need to work an 70 hour week one week, it needs to be balanced by not working at all the next week. If we were to work even 5 hours a week over the limit, by the end of the month 20 hours would have built up, and the employee may take them off, or agree to save them up for later. The key point here is that it allows the business to temporarily ramp up when we need to, while limiting the length of time we can do that for, and giving employees the choice as to how they want to handle it. If we need longer term crunch, we have to ask the employees (nicely), to accept the longer working hours. Conversely, the employee cannot simply accumulate a mass of time off in-lieu without the business agreeing to it.

At no point should the employee be working additional hours without an explicit agreement on how they should be compensated for it. Any vagueness in the contract can only lead to dilution of an employee’s recompense. Any promises of bonuses at a later date to offset overtime done now are just theoretical; and employees will often find that the bonus divided by the hours of overtime actually mean they are being paid below the statutory minimum wage for that time.

That’s a long enough post for now, next time around we will cover Intellectual Property.

And it’s that sort of standing on the shoulders of giants that I hope that the Game Development Stack Exchange site will help provide. Recently out of beta, the community there has quickly flourished into a fully fledged site, with a good breadth of knowledge. As will all the Stack Exchange sites however, it’s only as good as the community makes it, so in an attempt to be helpful, I’ve tried to ask some interesting and useful questions, and provide some informative answers of my own.

Sadly, as with any open and un-gated site, there are more than a few contributors who are, quite frankly, not contributing so much as dragging the place down. Thankfully there are mechanisms in place to vote down the more useless questions (such as What’s the best phone for game development?) and vote up the more interesting ones (like Fixed time-step vs variable time-step and What can cause alt-TAB to be annoying / slow / glitchy?).

As always though, only time will tell whether it will turn into a useful resource, or will degenerate into questions asked by amateurs and answered by idiots. The only way I can see to properly raise the signal-to-noise ratio is to encourage my fellow developers to visit, find a few questions to answer, and vote down any questions that don’t add any knowledge to the community. And so this post, such as it is, is my little attempt to raise awareness of the site amongst the wider game development community. And feel free to add an answer to my only question so far.

I have this narrative in my head now of a lazy squirrel that wakes up one morning in November, hung-over to all hell, and realises that it’s frosty and he’s seriously late for winter. And now he’s dashing around, cursing under his breath at the monster head-ache he’s got, stashing food any old place. All the good places are taken as well, so he ends up stuffing them in all sort of rubbish places. Since I’m an unabashed cynic though, the story ends with him lifting up a particularly grumpy cat’s tail and trying to stash an armful of brazil nuts under the cat, only to be unpleasantly and messily devoured.

This sort of debate annoys me, because it’s always couched in absolutes. In software engineering there are no absolutes. So I felt I had to respond when someone declared, without much in the way of context:

No they shouldn’t. At least, not unless your team ethos supports it.

Just like all of these statements about how things should or shouldn’t be done, there is a whole bunch of context needed before you can say whether or not a strategy is successful or not. You can’t just look at those stats and say “TDD is the way to go”, or “asserts should be everywhere and always on”.

Every last one of these tenets of development requires a particular way of working before it is viable and/or usable. Asserts are great, as long as the team ethos is to never (or nearly never) allow them into a live build. What do you think you get if you just turn asserts on everywhere, when the build is riddled with conditions which aren’t show-stoppers, but which result in asserts? You get designers and artists that can’t use the build any more, and everyone gets pissed off.

Similarly, what do you get if you have a team which is notionally doing TDD, but in fact many of the developers aren’t structuring their code to support complete tests, or have incomplete test coverage where it counts? You get slower development, without a great decrease in the number of defects, and now you’ve got less time to fix them when it comes time to ship.

People should stop looking for one-stop, quick fix solutions to the problems which all development teams have. Every last one of these solutions will a) make things worse if applied in a half arsed way, and b) stem from an underlying mentality which is “what can we do to improve maintainability, increase coder efficiency, and smooth out problems in our day to day development?”

Sure, read the stats, read other people’s techniques, but for the love of Mike, don’t try to just stamp a particular technique on your development team and expect it to improve your lot. Instead, take a long hard look at your day-to-day process, identify the root of the problems that your team actually has, and take small incremental steps to fix those problems. Repeat ad-infinitum (or until you ship).

