This one came up during the drive home from a long weekend up north, while listening to one of those ‘Greatest Movie Songs Ever’ type of albums. They all seem to have Love Is All Around on them; great for singing along to, as long as you haven’t heard it recently. I mentioned to my travelling companions just how quickly it brought up memories of Four Weddings and a Funeral – within a few bars of the opening you could close your eyes and  imagine Hugh Grant’s face in front of you, itching to be slapped.

My fiancée took this to the next level though, as we’d been playing Rayman over the weekend, and one of it’s mini-games involves slapping choir-boysrabbits singing out of tune. The Wii-mote’s got such a nice motion for slapping, including a little noise/rumble when you connect. And so “Celebrity Slap – Wii” was born. All of the most annoying celebrities in popular culture today, moving around the screen. You wouldn’t need ultra-realistic models, just inflated mug-shots on wobbly-headed avatars – it’s the face you want to slap really.

You could have all different sorts of scoring modes: “Slap the Talent/Popularity Stars” – where you have to only slap celebrities who’ve been on X-Factor or Strictly Come Superstar; “Slap the Slappers” – where you have to only slap celebrities famous for their ridiculous love-lives. The possibilities are endless. You’d have to localise it of course, every country has it’s own set slappable figures; you could have a nostalgia version where you get to slap Timmy Mallet and Noel Edmonds and the like, or a music version with Britney Spears, et al.

Sadly though, the copyright and libel issues on this one put me off actually making it, so I’m giving this idea away free to the world. All I ask is that I get a free copy, so that if it does appear, I can have an enjoyable half hour slapping the Gallagher brothers.

Well, a bit of patience appears to have paid off with respect to finding a new office for us. Or at least, a bit of religious checking of Gumtree’s office space section every morning. I shouldn’t really count our chickens before they’ve hatched (as we’ve not signed the lease yet), but the new place is looking good. It’s just round the corner, so still nice and central for all four of us; it’s about half again as big as our current place (although the rent has gone up commensurately); and it’s generally just a nice space for us. As it’s still being renovated, when I went to see it was still somewhat rough around the edges, but that’s just the sort of place I like anyway.

We’ll probably not be moving until mid to late January though, as I’ve yet to get a final move date confirmed. BT and Eclipse assure me that if we give them enough warning then we will be able to switch our phone and broadband over without any hassle, which is nice. Even better though is the ability to keep the same phone number. Not that we use the office line for much except giving us a route to put broadband through, but I like minimal changes. It’s going to be annoying enough handling all the change of addresses as it is.

Still, I’ll be sad to leave the current office, it’s been a good home for the last 15 months. It’s a little hard to remember that right now though, given how cold it is. It will be nice to move to a place with working central heating and some well sealed windows! And of course we will miss the grumpy cat from the courtyard outside, who spends all day meowling loudly because it’s been left outside in the cold.

Grumpy Cat

Mind you, once it’s been let back inside (as I assume it must be occasionally), it probably takes about 5 minutes for it to start meowing and griping until it’s kicked back outside again. Such is the life of an outdoors cat. 🙂

I posted this in a discussion on TheChaosEngine forums, but it sums up my position on overtime/fixed-working-hours quite succinctly, so I thought I’d re-post it out here in the real world. For reference, our team tries to work office hours of 9-5, rather than a flexi-time arrangement. This is, it seems, quite unusual in the games world, and there was a spirited discussion on TCE about whether or not it stifled creativity and/or leads to making the unpaid overtime situation worse.

[in reply to the implication that really good employees are the ones who work extra and late to deliver over and above expectations]

While I heartily acknowledge that it’s daft to just up sticks and leave at some arbitrary time and break your flow, I think that its still going to be the exception rather than the rule. You don’t always hit your peak productivity at 4:30 only to have to leave at 5. Certainly there are some days when I’m just getting going when I really should be going home – I find a good point to shelve it and go home. And when I come back in the morning, I’ve had a whole night to ponder the work and generally do a better job of finishing it up than had I just forged ahead.

That said, I don’t want my team feeling like more hours = better work. The only way I want to see productivity improved is for people to work smarter and harder for those 8 hours. I want people to go home feeling like they achieved lots, but still get home at a sensible time that leaves them free to enjoy their own time. I want people to come in and focus, so we’re all in that intense zone of getting s&*^ done at roughly the same time.

We all spend time during the day surfing the web, emailing others, etc., and it eats productivity, and doesn’t necessarily improve the creative atmosphere. I don’t want people staying late to get their stuff done because they have only done 5 hours of effective work in the 9-5 period. Then they end up getting home late, and blame the job for sucking up all their free time.

I want a team that burns bright during their work day, and finds that balance between producing volume, and feeling the creative spark that gets them producing quality. If the only way I can improve the team’s productivity or quality is to increase the hours worked, then I’ve failed. If we’re really at our peak productivity in that 8 hour day, then I’m due to hire someone else. I’m pretty damn sure that if we every got even close to that zone we’d be one of the most effective devs around.

