I have to admit, back when I founded the company, I don’t think I imagined that it would make it to being fifteen years old. Back then, I was happy to make it from month to month. I’d only had five years of working in the games industry, and already it was clear that companies came and went. A lot. Not just in games, but in regular software too. The pace of change was so quick, the margins so tight, the price for failure so high; all of those made it a statistical likelihood that a new company would fail. I didn’t mind the risk, all of my alternatives were worse, and I liked the fact that it was my own choices that would make or break the company. To this day I don’t regret taking that risk, despite all of the ups and downs of the last fifteen years.

Only… we didn’t make it. Not quite, anyway. As of the end of our financial year, the 31st of March 2020, Black Company Studios ceased trading as an entity, eleven days short of ending its fifteenth year. I don’t regret that part either. As I said in this post, five years ago, it was time to admit that the days of being a team were in the past, and that’s just what happened. I broadened the sorts of clients I was consulting for, and the last five years have been non-stop work, of varying kinds, all satisfying. One in particular, ZeroLight, gave me so much work that I ended up working full time for them for several years, until eventually we acknowledged that it had ceased to be a consultant / client relationship and I became a full time employee of theirs, were I remain happily employed to this day.

So, Black Company became rather sidelined, a fact which will surprise no-one, given the dearth of posts here on the blog. Our little iOS apps still sell small numbers, but aside from that I haven’t invoiced a client in a couple of years. As such it made sense to wind things up, gracefully, and tie up all our loose ends. Black Company Studios Ltd will be struck off the Companies Register shortly, and the few remaining assets, including all our IP, will be purchased by me. That includes this website, which I intend to maintain in a limited form for posterity, and the Black Company name will continue on in the iOS store, at least until I transfer the apps to a personal account.

At this point I’d like to thank all of the members of my team over the years: Pete, Tim, Charlotte and Dan. You all contributed greatly to our success, and though it may not be the most notable line in your CVs, I hope you came away from it positively. I’d also like to thank all of our clients, whom we impressed enough to give enough repeat business to keep us going where so many other software businesses fail.

I don’t regret any of my time running the company, but I admit I’m a little wistful thinking back over all the years, and part of me didn’t want to close the door on that time. But there are new challenges to be tackled, and nostalgia is only good when you’re digging out your old games consoles and firing up a classic title to while away your time in self-isolation.

The funny thing about working as a consultant and selling your services is that you have very little predictability in your business. No matter how useful your skills are, no matter how in-demand your services are, you don’t always get to choose when the work starts and ends. Plans change, clients’ needs wax and wane, and a previously concrete plan for what you’ll be doing over the next few months can suddenly turn into idle time, with no other clients waiting and ready to take advantage.

For contractors, that’s a mixed blessing. Finally you get some breathing room, a chance to catch up on all the little loose ends that you’ve pushed to one side while you’ve been busy. For me, a chance to actually play some games instead of helping to make them. It doesn’t take too long however before you start to get restless, when you’re not actively engaged on something and your brain has some time to wander. During this particular down-time, I took the opportunity to try and reset my brain a bit, do some DIY, catch up on my reading, and other non-computer related stuff. I know that I could have been working on the VR stuff I’ve been putting off, but I felt like I lacked the focus needed to really get stuck into it, I’d been too long working on other peoples’ projects. Even when the DIY was done and I was properly back in the office, something was still nagging at me, and I spent more time pottering in the office organising than anything solidly useful.

The other thing staying busy with client work does is make you lazy about introspection. If I’m honest, the steady supply of business had allowed me, to fall into something of a safe, comfortable place. It was well past time to take a long hard look at the business plan and re-assess. Tim left the team over 2 years ago now, and Dan has been full-time on his Ph.D. work for almost as long. Black Company Studios is, and has been for a long time now, just me, consulting with our various clients and developing software for them. I think it’s time to stop lingering on the trappings of a larger team, and accept that reality.

There’s no shame in it, I feel. What we have always been good at is providing our expertise in software development to our clients. Actually making our own games and apps, not so much. For too long when talking about our work I’ve mentioned those non work-for-hire projects with a little bit of embarrassment, that they were things we notionally did, but they never received enough attention to make them projects we could hold up and be proud of, they were always just a footnote. That’s mostly because I felt that the work-for-hire we provided was always where we could add the most value. So changes are afoot to help us, me, refocus on that strength. The Belford Road office, large enough for 5, but really only holding me and a whole bunch of boxes and old machines, is being left behind, as of the end of April. There are hot-desk environments that would suit a lone developer much better, and often enough I’ll be working on-site with the client anyway. The machines and excess equipment have been sold off for token amounts and will actually see some use instead of lying cold in the corner of the office.

And finally, I’ll be trying to increase the breadth of clients I look to work with, not just games studios but all sectors. That’s already partly happening – 90% of the work over the last 12 months has been more 3D visualisation than games. Having to be a generalist for so many years has given me a grounding in many aspects of software development; .NET tools, DevOps and build pipelines, building web services and tools, user interface work both on the web and natively, high-performance/low-latency coding. It’s time I put those skills to work. Because after a lot of hard thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that what I enjoy about my work isn’t limited to making games, it’s knowing that I can do good, useful work, for whatever clients I deal with.

Standards Proliferation

Enough said.

