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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On an unrelated note, my train journey down to our client’s site yesterday was capped by a mother and her kids joining me at my table, a boy of around 6 and a girl probably 9 or 10. The boy had a PSP and was playing away, engrossed, but he would keep banging my laptop in his efforts to show this or that to his mother. So I asked what he was playing, and he replied “Grand Theft Auto”.

“Hmm,” I said, “Liberty City Stories?”.

“Uh-huh”, with an eager nod.

“That would be the 18 rated Liberty City Stories then?”, which I accompanied by a look for his mother which I hope conveyed the level of my disgust and disappointment in her parenting skills.

“Oh, ” she says, a bit flustered, “is it?”

“Yeah”

And with that the conversation died, thankfully. Anything else I could have said would have boiled down to “you’re really just a bad parent”. Really though, come on: you wouldn’t let your five year old watch The Exorcist, or Goodfellas, what on earth makes you think that letting them play an 18 rated game is okay?

The government is apparently planning to ‘clamp down’ on unsuitable video games. If I believed that it was anything other than a cynical vote-grabbing ploy to pander to Daily Mail readers I would heartily endorse this, as I’ve always been in favour of proper age regulation on games content, just as there is for films and television. Thing is, it’s already there. The games industry gets a BBFC/PEGI age rating on pretty much every title that goes out there. The console platform holders (Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo) insist on it as part of the publishing process. Big publishers would never think about not getting their game rated, it’s just part of making games. All in all, we’ve got a great record of self regulation – we are open and up front about the content of games, and we’re not trying to sneak games into the hands of younger gamers.

None of that makes a blind bit of difference though, as long as irresponsible parents refuse to accept that games deserve the same level of care as films. So you’ve found your 14 year old playing Manhunt, or GTA with the Hot Coffee mod – you think it’s outrageous that the developers can make such games. Well here’s a newsflash – we didn’t make those games for your 14 year old. We didn’t sell them to your 14 year old (high street retailers thankfully do pay attention to age ratings). But if their gran bought them the game for Christmas and you said “Oh, that’s nice, now go play” without ever actually checking what the game was like, then I’m afraid that the blame for your child’s emotional scarring lies firmly and squarely with you, the responsible adult. Stop trying to blame others for your actions.

We kick off on the second of our work for hire jobs this morning, so now we are splitting our time between jobs. Not many details to share as yet because I haven’t cleared it with our clients, but I hope to rectify that soon and have something to say here about it. Still not heard back from our licensed developer application yet, but I’m putting that down to applying over the holiday season introducing an extra delay. Admittedly, we’d have little time to do any solid work on it right now, but I’m hoping that things will settle into a more forgiving routine soon.

Interesting piece here with quotes from Jon Hare (ex Sensible Software) that popped up in the Google Alerts for my name (yes I know, how vain is it to be searching for myself, but it throws up the ‘other’ Chris Chapman as well). Two major points I agree with:

1) the quality of programming has dropped with the move to larger teams; I think that is somewhat inevitable though, you just can’t sustain the same team dynamics that you get with less than a dozen team members. Personally I think the approach of scaling up not by having a larger team, but by using multiple small (<12) teams has merit. Of course, the ability to do that hinges on being able to break up the development effort into tangible pieces that can be tackled by the teams.

2) British developers are continually being forced to ‘globalise’ (i.e. Americanise) their products in order to try and maximise sales in the North American market. But to do that, I think we are selling ourselves short – not just in terms of making the most of the British sense of humour, but also the culture we have here. There are a lot of stories to be told, and game ideas which could only come from a British team – but I think they are being passed over because the publishers think that they won’t sell in the broader marketplace. I’m very hopeful that reduced barriers to market from downloadable content will help the balance shift back towards interesting titles (and not just be an excuse for more shovel-ware)

Just read an interesting article here on longer term planning with the Scrum methodology. Good stuff, but there’s still the big chasm of “how do we get the publisher to sign up to this”. Until the people paying the money are okay with the less detailed milestone definitions that come along with agile planning, there will continue to be issues. It’s all very well running teams on agile internally, but until there is a solid contractual way of satisfying the publisher’s need for security with the developer’s need for flexibility, there will still be problems. At the moment the milestones are defined fully at the start, but it’s a naive producer that doesn’t expect the content of those milestones to change. It’s at the developer’s disadvantage though – the contract states that they are bound to deliver what’s in the milestone list, and if they don’t the publisher is within their rights to cancel the project at their discretion. They generally won’t, but it’s a quick get out if they want it. Even if the publisher and the developer both know that the milestones have become meaningless, when they’re written into the contract it means that there needs to be a re-negotiation to fix them again.

