Next up in our game-dev blog linking frenzy: Headlam, written by my old associate from VIS, Larry Docherty. Larry and I worked together on Brave for a long while, and we was a great guy to work with. As he was a filthy weegie ;-), he trekked through to Edinburgh every day – a trauma which I certainly didn’t envy. But he more than made up for that affliction with stories of neds from Glasgow which kept us all entertained (and a little worried). Since then he’s moved on to pastures new with SCEE in Liverpool and Amsterdam (lucky bugger), He’s always had a passion for music, and so his blog (while just getting started) promises to cover games development and music trivia in equal measure.

Yes, we’re not just taking on one new staffer, due to a fortuitous mix of circumstances we’re bringing on two! We have Charlotte Moseley, a graduate developer with knowledge of C# who is coming on and getting up to speed with our Evolution work; also we have Tim Angus coming to join us. Like Pete and I, Tim also worked at VIS until it went out of business – had things gone differently a couple of years ago he would have joined us much earlier, but instead he ended up in “regular software land”. Luckily we’ve tempted him back to the straight and narrow of games development, although in truth he’s never really left: he’s been driving Tremulous in his spare time!

Both of our new people will be coming to the new office close to the start of May, and I shall harangue them until they introduce themselves properly here and get added to the about page.

The currently running set of articles on Bruce’s blog are focusing on his time at Codemasters, from its humble beginnings on the home games machines of the 80’s up to its less than illustrious current state (it’s drawn criticism in industry circles for its treatment of staff and management decisions widely seen as poor). But aside from that the blog covers industry topics far and wide – pretty much whatever Bruce thinks is interesting at the time. He is a marketer by trade, so the blog is well written and updated daily (whereas most of the blogs in the sidebar update far more sporadically like we do), and while I don’t always agree with his views, there’s no doubting that the blog is written from a wide range of experience and covers topics of importance to game developers with insight and detail.

More crucially though, Bruce is the one who has been poking all of us with game-dev blogs to cross link and raise each others profiles (hence the impetus for this series of linking posts). In general we’ve shown ourselves to be pretty poor at getting ourselves noticed and heard, and for small developers and indeed individuals at larger studios, a higher profile is rarely a bad thing. I’ve always been a fan of championing the people behind the games, so it’s good to see some ‘class action’ from my colleagues in the industry.

Not just, as the title might suggest, all about survival horror games, this blog covers some wide ranging points on game design, horror movie reviews and other topics. The articles about the evolution of the horror game genre are the most interesting though, and cover a massive range of games dating back decades. Although I must admit, the only horror I remember feeling when playing Alone in the Dark was horror at the camera that insisted on changing angles just when I was trying to sneak somewhere, and leaving me unable to see my character while it was ripped apart by dogs or some such fate.

Definitely worth a visit, although I’d say take the time to subscribe the feed in something that allows you to keep posts as new – the posts can be quite large, but it’s worth saving them to read for when you have the time.

Oh yes Chris, that’s a great idea. Now you’ve learned to use the automated posting feature, why not use it on every post even when there’s no real need to. That way, when you try out embedding a YouTube video for the first time, you can go away to Runcorn for a day, and leave the blog to be totally shafted for ages until you come back to check it.

No brownie points for me today – although all should now be fixed. Feel free to go check out the actual YouTube clip for Goo! that I was trying to embed, and I promise the next time I will check what the post looks like on the actual site before I post it.

A development blog from PillowFort Games, makers of Goo, a fun looking game that made it to the 2008 IGF, nominated for Technical Excellence. It’s all based around fluid dynamics, which I’ve always thought had good potential for game mechanics and had been sadly under used till now. I remember trying a demo of a different game a while back, also based around fluid mechanics – it looked fantastic, but ran like a dog even on the fastest machine I could find. When I get a chance I’d like to try it out, but it seems (like a lot of the Dare to be Digital entries too) that it wants a 360 controller to let me play. Don’t get caught out like me though and just download the patch – the link you want is the “Download Public Beta” one on the right on the download page; oddly it’s not given top priority on the page.

The blog itself is a diverting read; it delves a lot into the ins and outs of the actually developing the game rather than just technical details or coding rants. It’s something sadly neglected in blogs from staff at bigger developers. The nice thing about being an independent developer is that you get to pretty much do and say what you want on your blog. Working with bigger clients always means that you have to worry about what you can say and when, so it’s nice to share those details when you can.

