And we’re back! By which I assume that the scheduled down-time while our server was migrated to another data centre has been completed without a hitch. I did intend to post here that it was going to happen, but it did in fact catch me by surprise because I thought it was supposed to be last Friday.

My only real mistake was to start reading some of the comments on the Dreamhost status blog regarding the move. Despite the fact that they were open and up front about the move - giving warning on the status page as well as by email more than 2 weeks in advance, they are still customers who feel free to bitch and moan in a most personal and horrific way. Seriously - this sort of stuff really makes me sad to see the sort of attitudes people have these days. Nowhere in the Dreamhost sales pitch does it imply that your 8 USD a month was somehow buying you a service that would be up for absolutely 100% of the time, and yet these folk think that even the best handled server downtime is grounds for some personal abuse. If I were running Dreamhost, I wouldn’t hesitate to respond to any of those “this is unacceptable” comments with “Oh I’m sorry, here’s a refund for the rest of your service, don’t let the door hit you in the arse on the way out”.

Anyway, trust in Dreamhost’s tech staff aside, my paranoia has been in high overdrive recently, so I had taken this opportunity to double check that our nightly backup procedure was working properly - and I was pleased to find it had. Which means that, should Dreamhost fall over at a critical juncture, we can fall back on our local mirror of the server and only lose work done since the previous night. Not that I’m expecting DH to fall over - they seem to have gotten on top of their random downtime issues, and since I’ve been tracking it with an external tool we’ve only been off-line for 4 hours out of the last 6 months, and no more than 2 hours in a single outage. Why don’t we just host our work locally and use an off-site backup? Well, we do a lot of collaboration with other client, and upstream bandwidth from the office is rather precious. That and the fact that Dreamhost already have quite a few mechanisms in place to restore connection and hardware problems, so they’re probably far more reliable than our local server machines anyway.

Of course, even that’s not enough for us, paranoia wise - not only do we have the primary copies in a well maintained place off site, and secondary copies in the office, we also keep physical (DVD) copies of the repositories in yet another location. Of course the first two are all automated, but the third requires me to actually go over and poke the office server to make a DVD and take it away with me. Unfortunately my attempts to train the local squirrels to do automate the process for me have been unsuccessful, but I have high hopes…

Okay, so we have had our Jobs page up for a while now, but ever since we started I’ve had a continual stream of emailed applications from potential employees. Some are impressive, some are not, but this post isn’t directed at any of them in particular. It’s intended as a guide to anyone else who is thinking of applying, so I’ll put a link to it on the right hand side.

First off, one of the biggest positive factors for a prospective employee is to show enthusiasm, both for developing games and for our company. We have this web-site and blog - it’s always been there, it’s fairly open. You could readily skim over everything on it in 5 minutes. So if your application clearly shows that you haven’t put in that small amount of effort, expect it to be either binned outright, or at least given short shrift. I make an effort to write a personal reply to every application, but the ones that annoy me get very little attention.

That point is at the core of why most applications that turn up in my in-box will fail, but I can sum the rest up in bullet points (most of which represent actual applications).

1. DO understand that you’re applying for a games job, not just a ’software’ or ‘IT’ job. Those who end up at games companies are primarily those who have a real passion for games, and that comes through readily in a good application.
2. DON’T show ignorance of who we are and what we do. There are two of us, and we primarily do custom software development for other games studios. And yet we get applications which:
   1. talk about things like meshing with our organisation and looking forward to working in a large team.
   2. ask about jobs on our QA team
   3. are an impersonal email, even though the applicant worked with Pete and/or I at VIS
3. DON’T send a generic “please I would like a job at your company” email. This includes:
   1. not mentioning our company at all
   2. not making sure the cover letter is appropriate to our company,
   3. the worst sin of all: sending the exact same email to every games developer in Scotland, and leaving all of those email addresses clearly visible in the To: line of the email!
4. DO make sure your email and CV are free of spelling and grammar mistakes. Bad spelling and grammar says to me: “I’m so slack that I can’t be bothered to spend the 15 minutes it would take to look them over properly, despite the fact that I’m applying for a job that might be hugely important to the next few years of my life”. Frankly that’s not a person I’m necessarily keen to employ.

Paying attention to these details take a very short amount of time. There aren’t so many games companies out there that you can’t do them for every place you apply to. Personally I think for the potential reward (i.e. getting a job), they’re worth it. I’m sure more bad examples will appear in the future, so I’ll be keeping this post up to date.

It occurred to me while watching a re-run of a pilot for a particular popular sci-fi show, that perhaps people worry too much about the plot for their sci-fi games. Sure, the Phl’aarg forces might have strong and compelling reasons for attacking the Kerflump home-world, but let’s be honest, your average game player really doesn’t care.

In my view, the job of a back story for a game is to allow willing suspension of disbelief for long enough that the player can enjoy the game itself. If the game is fun, the player will remember the story with fondness, even if it does follow closely the plot of some more famous film or book. The key factor is that the story shouldn’t make the player cringe, and shouldn’t contain the kind of horrible glaring inconsistencies that they can’t ignore. Some of the most effective game back stories are the simplest. Mario has to rescue Princess Peach. Sonic has to free little animals from the evil Dr. Robotnik.

If you are going for a more complex story, consistency is more important than fleshing out details. Once you’ve persuaded the reader/player to make the first jump to your story, try not to force them to make any more. You might persuade them to accept that magic is real, or that technology allows you to move instantaneously between points, but don’t change the rules afterwards to suit some awkward bit of plot development. Choose your universe rules at the start, keep them consistent and simple, and then base your story around those rules. The player then has a nice consistent world view, they understand what’s going on, and they’re happy because there aren’t constant surprises.

