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	<title>Black Company Studios</title>
	<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog</link>
	<description>Thoughts on games, the games industry, and other gems from the life of the Company</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:00:17 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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	<item>
		<title>On the move</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Aha! Just downloaded the Wordpress app for iPhone, we shall see if writing blogs on the move lets me be more reliable with my posts. As I write this particular draft (lamenting the iPhone&#8217;s keypad) I&#8217;m on a bus on Princes St, moving between Microsoft at the East End and our own office at the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/352</link>
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		<title>Advice to would-be designers</title>
		<description><![CDATA[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...]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/349</link>
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		<title>CruiseControl.NET / Custom Plug-ins</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I must admit, I&#8217;m a bit of a CruiseControl.NET fan. It drives most of our automation systems, and provides us a backbone from which we can hang many different systems. I use it both here at the Company, and when I&#8217;m doing tools consulting with other teams. That said, it&#8217;s not without it&#8217;s flaws and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/342</link>
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		<title>Lovely cold winters</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Maybe it&#8217;s the Scotsman in me, but when the yearly cold-snap hits Edinburgh in late November, it always cheers me up. It&#8217;s the time of year when the weather changes from being mushy and wet into being cold and dry. Scarves and hats are no longer a choice to make, they&#8217;re simply required. So even [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/338</link>
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		<title>A Married Man&#8217;s Thoughts On Policy</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This week&#8217;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 [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/335</link>
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		<title>Tock Tick</title>
		<description><![CDATA[2 more days in Reading, tick tock, tock tick. The new laptop MGS have ordered for me has turned up, and all in all it&#8217;s very shiny. Well not so much shiny as glowy. Seriously. There&#8217;s like a dozen different backlights, under the keyboard, around the trackpad, and the little alien logo on the top [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/332</link>
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		<title>The onset of illness</title>
		<description><![CDATA[As I write this, with clammy skin and fuzzy-head, I&#8217;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&#8217;ve been providing care, it&#8217;s pretty likely I&#8217;ve now got it too. I can feel [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/327</link>
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		<title>Creative SB X-Fi broken under Vista</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Okay, this isn&#8217;t strictly in-keeping with the theme of the blog, but I&#8217;ve found random posts like this can be very helpful in diagnosing and fixing problems. Google is your friend, and makes it easy to fine articles that describe your issue. My issue &#8211; that my Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi stopped working at some [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/323</link>
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		<title>Develop 2009 (part 2)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[So, interesting talks at Develop. As usual, there were some slots where none of the talks were particularly compelling, and others with 2 or more talks all equally appealing. Thankfully this time I had meetings which could be scheduled in the boring slots, which takes the edge off somewhat.
Day 1 (Evolve)
10 Things Nobody Tells You [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/312</link>
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		<title>Develop 2009</title>
		<description><![CDATA[So, since I was just a stones-throw (okay, two and a quarter hours by train) from Brighton, I took advantage of Develop this year. I&#8217;ll cover the interesting talks in a subsequent post, but for now some thoughts from the conference itself.
My boss at Microsoft was kind enough to let me go through them for [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/308</link>
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		<title>R.I.P. Bertie</title>
		<description><![CDATA[R.I.P. Bertie
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 [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/304</link>
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		<title>Off to Brighton</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Just a quick note, mostly to push the sunshine post off the top because it&#8217;s cooled down a bit (and I&#8217;ve correspondingly gotten less grumpy). Off to Develop Brighton tomorrow, which should be good. I&#8217;m not too eager to take the days out of my MGS work, but I have to think about longer term [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/299</link>
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		<title>The accursed day-star</title>
		<description><![CDATA[

It might just be my Scottish breeding showing through, but when it&#8217;s hot like this, I just want to curl up into a ball and die. It doesn&#8217;t start that way; I just wince a little at the bright sunshine and shade my eyes. After that, I gripe a little when it feels like the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/292</link>
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		<title>Productive weekends</title>
		<description><![CDATA[For too long now, I&#8217;ve been attacking my to-do list in a rather sporadic way. RememberTheMilk.com is a wonderfully flexible way of storing and categorising a task list, and given how mobile I am the web-access is great. The idea that on my own I would be able to remember all of the myriad of [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/289</link>
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		<title>So what&#8217;s an &#8220;Ananlyst&#8221; then?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[applications,idiots]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/285</link>
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		<title>Travelling Wilbury&#8230;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Right, I&#8217;ve had enough of the sad kitten at the top of the blog now; you can only stand so much cuteness before the mind rebels. Time for a quick update on status, as I&#8217;ve been quite heavy with the waffling and opinionated posts recently.