More than anything though, make sure any steps you do take work with the team you currently have, not with some ideal team that you’ve read about. If you find yourself applying a solution which will only work if everyone has a certain mentality or set of skills, then you’d better make damned sure that your team has those things before you try to apply the fix.

I’ve come to realize that game art is a fairly niche interest. There isn’t a digital art society at the university, and even if there was, I suspect the chances of me meeting another games artist there would be low. When I explain to people what game art actually is, I think they imagine it more as a technical skill – they imagine learning how to use certain computer programs or tools in a similar way to when they learnt how to use Microsoft Word. Perhaps this is to be expected. Although many games in the past have been very beautiful, and I’ve played games in which I’ve been attached to a certain character, often any real feeling is overshadowed by underwhelming storyline, hollow characters and immersion-breaking glitches and oddities. It is still generally an odd thing to think of game art as something that expresses emotion, feeling or ideas – something that comes so naturally to conventional art forms.

I suspect the majority of games artists, when you ask them what they do, will say they “make games”. Not, as their title might imply, that they are “an artist”. In some ways I resent this. Not because “making games” is some sort of trivial pursuit, but because in a greater sense, an artist is attached to themselves, their own experiences, and the artistic community – more than their company or game, of which they might have little input into the real “game” part of. Even more so, game art is not like programming, or the technical use of a special tool. Game art is a creative process. It requires the same state of concentration used for other creative processes. It requires experience, training and knowledge. It requires for the artist to hold an image of what they wish to create in their head.

Perhaps people’s impressions will soon be changing. There is a new form of media taking it’s baby steps into the world – so called “interactive storytelling”. I may not be in the majority with this view, but I am extremely excited about it.

As computer power, artistic skill and graphics engine design have improved, we have finally reached a point where we can render semi-photo-realistic scenes in real time. This gives “interactive storytelling” something over film, books and music – a level of simulated interactivity. Whether this can actually contribute anything to the experience is up for debate, but what it certainly does do is create a reason for this new form of media to exist – and that is enough for me.

There was recently an update to what is one of my most anticipated game developments ever:

The Dear Esther Graphical Remake

Not only is Robert Briscoe one of my favourite digital artist of all time (Having worked on Mirrors edge, a game with simply spectacular visuals), but Dear Esther will probably have been most people’s first introduction into interactive storytelling, and probably the best example of its genre to exist.

The graphics in the updated development version are not only stunning in their realism and technicality – but more importantly they are deeply emotional and the product of a personal project – something that is perhaps more familiar to the creative process of conventional artwork than we have seen before in the games industry. In this sense, the update is a true landmark.

I can’t wait for Dear Esther. Not just because I believe it will be a unique and beautiful experience crafted by some of the best minds in the games industry, but because it might even make me reconsider how I view myself. And perhaps the games industry will do the same.

And therein lies the problem. There aren’t enough successes. Sure they’re out there. World of Warcraft, Halo, COD4, Red Dead Redemption. But for every Halo there is a Haze, for every World of Warcraft there is an APB. What matters, for the health of the industry in general, is that the averages play out. It’s not enough that a hit brings in $100 million in profit, if for every hit a publisher also ships 6 titles that lose $20 million each. If every title was independent, that would be fine: quality is rewarded with profit, and its lack with loss. Businesses who make poor quality product should be punished, that is all part of a free market system.

But the problem is that the businesses at the core of the current system, the publishers, are shipping titles on both sides of the line. This is what they’ve always done. There’s nothing really wrong with that: it’s extraordinarily hard to predict in advance whether or not a title will be a success, and certainly not before a lot of money has already been sunk into the project.

What made such a system workable was that in the past, the profits on the hit titles were so much larger that they easily paid for the development of the flops. All publishers had to do was to stay on the right side of the line – make sure their hits were big enough and their flops were infrequent enough. So what has changed? Budgets.

Development budgets used to be far, far smaller. The retail price of games has stayed mostly the same, and the number of units sold has risen, not by much, but risen. But the budgets have gone insane. In any other business, the notion of accepting costs an order of magnitude higher, knowing that the incomes wouldn’t jump in the same way, would be madness. Bit by bit, the publishers have slipped to the position where only a few flops in a row is enough to cripple them.

