There are two main areas where amateur game development happens. The first is the Indie scene, which encompasses most forms of game development done by a single developer. This can mean cheap action games on Steam, cult hits like Minecraft and Braid, flash developers working on Newgrounds or mobile and smart phone developers. These games are often simple, 2D, and tend to be creative or puzzle type games with accessible graphics.

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 one of the most annoying things about the internet for computer fixing is that a) a lot of the people asking questions aren’t technical, so the problem reports are spotty at best, and b) a lot of the people providing answers think they know more than they do, so the answers often either conflict, or are just plain misleading. Worse, they’re usually just a list of commands, without any context as to why you’re doing these things, so it’s hard to know if they’re even appropriate. Often-times what might appear to be the same situation is in fact cause by a completely different underlying problem, and following instructions blindly will just make things worse.

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.

As of this morning, our second entirely internal app, Edinburgh – Parking, is up for sale on the iOS App Store! It’s a pretty niche app this time,  and combines the geo-location abilities of the iPhone with the rather complicated parking zones in Edinburgh, to provide a useful and easy to use reference for anyone wanting to know where they can park, and how much it’s going to cost. So if you’re local to Edinburgh, please do check it out!

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.

I must confess, the iPad we bought for device testing has migrated home to the flat, and now only makes its way back to the office for specific needs. Not for purely selfish reasons I hasten to add, although it is partly that. Rather it’s because when we first got it, I was unsure as to exactly how it would fit into the average user’s life. The iPhone was easy, within an hour or two of using it I could see it’s niche; a pocket sized, versatile device with good connectivity and an intuitive interface. The iPad, not so much. Too large to carry around without making a conscious effort; lacking the keyboard for serious work, and unable to run most of the existing software most users are accustomed to using on a laptop.

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 thought I’d add my voice to the rest of the gaming community praising Portal 2, which I finished last week. A great story, which made me laugh out loud at least a dozen times, which is rare in any medium, let alone a game. It’s not without its flaws, but all are minor and do not detract noticeably from the overall experience. It most definitely passed my usual acid test for quality: that I wanted to play it even when I didn’t have any free time, to the point where I was skipping sleep to play it some more.

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.

So I hinted last time about my continuing disappointment with the IGDA, and promised a more complete write-up of why. It seems though, just to take the sting from my tail, they’ve chosen this month to do something useful. So that has cheered me somewhat. It doesn’t erase the failings of the past, but it at least gives me hope for the future. Here’s a summation of my last couple of years of impressions of the IGDA.

[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.

It looks like a well meaning group are attempting to restart interest in a Scottish chapter of the IGDA. While I’m all for more cooperation between Scottish developers (and engaging with other people interested in the industry), I’m still rather soured on the IGDA itself. Since my earlier posts relating to working hours, the organisation has only been further devalued in my eyes. But rather than rant about it now, I’m going to make the effort to attend a local meetup and meet the people in question, and tell them just why I’m cynical. Maybe I can be persuaded that I’m just being a stick-in-the-mud, but at least they’ll be going into it with open eyes. Either way, I’ll thrash out the arguments both ways, and write it up for here.

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’s been a busy winter for us, but this story (originally in the Daily Mail, unsurprisingly enough), made me grumpy enough to warrant a post.

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.

And finally, the last part of our look at our Employee Terms and Conditions. Since the document itself is written in suitable legalese, I wrote up a more succinct (and decidedly less formal) version that conveys the spirit of the terms rather than getting bogged down in exact wording.

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

Maybe I’ve just been reading too many youtube comments, but as a game artist, you can’t quite help get the feeling that some people consider you partially responsible for the downturn in the quality of recent blockbuster titles.

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.