This post is written courtesy of the wi-fi in a B&#38;B [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/281</link>
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		<title>Bad Digital Distribution Stores Make Kitties Cry</title>
		<description><![CDATA[One of my biggest issues with the games industry as it stands today is with the digital distribution stores (DDS for brevity) in place on the various platforms. I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon with others who have predicted the imminent death of physical retail stores; I think there's still a large place for brick-and-mortar game shops, and they're certainly not going away any time soon. But I think a large part of the continuing need for retailers is down to the failings of the various digital providers.]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/256</link>
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		<title>Working Hours and the IGDA (Part 2/2)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This implication that number of hours you work has absolutely zero relation to the level of talent you possess.

...

The sooner we accept that abusing our staff is unprofitable in the long term the better off we will be as businesses. The sooner we accept that the 40 hour working week is the norm, and everything we do should be trying to get us closer to that norm, the better off we will be.
]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/259</link>
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		<title>Working Hours and the IGDA (Part 1/2)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[And so the perennial topic of working hours comes back to us again, this time as a result of some spirited discussion from the IGDA. The exact nature of the discussion has been covered well elsewhere, but suffice to say that an IGDA board member (Mike Capps of Epic) has been lambasted by the game developer community in general for his statement that Epic doesn't want to hire the sort of people who just work 40-hour weeks.]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/254</link>
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		<title>Feature Creep</title>
		<description><![CDATA[We were having a discussion this morning about the perils of building your business around a popular tool that you&#8217;ve made, and I thought it might make a good blog post. Really this is inspired by the impending upgrade I&#8217;m going to need to do to SmartSVN 6, despite having only just bought a SmartSVN [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/250</link>
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		<title>Coding Reviews</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Some discussion on the Chaos Engine about code reviews and check-in process had inspired me to write up a post on my thoughts on this, but on my morning trawl through my RSS feeds this morning it looks like Lee Winder has beaten me to the punch. He pretty much covers all of my thoughts [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/247</link>
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		<title>Sid the Squirrel</title>
		<description><![CDATA[So it seems that aside from just the usual wildlife inside the office (i.e. the ubiquitous Edinburgh mice), we have some visitors from outside as well.

Isn&#8217;t that one chubby squirrel? Tim reckons that he just does the rounds of all the windows nearby, and lives off the generosity of the locals who like cute squirrels. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/243</link>
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		<title>svnadmin verify</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Gah. New rule for Subversion repository maintenance &#8211; run &#8220;svnadmin verify&#8221; as often as you run your off-site backup process, and arguably don&#8217;t do the backup if it fails. One of our support repositories (as opposed to a development repository which I&#8217;m a bit more paranoid about) has had a dodgy revision in for a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/237</link>
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		<title>Dundee vs Edinburgh</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Here&#8217;s a little spiel I wrote up in response to a student doing research who was asking why we set up in Edinburgh rather than  Dundee, and what I thought of Dundee as a creative hub. It&#8217;s got a bit of history of us in there, so I thought it would make a good [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/231</link>
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		<title>JamPlus</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Amongst various things I had to sort out today, I was asked to write out a blurb for a potential client about improving build processes and automating/scripting things in the development pipe-line. It&#8217;s a subject I get quite passionate about, because unlike so many things in games development, it&#8217;s a nice task to do. There [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/228</link>
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		<title>14 Belford Road</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Exciting news! And pictures!
