Oh my, it has been a while, hasn’t it?

In my defence, it’s been a crazy summer, and I have been juggling many different balls. Thankfully, all the work we’ve been doing has finally come to fruition, and is all now out there in the world so we can talk about it. First off, the work I’ve been doing for the last year or so with Sumo Digital, on Nike+ Kinect Training.

This was mostly working on the localisation aspect, as the game is translated into some 15 languages across 3 discs, there was a lot of voice content to get in. I can’t take much for anything else, but I think the folks at Sumo did a great job on it – certainly when I’ve had to actually stand up in front of the Kinect and do some real exercise, I’ve certainly felt the burn!

In-house however, we’ve had another big project that we’ve put our heart and soul into. Last year, Bliss Kiss Productions approached us with a pitch to re-make Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, for mobile devices. Of course, we loved the original game, I think anyone who had a Spectrum or Commodore 64 will have played it at some point: personally I abused my old rubber-keyed Spectrum 48K terribly to try and get a decent score. Thankfully I didn’t have a joystick at that point, otherwise I’m sure it would have been broken just as many others did theirs. So the chance to bring it to mobile was something we couldn’t pass up.

While we did some solid work on it in autumn last year, other commitments meant that it wasn’t until this summer that we could tackle it in earnest. Which, combined with all our other ongoing commitments, made for a lot of work. Dan’s been in pretty much the whole summer working flat out on it, and seems pretty chuffed with his first proper published title.

It’s a remake from the ground up, obviously. Looking back at the original version it was clear that the design was still fun (we spent more time playing than taking notes when researching), but the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia allowed us to forget just how dated the graphics looked. On the Spectrum version, Daley’s an all-white blocky sprite with only a few frames of animation! There were also a lot of design decisions that were clearly made due to technical limitations (such as the shot put taking place on a straight track, instead of in a circular pit as it does in real life). Some of those decisions we revisited, but where there was a design case for it, we erred on the side of the original.

What was pretty clear,  from even the first round of focus testing, was that the original was brutally hard in its learning curve. Running events like the 100m and hurdles are straightforward enough, but three events in particular were unique in their own way: the high jump, pole vault and discus throw all differ in style. Instead of rewarding frantic tapping, they are games of timing. In the 80s, it was fine to spring that sort of challenge on the player and expect them to learn it on their own, but modern players are nowhere near as understanding. With that in mind, we put in a practice mode that allowed players to learn how to master particular events, without the added pressure of participating in the whole decathlon; and we put on-screen prompts and buttons to guide unfamiliar players through each event.

Also needing wholly revisited were the controls themselves. As a first principle we wanted to replicate the frantic button mashing / joystick waggling of the original; the user should have to break a sweat to get those high scores, especially in the 400m. At first glance the touch-screen controls seem obvious, alternating between left and right sides of the screen to run. But finding a way to let the user throw and jump without a) accidentally jumping when they didn’t mean to, or b) having the on-screen feedback be underneath the user’s fingers, was not a trivial task. Worse, when you introduce multi-touch, we had to find a way to handle input so that it was always physically hard to achieve the maximum speed. Later focus testing revealed that our use of an on-screen button for throwing / jumping wasn’t working; users were interpreting “HOLD” as a prompt, not a button, and simply holding their finger down wherever they last tapped. Based on that, we revised the controls to respond to exactly that action.

On the visuals and audio, we wanted to aim somewhere between modern and nostalgic. For the art side, we brought in Paul Helman to work on the graphics, and we feel he was right on the mark in his style – not blocky or restricted in colours, but also not trying to be too realistic. At first we were worried about how Daley Thompson would react to the stylised look we gave him, but all the feedback was positive.

For audio, we worked with Gavin Harrison, who did a great job experimenting on the audio we needed. Evoking the ‘old style’ in audio is somewhat harder; the audio chips of the 8-bit era had a very limited range, which just sounds silly nowadays. In the end, we went for a simple synth-sounding musical theme, and some very slightly distorted audio samples.

We finished our work at the end of September, and the game itself was released on iOS and Android on the 21st of September. The PR machine for the launch is in full swing, and we’re eagerly awaiting the public’s reception of it. When the dust has settled, I’ll try to write up a post-mortem of everything we’ve done, what worked and what didn’t, but right now I’ve been enjoying some well deserved time off!