If you omit details, the player will happily imagine the rest of the universe according to the basic world rules that you’ve established. Take Star Wars for example - you are shown a very small section of the universe, and the rest is simply implied. By not fleshing out endless irrelevant details, you avoid accidentally introducing glaring inconsistencies, and also avoid boring the player. Take it from the point of view of a character in your world. They don’t care about the mechanics of inter-stellar travel, they’ve been living in a world with it for a long time. It is mundane to them - they wouldn’t dwell on the details, they dwell on how it affects them. So don’t follow the Star Trek model of baffling the viewer with science details, instead show them the parts which affect them - e.g. travelling between point X and Y will involve hyperspace, and will take Z amount of time.

Well, at the risk of sounding like a total Nintendo fanboy: I’m delighted with the Wii! By virtue of some late night queuing at a 24hr Tesco by Pete on Thursday, we picked up a couple of consoles, and Zelda/Rayman. I’ll leave Pete to give his impressions of Zelda, I’ve been looking at Rayman and Wii Sports.

Basically it’s been a great experience right from the start - install went smoothly; all the parts feel solid and well constructed. The Wii-mote and nunchuck have a comforting weight to them, and don’t feel flimsy. I’ve been using the wrist-strap out of paranoia, but haven’t lost control of it yet. Last night was a wine fuelled extended session of Rayman with the girlfriend, who seems just as pleased and hooked by it as I am. I was watching her reactions to it carefully, as she’s really not much of a gamer; however she picked up the controls without any trouble at all, everything seemed natural and intuitive out of the box.

Rayman itself is a little esoteric, but the games make me laugh, and the lovely characterisation of the mad rabbits is fantastic. While I think it has some replay value, I think Wii Sports will probably get played more long term - especially with the fitness training thing. A lot of the Rayman mini-games and Wii Sports  games involve energetic movement, we were having to take it in turns to play as after a few we were out of breath!

Only minor gripe so far has been the fact that the News and Weather channels are offline, and that the Wii Shop channel failed to connect first time round. Other than that the experience has been great, and I’ll certainly be buying at least another Wii-mote (probably with the Play game) for multi-player fun. The girlfriend will probably be taking it to her family over Christmas as well for some fun games too.

Anyway, fan-boy ranting aside, I predict a glowing future for the Wii, and development on it. While the unique control mechanism is interesting and well implemented, I don’t see it standing in the way of traditional console gaming - since you can get just as much control from the wii-mote/nunchuck pairing even without using the motion sensitivity of the controls. I’d love to have the opportunity for us to develop on the platform, but we shall have to see what pans out.

…has been made, based on this breaking news. I was humming and hawwing about whether I even wanted a console, or whether I’d stick with PC (all the recent titles I’ve wanted have been on PC, bar none).

Speaking of which - stand-alone Tremulous has finally been released! No more need to dig out the dusty old copy of Quake III you had.

Boy do I need a holiday though - its been 5 months straight now without a day off (or at least, not one that I didn’t have to make up at the weekend). I’ve been trying to put aside time for side projects (notably a game pitch demo using Torque and some more website work), but its all been taking second place to the main contract for Barco and some other part-time remote work. Not to mention all the paperwork and faff that goes along with the financial year end at the start of this month.

Still, coming up to the end of the Barco work at the end of this month - high on the priorities list are: getting VAT registered (so I can splash out on a shiney new lap-top), finishing up this game pitch demo, catching up on all the GDC/E3 footage, and a hundred other little things on the to-do list that I can’t even think about until I can get a good solid week-day in the office. But all of that can wait until I’ve taken a few days to relax, as I think I deserve a break…

To be found here at Lost Garden. Worth reading, if only for the comedic diagrams near the start.

Amen

News in today that Peter Jackson’s production company will be working with Bungie, Universal and Fox. Good news I think - it certainly seems a better candidate for a game-to-movie conversion than Doom. Plus the Halo ring structure is kind of outdoors (discounting the unusual sky backdrop), so they get to set it in New Zealand and pump some more money into their economy. I always like to see the Kiwis get ahead (although I’m compelled to admit its because I’m secretly hoping they’ll all get so rich they’ll start giving away free plane trips over there).

Of course, game-to-movie conversions are always going to be at least a little cringe-worthy, even when the game story is good, the movie can’t fit everything in (like a book-to-movie conversion) and it loses its magic. At least movie-to-game conversions can expand on the movie’s plot and get you more involved in the world.

One good example I found recently though was the book that Raymond E. Feist wrote after the success of Betrayal at Krondor. I’ve never played the game (I know, I know, how can I call myself a gamer), but I can see the shape of the game in the book, and feel just how the various stages would map to quests and sub-quests; and how the character/group mechanics would work. You can even almost see the levelling mechanics at work in the character of Owyn. If only all medium crossovers were so effectively possible.

Interesting article here on EVE/CCP’s use of IBM server tech to sustain their scalable server technology. I must admit I’ve always been impressed by their ability to grow the universe without having to break it into shards. Since massive universes have always been my thang, I’m curious as to the mechanics behind their scalable technology. I can see where the game mechanics help hide the boundaries between servers and where load balancing can be achieved, but I’d still like to poke around under the hood to see the little tricks they do to make it practical.

Well, the site’s finally starting to show up in a standard Google search for Black Company Studios (previously you had to enter “Black Company” in quotes to find it). Hopefully we’ll make it onto the front page soon. Still don’t quite understand why Lionhead is ranked number one on that search though. Meh, the intricacies of Google’s ranking algorithm are not for the likes of us mere mortals to understand.

Update (25/09): Onto the front page now! My surreptitious linking from other places seems to be working.