For the games industry to be healthy again, an average game needs to be able to make money. That’s how averages work. If you have to be in the top 10 or 20% of titles just to break even, then there is 80% of the titles being made that are losing money, and those 80% cost almost as much to make as the top titles. And in the end, the funding for that top 20% comes from the same businesses that are funding the bottom 80%.

It’s not entirely the publishers’ fault – the console platform holders gave them a technology platform for which the development costs were far higher, and then took the old platforms away. No-one asked the consumer if they were prepared to pay a higher price for games on those platforms, because we knew they wouldn’t. Instead, the industry held their breath, and sucked up the increased risk and cost, hoping that they would be able to make good enough games to survive. That’s not a healthy business model.

Have you seen any new publishers enter the market recently? There’s a reason for that. Our business isn’t one that people want to get into. If publishers were making good money, for every failure because they shipped consistently poor games, another business would arise with a better focus on quality. That’s not happening – even the most experienced publishers are struggling for air.

It’s not just the publishers either. I know many developers who refuse to consider making anything but top-flight AAA titles, pushing the hardware to the limit. When it is suggested that titles on that scale aren’t profitable, they sneer, and point at the successes, and ignore the failures. They say that if being profitable means making social networking games, or mobile titles, then they don’t even want to be in the industry any more. What sort of an attitude is that? “If I can’t make these shovels out of diamonds, I don’t want to make shovels any more.” Does anyone want a diamond shovel? No. If you’re offering one for the same price as the old wood and steel shovel, then sure. But the old shovel was fine for me, and I don’t have any more money to spend on shovels than I had before.

The pre-owned market is a big indicator of the pain going around the industry at the moment. Consumers think even the current price points are far too high, so when retailers like Gamestop, etc. offer them a re-sale value that gets them the same games for cheaper, they jump at it. Why are the retailers pushing it? Because their margins were getting trimmed to the point where they couldn’t make a decent profit. Why? Because the publishers were also trying to maintain a decent profit level themselves, as risks and increased costs of development slashed their profits to ribbons.

What to do? Fix the budgets. Better efficiency. Get scope under control – no more long games for the sake of it. If one publisher takes the first step, back towards to profitability in their core business, is the consumer really going to abandon them? Will they really not buy a high quality game because it’s shorter than some other publisher’s offering? And if they don’t, what about next year, when that other publisher has gone under, and there’s no “other game” to buy?

Our new and slightly larger team, at Ghillie Dhu in the West End

Dan brings much needed artistic ability to the team, and even though he’s only working a few hours a week, should give us the ability to make our prototypes look much, much prettier. Certainly much prettier than the photo above, taken in poor light conditions on an iPhone as we partook in a celebratory drink. We’re not that blurry really. Well, Tim and Dan aren’t at least; since my beard has reached full thickness, all of my edges are pretty fuzzy now.

Executive Summary:

If the government wants to help the games industry, rather than through relief on corporation tax, it should do so by improving the quality of the talent pool. By supporting education, apprenticeships and internships within games developers, and making it easier and cheaper to hire talented but inexperienced staff. In doing so, it will help maintain the UK’s competitiveness as a creative centre, and the returns in increased profitability for UK developers should pay for the incentive schemes. Any incentive scheme which rewards large non-UK publishers will in my view be less effective than one which supports the myriad of smaller developers, many of which are wholly UK-owned.

Full Response:

Sadly, since the original request for input to this inquiry, the Scottish games industry has suffered a serious blow in the loss of Realtime Worlds. I would like to start by raising my voice against the ridiculous notion put forth by various MPs to the media that the previously cancelled tax-breaks proposal would have somehow prevented this company’s failure. The scheme proposed relief on corporation tax, and Realtime Worlds’ issues were certainly not down to being too heavily taxed.

I run a small studio that provides development support services to the wider games industry, primarily in the UK. We are members of the trade association TIGA, whom I believe will also contribute to this inquiry. TIGA were instrumental in persuading the previous government to take up the proposed tax relief scheme, but I must confess that I am not and never have been entirely convinced that their proposal is the best approach to boost the industry.