The folks from Edinburgh University Computing Society, who run the student TechMeetup, have asked me to give a brief talk on the games industry to one of their gatherings. As anyone who knows me will attest, I’m happy to waffle about the games industry at length, but I do have a few pet topics. Here are my discussion items for the talk, on which I’ll expand at the talk itself.

• Hard but rewarding work – need talent and passion.
• The feeling you get from seeing other people pick up the work you’ve made and get real entertainment from it is fantastic.
• Making games is a business, but not a hugely lucrative business. If you want to get rich, look elsewhere.
• Don’t expect a job for life, or gamble everything on one team.
• Employers vary in quality. Good teams make good games. Business can still kill good teams.
• Margins are much tighter, hiring people is a risk.
• Show your talent: make a demo, work on mods. An academic CV is unlikely to be enough.
• Passion should not equal crunch. Enjoying your work is not a licence for exploitation.

Is it bad to be compulsively checking the UPS tracking page for my new laptop? Or to be a little nervous because it’s currently in Kazakhstan, and all those Call of Duty games made me a little nervous about ex-Soviet republics? Is that over-protective? It’s not even here yet, and I’m clucking over it like a mother hen.

Whatever, as long as it gets here in one piece and is suitably shiny. We’re kicking off with our new client this week, and it was immediately apparent that my current 32-bit dual core laptop (now five and a half years old) really wouldn’t cut the mustard. It was okay, just, for building for 360, because the console does all the heavy lifting. But it won’t run a PC build of anything substantial, and compilation takes an age. Not to mention the graphics flashing and sporadic unexplained hard freezes. So the new Macbook Pro kills two birds with one stone – it’s modern and chunky enough that it should build and run the client’s title, and it means Tim and I no longer have to pass the older Macbook Pro whenever there’s iOS work needing done.

To put it in some context, Tim’s machine needed a new graphics card as well to bring it up to spec. His new graphics card scored ~1600 on the benchmarks. The new Macbook Pro’s graphics score ~1300. Tim’s old graphics scored ~500, and the old MBP ~270. My current laptop (and bear in mind I got the Dell Precision M65 with the graphics ‘upgrade’) scores 71. Yes, 71. I had to go three pages down on the benchmark list before I could even find it.

Of course, even the new MBP isn’t up to the level of the monster Alienware M17X that MGS bought for me, but on the flip side, it also won’t weigh 7 kilos and sound like a jet turbine taking off. While I do still miss the glowy lights and brushed aluminium body of the M17X, the added benefit of crotch-based heat sterilisation from the MBP is surely enough to seal the deal.

Happy New Year! Tim and I have actually been in the office since Monday, eschewing the traditional extra Scottish bank holiday in favour of getting cracking on our big stack o’ work. Today though we’re here in defiance of all the sensible advice to avoid travel! Trees down, tiles smashing onto the ground, signs being torn off buildings and thrown around the roads like crisp packets in the wind. There are a few nice things about being in a basement office, and shelter from the wind is one of them.

It’s been a while since the last blog post though, so I’ve missed the opportunity to post this gem from back in December (and #HurricaneBawBag)

How to get poor reception

That is our back-yard neighbour’s TV and ham-radio antenna, trailing a big sheet of polythene. Note the mangled and bent spokes, as a result of the polythene catching the wind like a sail and whipping around for hours, very nearly pulling the poor man’s chimney stack over. Not that last months winds can hold a candle to today’s storm though. It seems Mother Nature is angry with us this winter.

To other news: we’ve picked up a new client for the new year which promises to be very interesting – a variety of code support work on PC/360/PS3. In addition to our existing clients, that’ll mean our own projects will have to be put to the side for a little while.

After yet another acquaintance saw fit to share their mobile app idea with me last night, I realised that what we’re short on isn’t ideas, it’s time. What with all of our client work and flitting back and forth, we very rarely get a chance to get heads-down, all-out concentrated on our own apps. There’s nobody to blame for that but me really, but we are rather at the mercy of the paying work. Tim’s been doing a bang-up job in December of bringing our latest creation up to a releasable standard, but I fear it’s not going to reach the quality bar before we have to put it back on the shelf and concentrate on our clients’ needs.