Bah humbug. The new office on Rutland Square was looking better and better, and we were days away from signing the lease. Sadly though, delays in organising things amongst the three companies to be involved meant that someone else has seen the place and signed the papers all in the space of a week, and now we’re back to square one in our search for an office. Boo hiss. On the bright side though, the new office would have been a tad smaller than the current one, so at least now we’ll have the potential of finding somewhere with a bit more room to grow.

In other news, our prototype games on WiiWare are now looking like actual games, although I’ve left it in the capable hands of Pete and Tim while Charlotte and I have been taking care of our clients. So as not to be left out of all the fun though, I’ve taken on a bit of hobby coding and am converting our somewhat ungraceful build process (a combination of Lua scripts, makefiles for Wii/PSP and Visual Studio projects for Win32), and am converting it over to use JamPlus. There has been a lot of debate on the sweng-gamedev mailing list and elsewhere about getting build systems which cope with the rigours of game development. Jam had the most potential but development of the main version of it has pretty much died off, and the patches and work required to get a Jam build suitable (performance and flexibility-wise) for games development is enough to put everyone else off.

The helpful Joshua Jensen however has done some sterling work in putting together all that existing work in a practically off-the-shelf tool called JamPlus. I’ve been most impressed with its speed and flexibility so far, and thanks to Josh I’ve learned enough of the scripting logic to convert our quite specific build needs into Jam logic. Once it’s done I’ll publish our scripts to serve as an extra example for folks (minus all the Wii and PSP stuff that’s covered under NDA of course), hopefully that will help others and get it to be a well accepted tool. As always, I think anything that helps efficiency of games developers in general is good, but really it’s because as our prototype games have grown, it’s become clear that we need a proper dependency-checked build tool to manage our asset->game toolchain.

While rummaging around in my backlog of things to post, I found this link to an article I’d seen on Linux Journal. Definitely the best form of re-use I’ve heard. Everyone these days seems to be going on about recycling of goods we’ve used, and that’s a fair point. But I’ve always been more concerned about the impending energy shortages. It has always jarred a bit that in some places we’re using millions of joules of energy cooling our local environment down, when not too far away there are other people spending similar millions of joules warming their’s up. So much of the things we waste is because it is simpler to just use or make another than to try and re-use something already made. A case in point – we spend lots importing fuel to burn and keep our homes warm, but happily throw out heavy furniture made of wood. Once upon a time we would have thrown it on our fire and killed two birds with one stone, but our modern lives no longer make that easy.

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.

Funnily enough, whenever I come back to the blog to write up a new post, one of the first things that jumps out at me is the monthly archives posts over on the right which I have to scroll past to reach the ‘site admin’ button. Whilst in my head I know fine well that we’ve been going for three and a half years now, it is another thing entirely to see all those months collecting up in the sidebar. Going back to some of the early posts still makes me laugh, as we’ve certainly come a long way since then.

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!

Truly it’s the belligerent passengers that are the worst though. Most often on a British train there’s a sense of shared suffering, and people usually pitch in to help the doddery old lady to her seat, or the mother with a child and a heavy bag. If the train is packed or the air conditioning is broken (and in summer it’s usually both at once), there are quiet jokes shared amongst strangers at tables about how crazy it all is. The mad passenger fighting with their huge luggage up the carriage gets an exchange of knowing looks and a smile, from people glad that they’re already settled in their seats and don’t have to get involved.
The belligerent passengers though, they can spoil it for everyone, even those already installed in their seats and trying to block out the world with earphones and a book or laptop. Inevitably it’s a grumpy passenger looking to take out their frustrations on someone else, be they deserving or not. The luggage rack isn’t big enough. Someone stole my seat. The train is late so I’ll miss my connection. And so because they are suffering, the rest of the passengers must too. Complaining loudly and bitterly of course is known to accelerate the train and make up that delay, and expand the luggage rack. Or maybe it just compounds the misery which is probably already being felt by the other passengers, who have already accepted the fact that they are running late. And as for finding someone sitting in your seat, apologetically pointing this out will get you far further with a minimum of fuss.

I’m fairly sure that I’m not an especially lucky traveller. I have a decent share of missed or late trains, and while it doesn’t exactly make me the cheeriest soul in the world, I try to bear it with good grace. But I’ve never had a problem with luggage space, or seat reservations, or half of the things that plague these passengers, so I can’t help but feel that there’s some sort of karma working itself through there. It might seem petty, but I find myself thinking “Good”, when someone has missed a connection and has decided to take it out on a conductor who clearly has nothing to do with their problem.

As troubling as it is to witness the sheer unbridled ignorance and lack of concern for the effects their actions have on others that some of the passengers show though, it is at least comforting to see that the majority of my fellow travellers are actually just nice people. They just want to get to their destination with the minimum of fuss, like me.

One of the fringe benefits of travelling to client sites regularly is the amount of people-watching you get to do. And in the words of the late, great Bill Hicks: there are some real pockets of humanity out there, it’s amazing to see them travelling around.

You can spot the regular travellers of course, they tend to be quite quiet, keep to themselves. They know exactly where they are going, they know which cars on the train are which and how the seat reservation system works. In general they get on the train and settle down quickly, surrounding themselves with the trappings of the regular traveller – the laptop or MP3 player comes out instantly and gets arranged artfully in front of them. On the morning trains down to Cheshire I’ve seen people get on, set up their space and have their head leaning against the window close to snoring, before the train has even left Edinburgh Waverley. Now that is a professional traveller.