When the current government announced the scheme would be scrapped, I cannot say that I was concerned. It had never been implemented, only proposed in loose terms by the previous government. I doubt it would have ever made it to implementation. Its absence will not hurt the Scottish games industry, where the only sizeable developer left (Rockstar North) is foreign owned, and solid for other reasons than financial ones. The smaller developers left here are not in a position to expand massively, tax-breaks or not.

While corporation tax-breaks would I’m sure attract inward investment to the UK as a whole, their nature is such that the biggest winners in such a scheme are large, multi-national publisher/developer corporations. Implementing tax breaks might attract them to form or expand studios here, but aside from the direct investment here, their profits still largely go abroad. Once in place, it seems to me that removing those tax-breaks would quickly lead to studios being declared unprofitable and being shut down again, such is the fickle nature of games development.

Furthermore, subsidising the industry solely because the French and Canadian governments do seems to me to be a dead end road that can only end in subsidies escalating out of control. Yes, we are losing development talent to Canada, and the more developers that go out of business here, the more of our talented workforce will emigrate there. But when studios go bust, their talent doesn’t just leave the country, some also leave the industry, and our available workforce pool is diminished. The tightening belts of the publishers and financiers of the industry don’t allow developers the leeway they need to recruit and train new talent, and that hurts the industry both now and in the long term.

I don’t want to see subsidies for general game development. I don’t want to see incentives to make culturally British games (although I do think that there should be more of them made). What I think the government should be doing is to support what makes the UK competitive in the world market: our creative talent. We need more developers doing innovative, creative things. We can’t compete with Eastern Europe or Asia on labour cost, but we can compete on labour quality. But for that developers have to be able to take in new talent, new ideas, and reinforce a waning labour pool.

I would propose subsidies for education and training. And since the only kind of training that is really effective in the games industry is on-the-job, what I would like to see is more support from the government to get students and young people inside developers and doing real work. Apprenticeships for game developers almost. I’d like to see real financial support for developers who want to take on inexperienced but talented people. That might take the form of subsidised placements, internships, or PAYE relief on students. The universities like Abertay are doing well with their industry outreach efforts, but with better financial support they could do far better. The developers want the talent, but they can’t afford to take risks in hiring, or to get the people up to a useful level of productivity. The universities want to get their graduates into the industry. The government wants the students in jobs, and it wants the developers healthy and profitable.

So in summation, if the government wants to help the games industry, it should do so by reducing the real costs UK developers have: the staff. In doing so they will enrich the talent pool, maintain the UK’s competitiveness as a creative centre, and the returns in increased profitability should pay for the incentive schemes.

Which is what bugs me about the whole thing. The product designers have added a whole mess of extra buttons, all of which adds to the cost of the product, to satisfy controllability that we really just don’t use. Even that last 5% of the time, if we didn’t have that extra controllability, we’d be able to just make do. It’s not a surprise to me that industrial microwaves have pretty much two controls: a dial for power, and a dial for time. Anything more smacks of designers trying to justify their own salary, or interference from people who don’t really understand their customers. To be honest even those two controls are overkill. A single button that adds 30 seconds to the clock and starts the microwave (if it’s not already started), and another to cancel. Simplicity.

This isn’t just a rant about our microwave. Okay, well maybe a little bit. But it’s a design principle that goes through everything, games design included. Understanding what your users want to do in the majority of cases, and give them just what they want, but resist the temptation to drown that out with other minor features. It’s not just user interfaces, it’s features as well. Even with the best interface in the world, games or tools that try to over-complicate things end up suffering. Not only do those features take valuable developer time to implement, they’re almost certainly going to increase the odds of those features adversely interacting with the important core features.

So why put in unnecessary features? Many reasons:

Of course it would be easy to take this advice, and ship a project with only a few features, claiming to be keeping things ‘clean’ and ‘simple’, even though they omit the features the customer is really most interested in. As always there is a balance to be struck. The important thing is to understand both the product/game you’re making, and the people who want to use/play it.

So basically I’m pleading with the game and product designers out there: add features sparingly. Not only do you keep your development costs down, you improve your chances of making a cleaner, more usable product, that fits better with what your customers want.

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.