In an ideal world, we’d be able to take our time, concentrate fully on bringing our ideas to fruition, and the money made from releasing them would pay for the next round of product-making. In practice it’s not as simple as that; client work is money in our pockets now, but app sales are money in our pockets later, maybe. Of course, that’s a vicious circle, without taking a punt on our own apps, we’ll never have the opportunity to win big and break out of the work-for-hire mold. But in the meantime we take the work that keeps a roof over our heads.

We’re coming up on the end of our 7th year in business now, which is no mean feat these days. I’ve just updated our entry in SDI’s Gaming Brochure list of Scottish developers, and it’s heartening to see all the small and large companies in there. Here’s to a bright and positive 2012, and to the opportunities it brings.

Ooh: post 666! Spooky.

I’ve the office to myself for a couple of weeks, as Tim has taken the opportunity to use up the load of holidays he’s saved up before the end of the year, and Dan is busy with both university and other projects. I’m somewhat surrounded by Amazon boxes, as my wife has been using the office as a delivery drop-off for a vast amount of Christmas presents for all and sundry; as a personal rule I don’t shop for Christmas until it turns to December, but she’s a bit more efficient and organised about it than I am. As compensation for that though, and because she’s just generally lovely, she’s also had them deliver a shiny new copy of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for the 360. There was a certain amount of giggling with glee when it turned up, as I’ve been quite jealous of all the other devs who are enjoying it: I do like a good open-world adventure. Where I’m going to find the time to play it I’m not quite sure yet, but even rationed out over weekends I’m sure it will be fun. A first quick blast in the office had me running away from dragons, which is always a good start.

On a whim a few weekends back while I was huddled up trying to beat off a nasty illness, I picked up a copy of DCS: Black Shark from Steam; I do like sim games, and the X52 in the cupboard doesn’t get a chance to come out. It was tragically disappointing though. Not because the manual isn’t the manual for the game, it’s the manual for the actual helicopter. That’s half the fun. No, what put me off was the terrible way it was presented. In a nod to playability, they include ‘game’ toggles for the flight and avionics. The ‘game’ flight mode is much friendlier to new players, but takes away half the fun and control I enjoy. However I learned my lesson with Lock On: Modern Air Combat; actually learning the radar and weapons controls for a real combat aircraft isn’t nearly as much fun! So I want ‘game’ avionics, and ‘sim’ flight, and set the options accordingly.

Here’s where it starts to go wrong. If you set either of those options, the game considers you in ‘game’ mode. And there’s an entirely distinct control configuration for game mode. It doesn’t tell you it’s in game mode, or give any indication as to which controls are ‘current’. You are just supposed to know. It’s not even in the manual anywhere, I checked. Worse, the control configuration isn’t accessible from the in-game menu. So you start a mission, take off (because that part is easy), but find you can’t operate one of the controls (of which there are many). Can you look it up? No. Because to look it up, you have to exit the mission, and go check the control configuration in the front end. I don’t even want to change it, I just need to see which button it’s mapped to.

So instead of actually enjoying the challenge of controlling a complex, agile helicopter, I find myself getting into the mission, only to find that the weapons systems are unusable, and I get shot down because I am spending a good few minutes just trying to get a particular bit of it to work. And there aren’t any missions in there that let you just concentrate on one thing at a time. You don’t get a ‘free flight’ mode, you don’t get some a mission with nice simple targets that don’t fire back right in front of you so you can familiarise yourself with the weapons systems. It’s either ‘quick start’ (which throws you into a mission assuming that you have full control over everything), or ‘campaign’. At least the first mission in the campaign takes you through some easy flying, but there’s no practicing of flight maneuvers, just ‘fly there, then there, then home’. That’s not what you need to practice. You need to practice low level flight, and going from full forward to stopped and hovering before popping up over the brow of a hill. You need to practice strafing and orbiting targets. None of which is encouraged in the missions provided.

Anyway, suffice to say that the nod towards making it ‘friendly’ very much fails. It’s not that much friendlier for novices, and those parts are ignored by intermediate or pro pilots.