We&#8217;ve finally shifted to our new place in Belford Road. It&#8217;s really just around the corner from our old place, but is generally much nicer, larger and more flexible than our old place. If you look back at the pictures of the Palmerston Place office it&#8217;s clear that we struggle to fit [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/223</link>
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		<title>Library documentation</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Okay, note to library developers. When you&#8217;re providing documentation for your class library, a bunch of pages like:
SomeObject::GetID method
Gets the ID for the object
Does not mean that you have thorough documentation. Seriously. That is all.
]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/163</link>
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		<title>Celebrity Slap &#8211; Wii</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This one came up during the drive home from a long weekend up north, while listening to one of those &#8216;Greatest Movie Songs Ever&#8217; type of albums. They all seem to have Love Is All Around on them; great for singing along to, as long as you haven&#8217;t heard it recently. I mentioned to my [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/218</link>
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		<title>New office</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Well, a bit of patience appears to have paid off with respect to finding a new office for us. Or at least, a bit of religious checking of Gumtree&#8217;s office space section every morning. I shouldn&#8217;t really count our chickens before they&#8217;ve hatched (as we&#8217;ve not signed the lease yet), but the new place is [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/214</link>
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		<title>Fixed working hours</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I posted this in a discussion on TheChaosEngine forums, but it sums up my position on overtime/fixed-working-hours quite succinctly, so I thought I&#8217;d re-post it out here in the real world. For reference, our team tries to work office hours of 9-5, rather than a flexi-time arrangement. This is, it seems, quite unusual in the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/210</link>
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		<title>Office hunting</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Bah humbug. The new office on Rutland Square was looking better and better, and we were days away from signing the lease. Sadly though, delays in organising things amongst the three companies to be involved meant that someone else has seen the place and signed the papers all in the space of a week, and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/212</link>
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		<title>Heat exchange</title>
		<description><![CDATA[While rummaging around in my backlog of things to post, I found this link to an article I&#8217;d seen on Linux Journal. Definitely the best form of re-use I&#8217;ve heard. Everyone these days seems to be going on about recycling of goods we&#8217;ve used, and that&#8217;s a fair point. But I&#8217;ve always been more concerned [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/207</link>
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		<title>Fustian Future</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Funnily enough, whenever I come back to the blog to write up a new post, one of the first things that jumps out at me is the monthly archives posts over on the right which I have to scroll past to reach the &#8217;site admin&#8217; button. Whilst in my head I know fine well that [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/204</link>
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		<title>On trains you meet the funnest people (part 2)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Truly it&#8217;s the belligerent passengers that are the worst though. Most often on a British train there&#8217;s a sense of shared suffering, and people usually pitch in to help the doddery old lady to her seat, or the mother with a child and a heavy bag. If the train is packed or the air conditioning [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/200</link>
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		<title>On trains you meet the funnest people (part 1)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[One of the fringe benefits of travelling to client sites regularly is the amount of people-watching you get to do. And in the words of the late, great Bill Hicks: there are some real pockets of humanity out there, it&#8217;s amazing to see them travelling around.
