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.

The currently running set of articles on Bruce’s blog are focusing on his time at Codemasters, from its humble beginnings on the home games machines of the 80’s up to its less than illustrious current state (it’s drawn criticism in industry circles for its treatment of staff and management decisions widely seen as poor). But aside from that the blog covers industry topics far and wide - pretty much whatever Bruce thinks is interesting at the time. He is a marketer by trade, so the blog is well written and updated daily (whereas most of the blogs in the sidebar update far more sporadically like we do), and while I don’t always agree with his views, there’s no doubting that the blog is written from a wide range of experience and covers topics of importance to game developers with insight and detail.

More crucially though, Bruce is the one who has been poking all of us with game-dev blogs to cross link and raise each others profiles (hence the impetus for this series of linking posts). In general we’ve shown ourselves to be pretty poor at getting ourselves noticed and heard, and for small developers and indeed individuals at larger studios, a higher profile is rarely a bad thing. I’ve always been a fan of championing the people behind the games, so it’s good to see some ‘class action’ from my colleagues in the industry.

Not just, as the title might suggest, all about survival horror games, this blog covers some wide ranging points on game design, horror movie reviews and other topics. The articles about the evolution of the horror game genre are the most interesting though, and cover a massive range of games dating back decades. Although I must admit, the only horror I remember feeling when playing Alone in the Dark was horror at the camera that insisted on changing angles just when I was trying to sneak somewhere, and leaving me unable to see my character while it was ripped apart by dogs or some such fate.

Definitely worth a visit, although I’d say take the time to subscribe the feed in something that allows you to keep posts as new - the posts can be quite large, but it’s worth saving them to read for when you have the time.

A development blog from PillowFort Games, makers of Goo, a fun looking game that made it to the 2008 IGF, nominated for Technical Excellence. It’s all based around fluid dynamics, which I’ve always thought had good potential for game mechanics and had been sadly under used till now. I remember trying a demo of a different game a while back, also based around fluid mechanics - it looked fantastic, but ran like a dog even on the fastest machine I could find. When I get a chance I’d like to try it out, but it seems (like a lot of the Dare to be Digital entries too) that it wants a 360 controller to let me play. Don’t get caught out like me though and just download the patch - the link you want is the “Download Public Beta” one on the right on the download page; oddly it’s not given top priority on the page.

The blog itself is a diverting read; it delves a lot into the ins and outs of the actually developing the game rather than just technical details or coding rants. It’s something sadly neglected in blogs from staff at bigger developers. The nice thing about being an independent developer is that you get to pretty much do and say what you want on your blog. Working with bigger clients always means that you have to worry about what you can say and when, so it’s nice to share those details when you can.

Apologies for the brief hiatus from posting - what can I say other than that there haven’t been enough days in the week to do all the stuff I need to do as well as blogging. While it’s nice that we’re busy with stuff, I could do with getting my weekends back. And on that note we have good news - a third employee! More about them when they actually start next week. Anyway, they should be able to take the load off me a bit, and we can get back to sensible working weeks and take care of all the other things that mount up when you are busy with development work.

I’ve gotten clearance from our two clients to post a bit more about who they are and what we’re doing with them, which is good! It should free us up to mention things a bit more, and I don’t have to be so close-mouthed here about the stuff we’re working on. More about that later this week, although I won’t be posting straight away as I want to pass our initial posts by the clients to make sure they’re happy with what I write.

It seems there’s been a bunch of incoming links from associates in the games industry who also have blogs. Rather than simply regurgitate the original post from Bruce On Games, I’d like to take some time and give a little review of each out-going link and give them each their own post. In the meantime, they’re all in the right-hand sidebar, if you’d like to visit them before I write about them.