Lastly, and on a completely different note, we’ve got ourselves a new accountant, who comes recommended from a couple of other game-devs around Scotland. This is a bit of a relief to me, since our filing deadline is the end of December. The previous accountants, who I’ll not name (although they do deserve to be shamed) have been informed, although they can’t have expected to keep our business, not least because they’ve been avoiding contact with me since spring (and their refusal to pay the fines they incurred through their incompetence).

Lots of little things this month, keeping us all busy. I was ill for much of it, a fortnight of a racking cough that was driving everyone in the office crazy I’m sure, which put the kibosh on any plans I had to enjoy the Edinburgh Festival. It also made it rather hard to concentrate quite as much as I would have liked on our new project, a re-make of a famous Spectrum / C64 classic for smartphone and tablets. Instead, that’s largely been left in the capable hands of Tim and Dan, with me only providing interference in the form of design notes. We can’t talk too much more about it just yet, but it’ll be announced soon enough, probably when we get some good looking preliminary builds made up that will give people something to talk about while we get the game ready for release.

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.

Ah, summer is in Edinburgh at last. Thunder and lightning storms, and flooding so bad the water breaks out of the sewers and comes up through the road. I love this city. I don’t think the squirrels in the garden were quite as happy though.

Curse you and my steel (tin) prison...

At least the squirrels have the decency to stay on the outside of the office though. This little gent (or lady, I didn’t get close enough to check), was the second littlest of a family of mice that have been tormenting us for weeks now. Leaving little presents on our desks. Something in the last couple of weeks must have driven them out looking for nesting material though, because they were all inexorably drawn to the box of packing peanuts that lay out in our office. Bold as brass, we found them rustling around in the box, and popping out the top with a polystyrene peanut in their mouth, trying to get away. Thankfully, their attraction to the box made it much easier for us to arrange things in such a way that we could more easily trap them when they did show themselves. At the current count, I’ve caught four of them, and Tim caught one [Hah - I win!]. We’re presuming the one Tim caught was the daddy, as he was much larger.

All of them were released into the wild (or as wild as it gets 100 yards in either direction along Belford Road), as we’re both softies at heart and couldn’t quite bring ourselves to kill them. Tim’s catch was released on the Dean Bridge itself, much to the amusement of passers by – hopefully it won’t have decided to end it all and take the leap off the edge. They probably have a homing instinct of some sort, but we figure as long as they find a similarly attractive home somewhere along the way back we’ll be rid of them for now.

I must confess, the iPad we bought for device testing has migrated home to the flat, and now only makes its way back to the office for specific needs. Not for purely selfish reasons I hasten to add, although it is partly that. Rather it’s because when we first got it, I was unsure as to exactly how it would fit into the average user’s life. The iPhone was easy, within an hour or two of using it I could see it’s niche; a pocket sized, versatile device with good connectivity and an intuitive interface. The iPad, not so much. Too large to carry around without making a conscious effort; lacking the keyboard for serious work, and unable to run most of the existing software most users are accustomed to using on a laptop.

The real trouble is that we here at Black Company make terrible cold testers. We’re technical, so we tend to focus on the implementation details rather than the broader feel of the interface. We’re advanced users, used to knowing everything about the software we use; being forced to learn a whole new interface makes us grumpy, but not nearly as grumpy as having not having all of our usual tools to hand. So as I usually do with such things, I hand them straight to my wife without saying a word, and simply watch how she uses it. The question was, really, would it find a use naturally, or would we be using it for the sake of it? And what would that use be?

Put simply, it did, and the use is: content viewing. I had thought that my computer time was read-write, but in reality, outside of work, the majority of my time is spent consuming content and not creating it. Facebook, Twitter, blogs and RSS feeds obviously, but more and more with on-demand video services like iPlayer. The iPad keyboard is, frankly, not pleasant to use (I’m writing this blog post using it as a proper test), but for the majority of content viewing we do, that’s not an issue. In fact, in the few months we’ve been using it, the biggest annoyance has been the fact that much of the on-demand TV we want to watch is on Channel 4, and their web solution was Flash based (i.e. not available on iPad.

