It’s probably entirely escaped your notice (or at least it should have done), that we’ve upgraded to WordPress 3.0.1 recently. Everything should be exactly as it was before, externally at least. Please let me know if anything looks off of course. Doing that little bit of maintenance has reminded me that it’s probably time to update the website in general though. I have been meaning to make a little section for our iPhone games and applications, although probably that’s easiest done in the blog itself. More importantly however will be to update our About pages to include more recent endeavours.

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.

New link over in the right hand panel: GameDevBlogs.net Not to be confused with Jamie Fristom/Torpex’s GameDevBlog.com, to which we also link!

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!

While rummaging around in my backlog of things to post, I found this link to an article I’d seen on Linux Journal. Definitely the best form of re-use I’ve heard. Everyone these days seems to be going on about recycling of goods we’ve used, and that’s a fair point. But I’ve always been more concerned about the impending energy shortages. It has always jarred a bit that in some places we’re using millions of joules of energy cooling our local environment down, when not too far away there are other people spending similar millions of joules warming their’s up. So much of the things we waste is because it is simpler to just use or make another than to try and re-use something already made. A case in point – we spend lots importing fuel to burn and keep our homes warm, but happily throw out heavy furniture made of wood. Once upon a time we would have thrown it on our fire and killed two birds with one stone, but our modern lives no longer make that easy.

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

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

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 ‘site admin’ button. Whilst in my head I know fine well that we’ve been going for three and a half years now, it is another thing entirely to see all those months collecting up in the sidebar. Going back to some of the early posts still makes me laugh, as we’ve certainly come a long way since then.

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

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

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

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

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’t really need to be done until much later in the year, since the deadline is the end of January for filing, but I always say that I’m going to sort them out at the end of April once all the figures are in, and invariably get distracted and have to be reminded.

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

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

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

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’s the case, then Clinton Keith over at Agile Game Development must be pretty damned smart. This post covers pretty much exactly what I’ve said previously about the rising cost vs. stagnant demand for big-budget games, except with pretty graphs and actual numbers. Psshaw – who needs statistics when you have hunches and rhetoric.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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