You can spot the regular travellers of course, they tend [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/166</link>
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		<title>Je suis retourné</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Yes, back from the roaming around the States, although my body&#8217;s clock still says I&#8217;m somewhere in the mid Atlantic I think. Hotel wi-fi access was pretty sporadic sadly, even the places that charged 10 USD a day for internet access were pretty flaky and hard to connect to. And goodness knows how much malware [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/185</link>
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		<title>The lurgy</title>
		<description><![CDATA[One of the biggest problems with running your own business is handling illness and time off. You get used to driving the business forward, dealing with all the clients, making sure everyone knows what they&#8217;re doing and that there aren&#8217;t any hidden snags waiting. So when you get ill, it&#8217;s hard to switch off and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/183</link>
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		<title>Accounts and slackness</title>
		<description><![CDATA[So our accountant (who happens to work in the same building as us) popped his head round the door this morning inquiring about when I was going to sort out our 2007/08 accounts. Cue a frenzied morning of tallying, checking of figures, amending totals, and now we have our accounts finalised (finally). They don&#8217;t really [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/181</link>
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		<title>Other smart people</title>
		<description><![CDATA[They say that your opinion of someone elses intelligence is pretty much solely based on how much they agree with your views. Well if that&#8217;s the case, then Clinton Keith over at Agile Game Development must be pretty damned smart. This post covers pretty much exactly what I&#8217;ve said previously about the rising cost vs. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/180</link>
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		<title>Adventures in Wii-land</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I was debating with myself over whether or not to attach a picture of our Wii development kit to this post to add a bit of colour. In the end I decided not to, as you could probably construe it as a breach of our promise to Nintendo to keep everything super-secret and hidden. Boo-hiss. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/179</link>
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		<title>I Aten&#8217;t Dead</title>
		<description><![CDATA[A month without a post! That&#8217;s just not on. Bad Chris, bad! At first it was because I wanted to write a good post about our new team members! But then it was all about the long hours I was putting in for our Four Door Lemon work, to help them get a title out [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/178</link>
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		<title>Coffee Morning</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
Quick rule of thumb for anyone wanting to court Scottish games (or regular) developers: If you promise coffee and/or breakfast, make sure 1) the coffee doesn&#8217;t run out, and 2) the breakfast consists of carbohydrates. And no, chocolate Hob Nobs don&#8217;t count as breakfast. Bonus points for the saw player though, she was good, and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/177</link>
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		<title>Why the games industry is having trouble</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Interesting article here from the Rampant Coyote; also on our blog-roll, so I thought I&#8217;d jump them up the order. Basically it is bemoaning the fact that games developers are in a losing business right now. Well, those who are in the traditional publisher-fronts-all-money-as-advance-against-sales model are at least. I wouldn&#8217;t like to speculate on whether [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/176</link>
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		<title>Japanmanship</title>
		<description><![CDATA[JC Barnett&#8217;s Japanmanship is our next link from the side-bar. One of the more widely read developer blogs, not just because the content is funny and insightful, but also because it&#8217;s one of the few insights that western developers can get into the sometimes impenetrable world that is Japanese games development.
It seems that although a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/175</link>
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		<title>Wordpress 2.5</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
So, despite the fact that the blog looks no different on the surface, we are actually running on Wordpress 2.5 now &#8211; the latest and greatest update to the blogging software. The Control Panel in which I write all the posts now looks radically different though, it looks much snazzier and dare I say it [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/174</link>
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		<title>Jake World</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Don&#8217;t be put off by the pictures which make him look like Vic Mackie from The Shield, this is in fact another game developer blog, written by Jake Simpson. (Sorry Jake, I couldn&#8217;t resist). Much like Dopass, this blog is heavy on the opinion pieces &#8211; but Jake has been around the block enough times [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/173</link>
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		<title>Dopass</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Continuing our trip down our blog-roll: Dopass, written by Snipehunter who always seems to make insightful posts on The Chaos Engine forums. A designer for games, based in the US &#8211; the blog has plenty of opinion pieces, based mostly on articles from the web. It&#8217;s an interesting take on games in general, with a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/172</link>
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		<title>Headlam</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Next up in our game-dev blog linking frenzy: Headlam, written by my old associate from VIS, Larry Docherty. Larry and I worked together on Brave for a long while, and we was a great guy to work with. As he was a filthy weegie  , he trekked through to Edinburgh every day &#8211; a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/171</link>
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		<title>Let&#8217;s kick it up a notch, or two</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Yes, we&#8217;re not just taking on one new staffer, due to a fortuitous mix of circumstances we&#8217;re bringing on two! We have Charlotte Moseley, a graduate developer with knowledge of C# who is coming on and getting up to speed with our Evolution work; also we have Tim Angus coming to join us. Like Pete [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/170</link>
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		<title>Bruce on Games</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The currently running set of articles on Bruce&#8217;s blog are focusing on his time at Codemasters, from its humble beginnings on the home games machines of the 80&#8217;s up to its less than illustrious current state (it&#8217;s drawn criticism in industry circles for its treatment of staff and management decisions widely seen as poor). But [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/169</link>
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