And it was what we had to do when we did want to watch those things that drove it home to me. The iPad lies around the living room happily. It’s discreet and portable. To get the laptop out, plugged in, booted, takes a good 5 minutes, not just because it lives in a bag in the other room. So it’s a new way for us to experience the content out there, that we just wouldn’t have done before, and I don’t think I would have appreciated that without properly field testing it (or at least, allowing Vicki to do that).

That’s not to say that there aren’t other lessons to learn too. The bad apps we’ve found are the ones which simply take an iPhone user interface and make it bigger. But the key thing to appreciate about the iPad is that there’s likely to be only one in the household. Whereas the iPhone is a naturally single user device (not just because it’s something you keep on you as you move around), the iPad is passed around amongst the household. So apps like Facebook and Twitter have to account for the fact that you’ll want to easily pop back to the top level and switch users; as well as some loose protection against accessing other people’s accounts. You trust the people you share the iPad with, but not that much. And of course, it’s far less likely to be moving around out in the world, so apps that focus on the geo-location data are far less useful. On iPad, the value is on it’s versatility to display content in a relaxed environment (not necessarily at a desk). The larger display is key to that versatility.

The trick will be to take the things we understand about how the iPad gets used, and use it to inform our app designs.

It looks like a well meaning group are attempting to restart interest in a Scottish chapter of the IGDA. While I’m all for more cooperation between Scottish developers (and engaging with other people interested in the industry), I’m still rather soured on the IGDA itself. Since my earlier posts relating to working hours, the organisation has only been further devalued in my eyes. But rather than rant about it now, I’m going to make the effort to attend a local meetup and meet the people in question, and tell them just why I’m cynical. Maybe I can be persuaded that I’m just being a stick-in-the-mud, but at least they’ll be going into it with open eyes. Either way, I’ll thrash out the arguments both ways, and write it up for here.

In the meantime, I haven’t much that I can interestingly write about here. We’re juggling now 5 distinct projects (6 if you include the much neglected internal prototype work), none of which I can freely write about here. Well that’s not true, of course I can talk about our own project, but right now I don’t quite want to, at least not until we can put up some interesting looking screenshots. But more importantly for us is the fact that we’re actually progressing one of our ideas, instead of continually putting it off till the next bit of down-time between client work. I think that’s good, both because it’s cool to be doing our own work, but also because it keeps us from going a bit mental with an seemingly never-ending pile of work-for-hire. As much as we like our clients, their work is theirs, and it’s hard to get super-enthusiastic about other peoples’ projects.

I’m personally feeling a bit of burn-out, largely because I’ve been working solidly since before October, with no breaks of more than two or three days, and there’s not likely to be any let up for the next month or two at least. So refreshing our heads with a bit of our own work is a good thing to stave off the madness. Sadly the same lack of available energy is the reason why the scarcity of posts here. There have been plenty of interesting topics come up, I’ve just not been able to find the time to write them up for here.

It’s funny, because when I was working as an employee for someone else, it never occurred to me that I needed a holiday. I threw myself into the work, but not completely, there was always room for personal stuff. Since starting up for myself, the greater focus on work means that I’ve had little creative energy left over for anything else. And if I want to refresh my batteries, I think I need a proper (i.e. not thinking about work at all) holiday. But I should stop dwelling on that now, because I find myself staring out of the window here at the pretty sunset, day-dreaming about what I’d do on a holiday, and that’s just rubbing salt in the wound.

And finally, the last part of our look at our Employee Terms and Conditions. Since the document itself is written in suitable legalese, I wrote up a more succinct (and decidedly less formal) version that conveys the spirit of the terms rather than getting bogged down in exact wording.

1.1 You’re an employee, we’re your employer. Welcome aboard. Get to work.
1.2 If you’re too sick to work, don’t be surprised if we get a temp in to cover. Don’t worry, you’re not being replaced.
1.3 Just to make sure – you’re okay to work here, right? You’re not also pretending to work somewhere else? Or claiming benefits from being out of work?

