We have a winner! Got to love that Potatamoto guy.

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!

Greg Costikyan announced the other week that the site is now ‘real’ (i.e. bugs are now proper bugs, and not just beta flaws ;-)), so I’ll drop in a link here.

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.

Been a while since the last post, due to a frantically busy week followed by a holiday in Glencoe. A rough timeline would go something like: Find out Brave failed submission, attended EIEF (round-up post to follow, albeit rather too late now), off to Dundee to attempt fixes for Brave bugs, day of meetings relating to new contract, burning another set of submission discs for Brave, off to Glencoe (beer, hill, ache, beer, smaller hill, ache, wine, wine, Loch Ness, beer).

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.

This piece can basically be summed up as: “we need to find more ways to make money out of games, otherwise we’re screwed”. A sentiment I can heartily agree with, although its possibly just my biased spin on the article.

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.

This item from Charles Cecil (Revolution) I thought was interesting. Of course, Revolution have been saying this for a while - they’ve gone radically to the other end of production, and adopted a similar model to the one William Latham was presenting in his talk at Develop. I.e. Creative input coming from a tiny core team of IP holders, with the main body of development work being outsourced to work for hire companies. But the fact that the probability of making money from high end development is extremely slim is undeniable. Even the companies that don’t expect royalties and are making all of their profits from up-front publisher advances will die under that model, because even if they survive for a while (by allowing the publisher to accept the risk/loss), the death of the publishers will leave them without anyone to front for their next big project.

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.