Personally I think it’s far better to start out with a high level statement of intent – that the developer will be working on a particular title for the publisher, and that they will use their best efforts to deliver builds of acceptable quality. The regular delivery of those builds is part of the process, and the method of arbitration as to what is ‘acceptable’ is written into the contract as well. That way the publisher still retains the majority of the power (control over what they deem acceptable), but they can’t use that control to avoid their responsibilities to allow the developer reasonable time to deliver something acceptable.

Proper credits is certainly a real issue though, as it’s a tangible benefit to your team. Being able to point to a good and/or successful title and say “I made that” is of real value for their sense of worth and their career long term. While not being credited isn’t the end of the world, there are enough unscrupulous people that claim credit for the work of others that not being credited when it is due is sufficient cause for doubt on the part of an interviewer.

Credits are, in my experience, usually knocked together at the end of the development process, and not thought about in advance. The list of people is usually drawn up quickly, and if there has been a lot of movement in and out of the team, people can easily be missed. It’s the producers job to maintain a credits list throughout development, detailing who worked on the title and for how long, and it’s not a chore which should be neglected.

Finally, my biggest bug-bear is with the ordering of the credits. I’m sorry, but the publishers, external producers and company management are not the most important people for a game. The director comes first, followed by the core team, and then the less involved parties. It might seem like a good idea to pander to the management or external partners, but you’re selling your team short if you don’t proclaim them loudly to be the most important part of the game.

What we need are people who has learned the importance of structured programming, or the fundamentals of databases, or any one of a hundred other things that are vital to understanding exactly how to develop software for games. Basically what I need are people who have been educated to the level of a Computer Science degree, but with all of the extraneous parts taken out. Games developers rarely need to know formal proof notation for languages, or details of the electronics behind the hardware on which their software runs. They also need to be aware of the constraints under which they must develop – fixed memory environments, designing algorithms that never take longer than a fraction of a frame to execute, etc. Possibly the hardest thing to learn about games programming is how to make things happen with all of those shiny tools and bloated constructs unavailable.

Of course, my idea of an ideal course for a games developer is probably a bit of a hard sell for universities. After all, if you signed up for a games course, you’d expect to be making games for at least some of it. But the fundamentals of making games are the same fundamentals for all software – it is only when you reach the high-level concepts do ‘games programming’ and ‘regular programming’ diverge.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the field of Artificial Intelligence. I gave up the Artificial Intelligence part of my degree after second year, when it became clear to me that the fields on which it concentrated were not going to help me make games. Neural networks, machine vision, genetic algorithms, knowledge based systems – are all good for cutting edge research programmes, but utterly out of place on even the highest-end hardware for playing games. As such, the AI that you find in games bears little relation to the AI that you would research in a university. Sure, maybe you can build an all-singing all-dancing AI that can respond to your questions and think and act like a real person; but if you can’t make it run in less than 3ms and occupy less than a few hundred kilobytes of memory, then you might as well forget it.

Regardless, it seems that the good people, the ones who shine in their job, are the ones who would do well in games regardless of the course they studied at university. They are the people who make games on their own, who code them in their spare time and learn by doing, not just by being taught. I think there is very much a place for games courses, but they should be far more like Computer Science degrees than vocational courses.

Anyway, I’ve been keeping a relatively low profile until we were more firmly established, but I think there is probably no good time to make a big entrance into the industry, so we might as well stick our heads above the parapet a little. There will be pictures of Pete and I forth-coming, and I will finally get around to updating our About page! The Scottish games industry has seen some high profile losses over recent years, but the blood letting appears to have subsided, and I’m confident we’re on the way back up. Now if we could just persuade the journalists who write for the Scotsman not to keep telling the public how it’s all gone to pot, we might get somewhere.

Aside from that, I’ll be taking advantage of the discount available to Scottish-based developers for the EIF this year (thankfully it’s lost the cumbersome title, although I still preferred just ‘Edinburgh Games Festival’); but we’re a little busy so I’ve decided to miss out on Develop in Brighton this year.

Anyway, here’s a quick link to another new start-up – Power of Two Games, run by Charles Nicolson and Noel Llopis, both of whom post regularly on the game-dev mailing lists and have done some great stuff which we’ve learned from here (not least of which, UnitTest++, a version of which we use at the Company for our own unit testing). All the best to the guys, and it’s great to see that I finally have an office that’s bigger than someone else’s!

Its been quiet on the posting front recently, mostly because I’ve been working overtime on my contract role, with various planning and build automation things occupying the extra time. But I’m taking some well deserved time back in the home office this week, and tackling the pile of paperwork that has accumulated in my absence. Double curses to the inland revenue now that I have to deal with VAT returns as well as payroll and corporation tax. When the CBI are complaining about the massive tax burden the UK industry is bearing, they’re talking not just about the amount of tax, but the sheer size of the administration required to keep up with all the obscure rules.