2.1 We expect you to work a typical week, but when the s&*^ hits the fan, we might need you to stay late.
2.2 If you’re putting in a regular day, you can totally take some time out for lunch. Just don’t eat anything that stinks the office out.
2.3 We can’t / don’t want to pay you money for overtime. But since overtime is definitely over and above the call of duty, we want to recognise that, so if we do need you to do it, we’ll let you take time off later, as much time off as you put in extra now. That doesn’t mean you get to take the piss and work silly hours for a week, and then not come in for a week. What it does mean is that, if the business needs it, you and your manager can work out when you’re going to work extra, and when you get to go home early (or stay off) to make up for it. Even at that, we’re going to cap it at 20 hours in a month, because that seems like a reasonable amount; anything more and you’d not be usefully working anyway.
2.4 Don’t f*(& around. Really. We pay you to work, we expect you to work. Don’t take the piss, and you’ll do just fine. On a more serious note, this is really how we want you to work. We don’t want you working stupid hours into the dead of night to hit our deadlines, we want you in and focused 100% on your work for the 8 hours you’re in the office each day. We’ve already said we’re going to send you home at a sensible time every day, and we hope that will help keep you sharp and eager to work when you’re at your desk. Obviously there’s some give and take here, but it’s at the discretion of your manager. Rest assured, he’s probably occasionally web-surfing too, but within reason, and he expects the same of you.

3.1 This is obviously a condition written when we were still all working from home (we have an office now). We’re not going to up a move to Guadalcanal without some notice, but if we do have to move, we don’t expect you to come with us without being paid to relocate.

4.1 You get paid! Hurrah. You get paid after you do a month’s work, at the end of the month. (If we didn’t pay you at the end of the month, you’d be within your rights to not come back in at the start of the next month until we did).
4.2 We’re not going to fix you on this salary for ever, but we can’t say when or how we’ll change it next. We will however work out when that’s going to happen with you in advance, usually when you take the job.
4.3 Legal stuff.

5.1 If you’re working for us, and you pay money out of your own pocket to do that work, we’ll pay you back later. But you’ve got to do it by the book, so receipts, and get the claims in sharpish. And for goodness sakes, clear it with your manager first.
5.2 Company credit card? How much do we trust you? Okay, so we do, but you’d better not abuse the trust, and it’s still ours.

6.1 Details
6.2 You get a certain amount of holidays a year, and you earn a fraction of those holidays for every day worked. This is to stop you from joining the company, then trying to take all 30 days holiday in the first month. Holidays come after the work, not before.
6.3 6 weeks holiday – but bear in mind that includes the what, 8 days of bank holidays that some other places add on top.
6.4 You have to let us know when you want to get off. Usually that will be fine, with advance warning, but sometimes we need you in the office for certain deadlines. The farther in advance you let us know, the more likely it is you’ll get to take it; if something comes up for the business then so be it – we won’t ask you to cancel a big holiday planned in advance because the client pushed the deadlines forward (or back)
6.5 (see 6.3)

7.1 You’re never so sick that you can’t make a call to the office and let someone know. NB: Emailing is not letting someone know! You have no idea if that email’s been picked up, maybe the person you emailed is sick as well. You have to have made a sincere effort to let someone who has made it to the office that day know.
7.2 Doctor’s note if you’re really sick – we need the paperwork to cover us for sick pay reasons, etc.
7.3 More statutory stuff that says we’ll still pay you if you’re long term ill, but in line with government rates
7.4 same again
7.5 and again
7.6 If you’re getting a wad of money from sueing the drunk driver that knocked you over, some of that money comes to us to cover anything we’ve paid for your convalescence.
7.7 We might need to check your health, for our own insurance reasons, or because we’re trying to stop all of you sedentary developers from keeling over with heart attacks due to your bad diet and lack of exercise. Don’t worry, we’ll pay for it all.
7.8 Just because you’re ill, doesn’t mean that we can’t terminate your employment. In fact, whether you’re ill or not should have nothing at all to do with us letting you go.

8.1 We might, at some point, need to sack you. Might be your fault, might be a decision we have to make for other reasons. If we do, we’ll tell you about it a month in advance. If you want to leave, you also have to give us a month’s warning. If you’ve breached these terms though, we’ll put you out right away.
8.2 If you’re leaving, for whatever reason, we might want to just pay you for your notice period without actually having you around. Don’t take it personally. Whether we do or not is up to us though, not you.
8.3 If you’re leaving, and we keep you around for your notice period, then we don’t have to give you any real work to do, or even let you back in the office.