One of the most interesting things about the field in which I work is the sheer range of topics I get to work on. Not just on different platforms or in different languages, but the actual subject matter of the projects. The project I’ve just completed, again working with Eutechnyx, manage to exercise parts of my skillset that I haven’t had to use for a while. Sometimes, working in games, you find yourself working on ostensibly the same problems. Different skin, different IPs, different engine, but really it’s the same fundamental concepts and functions that you’re re-implementing in a new project.

So when you get challenging problems, it’s really quite refreshing, because you have to go back to first principles of analysis and visualisation techniques to solve them. Where you’re presented with an overwhelming amount of information, and you have to design and implement something which wrangles that raw data into something coherent. Where you have to figure out a way of presenting that information in a way that is visually compelling and conveys that information in a useful, concise form. They are fundamentally hard problems, sometimes solvable, sometimes not, and finding the right solutions, if they exist at all, takes a level of concentration somewhat higher than the usual required to bring our games to life.

This is the state of mind I’ve been in for the last few months. For confidentiality reasons I can’t say anything very much about the project itself (it’s not the lovely visualisation linked above of course), but I wanted to talk about the satisfying nature of developing visualisations in general.

Often when you’re developing code, your debugging tools are limited to logging and step-by-step debugging. But for complex data sets, especially those dealing with spatial data, it’s far more useful to display that data visually. The same is true for end users – a sequence of numbers means very little; a dumped spreadsheet of data, while accurate, doesn’t let you see shapes or patterns. Turn those numbers into 2D graphs, and you can discern patterns, noise and trends. But that still may not be enough. You can make a line graph of each component of a 3D position that changes over time, but in 2D those graphs make little sense. Allow it to be viewed in true 3D space however, and suddenly you can see the shapes. But a line covering every point that 3D position visited tells you nothing about how quickly it moved between those points. So you introduce animation over time, or colour, and suddenly the data makes sense. When writing processing code, a visual representation of the outputs lets you pick out flaws that would otherwise be hidden. Spikes where there should be smoothness, patterns where there should be only random noise, correlations that hint at relationships you didn’t realise existed.

Of course it isn’t as simple as layering in more and more information. With too much visual clutter, it becomes impossible to discern any useful patterns from the data. So knowledge of what data is important becomes vital; ways of filtering information to show only what is relevant allow you to show information where it is needed, and hide it when it is not.

This, again, is one of the reasons why I’m so enthused about VR development. Being able to visualise spatial data is very dependent on good camera work – you have to be able to look around the visualisation. If the camera is out of your control, then you’re utterly reliant on the generated camera. If that is poor, then you might as well have a 2D visualisation of the data, because you need to have some useful spatial context to be able to process what you’re actually seeing. It’s for that reason that many optical illusions that rely on a particular perspective are defeated by moving your viewpoint; if you viewed the same illusion from a static perspective, you wouldn’t be able to tell it was an illusion at all.

Floating cube

So the introduction of VR allows us to get great flexibility of viewpoint, while not requiring the user to learn a cryptic set of control inputs to gain full 3D control over their viewpoint. That opens up great possibilities for exploring even more complex datasets and 3D structures. We’re living in an age where technology has advanced massively and the integration of computing into our everyday lives has resulted in masses of new information becoming available, in overwhelming amounts. Being able to visualise and process that information is the first step to being able to make use of it, and we’ll need new tools and tricks to do that.

You can tell when the November cold snap comes around to Edinburgh. Here in the office, it means that the winter charcoal hand-warmer comes out…

So, it seems in a staggering degree of competence, the three lengthy rants on crunch I wrote and queued for posting didn’t in fact get posted, and just sat around in WordPress till now. So much for my good intentions on blog posting. They’re up now though, so please do scroll back and take a look. Those who know me know I’ve a bee in my bonnet about both crunch and the underlying viability of games development, so those thoughts have been bubbling up for a while.

Since NASCAR: Redline shipped I’ve been busy with various different things that I’ve been neglecting, not least of which is looking ahead to see where to go next. While I’m still positive about smartphone development, I’m conscious now that the market is rather saturated, and I feel like we have missed the window where a small team can do great things and get noticed for it. That’s entirely my fault, focusing too much on work-for-hire development and neglecting our own projects, but I stand by the choices good or bad.

Recently though I’ve been investigating the resurgence of Virtual Reality tech, specifically the Oculus Rift project and castAR. Both are using modern technology to revisit the old holy grail of immersive digital realities, but unlike previous attempts at it, these project really feel like they are breaking through and making this a real possibility. The enthusiasm around both projects is real and infectious, and having gotten a hold of a Rift prototype in October, I confess that I joined in. Potential projects, interesting research opportunities, titles that you just couldn’t do before, they’re all bubbling up and out of me, and I’m enthused about getting my hands dirty in a way I haven’t been for games development in a long time. What’s clear to me is that many or most of the existing techniques we use, both for user input and for user interfaces, just don’t work in a VR setting. We’ll need to throw a bunch of our old preconceptions about how to build games out and learn them anew; as well as conquer a few more problems which are unique to VR. I have plenty of ideas on that front, but will need to try them out to see if I really understand the problems, let alone the solutions.

My Rift prototype turned up earlier this week, and I find myself massively frustrated that I’m busy with other more pressing projects and can’t get started. I’ll hopefully rectify that soon enough, and you should probably expect a bunch more posts around my experimentation with the kit. I’ll have to wait until next year for a castAR kit, but that will open up even more possibilities in a different way to the Rift, and I think the final solutions will draw on the lessons learned from both systems.

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.