On the flip side you get the occasional travellers, who are easily marked out early on by the fact that they come on, wandering down the aisle and staring at each and every number in turn for a few seconds before moving on. Which is odd really, given how little information is on there. Read the number. Does it match your number? No? Then keep moving until it does. There’s four seats in every row, if your number is 48 and you’re just passing 4, then you don’t need to stop and check every row, you’re at the wrong part of the carriage. If it matches? Then sit down, or at least move out of the way so the dozen people patiently (or not so patiently) standing behind you waiting to get past to their own seats can get along. In particular, don’t stare at the seat number, look at the seat, at the seat number again, then look around and see if you like the other seats nearby better.

Couples and families are especially bad for this. It’s not rocket science, you’d think, getting to your seat and sitting down. But watching a pair of grandparents with a young child going up and down a carriage, dithering over where to go, because there’s someone else  sitting in the unreserved seat of their table for four; well – it’s excruciating to watch. Sometimes the conductor happens along while they’re still dithering, and I don’t envy their job at all. You can see the distress on their face as they try to resist the urge to shake the errant passengers by the shoulders and shout “Just sit down! It’s not that hard!”

Families are also the worst for the crazy bag sizes, which is great fun to watch, as long as you’re not sitting by the luggage racks. At a distance though, it’s great to watch them trying to manage with a bag big enough to fit a small child in. From the moment they get on the carriage and struggle to even get their bags through the doors, you know there’s going to be a dilemma before they get to sit down. And sure enough, they eventually get to the rack, banging peoples elbows and ankles along the way, only to find that it’s already pretty full of normal sized bags. Then they huff and puff and half-heartedly push other bags around, even though it’s clear that the only way they’re getting their bags in is to throw all the others from the train and hope no-one notices. With couples and families though, you get a further treat, which is to watch them turn to each other and start complaining that there’s never enough room for bags on the train (or for bonus points – complain at their partner that they’ve packed too much stuff). As if it’s somehow the train company’s fault for not accommodating their giant-sized luggage. The more belligerent amongst them will even start asking around if other people could move their bags instead – only to be greeted with shocked stares and disbelief at their gall.

(to be continued…)

Yes, back from the roaming around the States, although my body’s clock still says I’m somewhere in the mid Atlantic I think. Hotel wi-fi access was pretty sporadic sadly, even the places that charged 10 USD a day for internet access were pretty flaky and hard to connect to. And goodness knows how much malware and traffic snooping was going on. Suffice to say that any sensitive stuff was entered via LogMeIn to the office machine so it wasn’t out in the open.

Anyway, that paranoia aside, I certainly got less blogging than I wanted to done, as I was going to catch up on my backlog. That in itself was probably good though, in that I got more time enjoying the holiday (and the generalised madness that is being a tourist in the USA) instead.

Everyone has seemed to get along just fine without me anyway, the clients all seemed quite happy with the work getting done, none of the team got ill or went crazy, and the office didn’t burn down. So all in all a successful trip away. Lot’s of paperwork and admin to catch up on though, and getting back up to speed with our 3 projects.

One of the biggest problems with running your own business is handling illness and time off. You get used to driving the business forward, dealing with all the clients, making sure everyone knows what they’re doing and that there aren’t any hidden snags waiting. So when you get ill, it’s hard to switch off and give yourself time to recover, because you know that there are a whole bunch of things that need doing and if you don’t deal with them then they just won’t get done. And that’s been my curse – a bad cold in early July, which took a week to clear, but left me with a crippling, wracking cough that still hasn’t shifted. The cough in turn causes sleepless nights, and so leaves me generally grumpy (well, grumpier than usual) and less able to work. And of course there’s so much to be done that I can’t readily give myself days off to help the recovery, which makes the whole thing worse.

Couple the illness with preparations for an upcoming three week holiday around the US, and I’ve been run ragged for the last month, which really isn’t good. On the other hand, it’s forced me to make sure that the rest of the team are good to keep working on their own without me micro-managing everything.

Being ill has radically cut down on my ability to tackle the little additional things that I normally do in addition to the regular day-to-day work of the Company though, hence the blogging hiatus. It remains on the to-do list, every day taunting me by being something I really want to do, but never being high enough on the priorities to actually get done.

It’s also meant that my enjoyment of the EIF this year was radically cut down. But thankfully the venue was just a few hundred yards along the road from our office, which made it much easier to both attend and still be on top of our normal work. I’ll write up my impressions from the talks as usual, but that may have to wait until later in the week.

We’ve also taken on work for a new client – another WiiWare development, which is good as it helps us cement our understanding of the platform. But that is mostly going to rest in the hands of Tim and Pete as I go off travelling from Friday. Our hotels mostly have wi-fi connections (I think I’d probably go insane if I didn’t have net access for three weeks) so I’ll be talking with the office over Skype and email in case of emergencies. But hopefully I’ll be able to relax and remember what life outside of work is all about!