9.1 We might give you some kit to do your job, but if you’re leaving us, then you have to give it all back, including any copies you’ve made
9.2 And you might have to swear that you definitely have done this, so if it turns out later you were lying we have something we can point to and moan about it

10.1 If you are involved in any other business that might relate to us in any way (like a competitor, or even a similar business), you have to let us know. We might not mind, but you definitely have to tell us. That includes your direct family too.
10.2 Once you’re working for us, you agree not to start anything like that either. We don’t mind you buying shares in a business like that, as long as it’s not a very big stake.
10.3 Stuff defining some examples of how we mean ‘involved’ in those other businesses.

11.1 You’ve got to tell us if you were a crook, generally a dodgy character. And if you find out that a bunch of your colleagues are planning to leave and strike out in competition with us, you’re obliged to tell us as quick as you can. And if you know that one of your colleagues is screwing us over, tell us that too. Otherwise we’re going to believe that you were helping them.

12.1 Don’t tell anyone else things you know because you’re working with us. That includes other business’s secrets – our company has agreed to keep those secrets, and that includes you.

13.1 Any ideas or content you come up with “while working on activities for us”, belongs to us, wholly and completely. That applies whether you’re in our office our out on a client’s site somewhere, or even if you’re working on company stuff in your home. Conversely, if you’re not working on activities for us, your ideas are your own. Bear in mind, you shouldn’t be working on activities of your own when you’re at work at all – we expect you to either be at the office, working, or at home, not thinking about work at all.
13.2 If you do come up with something at work, and we really don’t want it, you can ask, and we might just give you all rights to the idea. This will basically take the form of a signed document that say exactly which idea we don’t want and we’re handing off to you.
13.3 Some copyright specific stuff to make clear that we, the company, is the author/originator, and not you, when it comes to IP
13.4 We might need you to sign your name and generally take part in the process of sorting out trademarks, patents, etc, that you had a hand in creating with us. That’s true even if you’ve left the company’s employment since you did the work. You won’t be able to do those things on your own, it will have to be us that drives the process.
13.5 You’ve got to do everything you can to make sure that the IP rests properly with us, and not you; even after you leave us.
13.6 Don’t steal anyone else’s work and pass it off as your own (and so ours), or make some libellous or obscene content in our name.

14.1 You’re going to be exposed to at least some level of our company’s secrets – you’ve got to keep them. If you do divulge anything, you’d better have our written consent first.
14.2 You can’t start a business in competition with us. But we don’t mind you owning shares in a publicly listed company that competes with us (that’s just investment). Shares in privately held companies are out though.
14.3 You’re not allowed to poach recent (in the last 12 months) customers from us
14.4 You’re not allowed to poach recent (in the last 3 months) employees from us
14.5 You’re not allowed to use any confidential information you have as a result of working for us, or tell anyone else that information (apart from tribunals or courts that you’re obliged to tell the truth in)
14.6 You’re not allowed to record details of what’s going on inside the company, unless it’s to benefit the company
14.7 You’re not allowed to pretend to still be working with us after you’ve quit
14.8 We know this legal wording’s pretty complicated, and different situations lead to different justifiable periods, so if this contract would be valid if we took out some of these restrictions and/or reduced the times involved, then that is the contract instead. I.e. you agree not to try and work around these agreements by finding a loophole in an otherwise reasonable clause.

15.1 Don’t do something on our behalf that would tarnish the company’s name. We’ve written down how we expect you to behave, roughly, so you should read up on that so you know what to avoid.
15.2 If you’re new, then we might skip the more rigorous disciplinary procedures; but you can take your complaint to the company director, if you’re not happy with the way you’ve been treated.
15.3 Please be sensible, and work things out with your line manager before starting the formal grievance procedure. But if you do want to do it formally, make it in writing.
15.4 If you’re formally doing things, you have the right of appeal of your decision
15.5 If you’ve since quit, please still raise the grievance with the company director.

16.1 Legal statement that nothing else interferes with these terms
16.2 We might need to change these rules, but if we do we’ll let you know a month in advance.
16.3 Where to find the employee handbook

17 Legalese

18 Legalese