Pete and I have been banging our head against tools, makefiles and cross-platform compilation this last week, along with a continuing spree of unit tests. Barco time is sucking up my 9-5 day, but I’ve been working while commuting, and doing paperwork in the evenings. Speaking of which, its time to figure my way round our first VAT return.

Game of the week has to be the Battlefield 2142 demo – big stompy mechs in a combat scenario = much squishing and crunching of bones. Fantastic!

I’ve been browsing the site, and found a bunch of games I want to try, which is surprising, given my cynical take on games these days. Not a lot of time to try though, so I think it may have to be relegated to the 30 minutes on the bus in the morning (I’m at Barco for a brief spell).

I’ve been playing Defcon (available through Steam) a bit – lovely classic game, simple concepts but which combine together to become radically complex when played. I can’t even begin to get my head round some of the strategies needed to be a good player, so I settle for massive early strikes which makes me think I’m doing well, only to be crushed mercilessly by the retaliatory strike. D’oh!

Also got the Battlefield 2142 demo yesterday for a quick blast – looks good, and a decent successor to Battlefield 2 (which has also sucked away some of my precious gaming time). I’ll probably pre-order it, although I’ve got to order a Wii first. Hopefully the rumours of increased production rates are true and the queues for a console will be diminished. Big slap in the face to Microsoft and Sony if that’s true – normally the news is that production rates are less than hoped. I’ve given up bothering on Sony’s continuing stupid press releases and general fumbling of the ball, you can find that elsewhere.

Randomly bumped into one of the few people I’d lost touch with since VIS on the bus last week – Jonny Dobson the director/head of programmer/etc. Still in the industry as an independent (Insurgent Games with Craig Hunter), keeping busy doing consulting work. Yay for a Edinburgh games success story.

We’re still waiting to go forward with the next contract, so groundwork continues apace. Not much else from the world outside, other than the news this morning that Infotari is to fight their Nasdaq de-listing. I’ve got to say, I think the games industry is really too unpredictable for companies to do well on the stock exchange. While its easier for industry people to predict and understand the nature of deadline slips, missed sales targets, etc., the Wall Street investors react violently to things they don’t understand, and can wipe huge chunks off a public company’s value over an entirely foreseeable minor failure. Of course, I’d say that Atari’s loss in stock value is probably due more to long term problems than single slips, but I’m just an uninformed observer. Its likely that they’re just one more big publisher feeling the long term pinch of the things I’ve ranted about before – rising costs and constant returns.

Also, this news on Visual Science is uplifting, if a little late. Hopefully the staff stand a better chance of getting some of their unpaid wages/redundancy on the back of this.

A quieter week this last week, thankfully; mostly dedicated to laying the groundwork for future development. You know the sort of thing, getting all the tools upgraded to the latest versions, sorting out a development structure, and so on. Okay, well if you’re a programmer you know the sort of thing. Suffice to say it’s an interesting challenge to make old code sit nicely in a structure which promotes re-use. So new code doesn’t disappear into a bottomless pit and become wasted work.

Some experimentation was done also to see if a C#/Lua mix would work well in new tools. Short story – it would, but it won’t integrate very well with C++. So tools which need to co-exist with the current engine will have to stay as Lua/C++ instead. There may be scope for a C# tool in the future, but not just yet.

I also spent an hour or so answering questions for an old compatriot (Phil Vaughan, now a lecturer at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee) on the old art/code divide, and what it means as team sizes grow larger and larger. I’ll probably polish up and condense what was said and post it up here as a rant, although the gist of it is “agile yay, monolithic management in big teams nay”. I’m a firm believer that game development teams just don’t scale well beyond 20 people, and any project that needs more resources than that should be worked in such a way that it can be done with several smaller teams.

Anyway, enough ranting. I’m feeling ill enough this morning without dwelling on depressing subjects. I blame the hot sweaty venues I was in over the weekend watching the Festival preview shows. Some good, some bad – I’d definitely recommend Jason Byrne though.

On a more games related note, I’ll be attending the EIEF this coming 21st/22nd of August, on the grounds that any opportunities to get us noticed and more business is good! Some more interesting talks there, and the fact that its about 10 minutes from my front door is just an added bonus for my lazy self.

Yesterday was Pete and my first visit to the IC CAVE office in Dundee – they are involved in our new project, so we’ll probably be spending a bit of time there over the next six months. Very nice office, although the building itself gave me flashbacks to University. No exams to pass any more though, just games to make.No news from Brave NTSC as yet, although I’m told it’ll be at Sony America in California today. Oh, and as a final note, we are no. 1 in Google, with a page ranking of 3/10! Take that Lionhead.