So we’ve been working with Evolution Studios since early February. Familiar for developing the World Rally Championship series, and more recently Motorstorm, they are now part of a much larger group since becoming part of SCEE last September. We’re working on support tools for Evolution rather than assisting with their game development in any way, but with such large teams and a wide range of titles in development, it’s a challenging task. The work is interesting, and we’re learning to love C# and hate it’s oddities. Also I’m getting to know the train down to Runcorn quite intimately, as we visit Evolution regularly to go over recent developments and decide where to go next. I can honestly say it’s an enlightening experience, although at the moment the biggest thing learned is don’t ever, ever attempt to eat any of the food provided in the Warrington Bank Quay station “buffet”.

We’ve been working with the folks at Four Door Lemon since the start of January now. They share many similarities with us as a studio – they are relatively small, and provide middle-ware and game development services to all sorts of clients. They are however a bit larger than us, and have a lot of work on just now, so it was a no-brainer for us to collaborate. We’ve been working with their Lemon engine for a while now to develop some small games that FDL needed made, and it’s proved relatively easy to implement some pretty complicated stuff in a short space of time. For confidentiality we can’t go into any detail here as to the nature of the games we’re developing for FDL, but hopefully we’ll have some tales from our on-going work with FDL that will be of interest.

Apologies for the brief hiatus from posting – what can I say other than that there haven’t been enough days in the week to do all the stuff I need to do as well as blogging. While it’s nice that we’re busy with stuff, I could do with getting my weekends back. And on that note we have good news – a third employee! More about them when they actually start next week. Anyway, they should be able to take the load off me a bit, and we can get back to sensible working weeks and take care of all the other things that mount up when you are busy with development work.

I’ve gotten clearance from our two clients to post a bit more about who they are and what we’re doing with them, which is good! It should free us up to mention things a bit more, and I don’t have to be so close-mouthed here about the stuff we’re working on. More about that later this week, although I won’t be posting straight away as I want to pass our initial posts by the clients to make sure they’re happy with what I write.

It seems there’s been a bunch of incoming links from associates in the games industry who also have blogs. Rather than simply regurgitate the original post from Bruce On Games, I’d like to take some time and give a little review of each out-going link and give them each their own post. In the meantime, they’re all in the right-hand sidebar, if you’d like to visit them before I write about them.

Well, someone must have been taking pity on my and my excruciatingly long train journey filled day yesterday, because I found this little gem on my morning news trawl. I’ve been a Princess Bride fan since the first time I saw it, years ago, so it’s a bit of a no brainer that I would happily shell out cash to play a game version, so the pre-order went in about 5 minutes after finding the site. Looking at the trailers and concept art, I think I’ll be pleased with the end result – definitely looking forward to the release date later in the year.

On an unrelated note, my train journey down to our client’s site yesterday was capped by a mother and her kids joining me at my table, a boy of around 6 and a girl probably 9 or 10. The boy had a PSP and was playing away, engrossed, but he would keep banging my laptop in his efforts to show this or that to his mother. So I asked what he was playing, and he replied “Grand Theft Auto”.

“Hmm,” I said, “Liberty City Stories?”.

“Uh-huh”, with an eager nod.

“That would be the 18 rated Liberty City Stories then?”, which I accompanied by a look for his mother which I hope conveyed the level of my disgust and disappointment in her parenting skills.

“Oh, ” she says, a bit flustered, “is it?”

“Yeah”

And with that the conversation died, thankfully. Anything else I could have said would have boiled down to “you’re really just a bad parent”. Really though, come on: you wouldn’t let your five year old watch The Exorcist, or Goodfellas, what on earth makes you think that letting them play an 18 rated game is okay?

The government is apparently planning to ‘clamp down’ on unsuitable video games. If I believed that it was anything other than a cynical vote-grabbing ploy to pander to Daily Mail readers I would heartily endorse this, as I’ve always been in favour of proper age regulation on games content, just as there is for films and television. Thing is, it’s already there. The games industry gets a BBFC/PEGI age rating on pretty much every title that goes out there. The console platform holders (Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo) insist on it as part of the publishing process. Big publishers would never think about not getting their game rated, it’s just part of making games. All in all, we’ve got a great record of self regulation – we are open and up front about the content of games, and we’re not trying to sneak games into the hands of younger gamers.

None of that makes a blind bit of difference though, as long as irresponsible parents refuse to accept that games deserve the same level of care as films. So you’ve found your 14 year old playing Manhunt, or GTA with the Hot Coffee mod – you think it’s outrageous that the developers can make such games. Well here’s a newsflash – we didn’t make those games for your 14 year old. We didn’t sell them to your 14 year old (high street retailers thankfully do pay attention to age ratings). But if their gran bought them the game for Christmas and you said “Oh, that’s nice, now go play” without ever actually checking what the game was like, then I’m afraid that the blame for your child’s emotional scarring lies firmly and squarely with you, the responsible adult. Stop trying to blame others for your actions.