Well, before DC went under (literally just the day before luckily), Tenon (the liquidators of VIS) got me to go retrieve all the assets relating to Brave from the server machine that DC had bought from the liquidation of VIS. So, I now have a little more than 250GB of assets sitting on a disk in my office – representing pretty much the whole 4 and a half years of development. I must say, it was fun strolling down memory lane looking at the old demo and concepts for it.

Not looking back in the code though. <shudders> There’s quite a bit of code in the history of it that I’d dearly rather forget. Let that be a lesson to you children – don’t make a demo in a few months and then expect to be able to reuse the demo code to build the real game!

But there was plenty of marketing stuff though, which has all winged its way to the new US publishers (Evolved) who’ve been putting the game around a fair bit! Good stuff. I believe IGN are going to be running some more coverage on it, and hopefully we’ll see some more of the concept and marketing stuff put out. There’s some lovely concept work and a whole raft of screenshots that were never published in the original SCEE marketing push, hopefully the US people will see them instead!

Other than that, busy busy working on Barco contract still (it was extended another month), mixing in all the stuff I’ve been meaning to do for a while. My shiny new Dell Precision laptop is on its way; should be here next week for when I get back from the Lake District. I’ll have a couple of weeks to fill it with equally shiny software, before its off to Develop at the start of July. Hopefully the laptop will mean I can be productive even on the seemingly neverending train and bus journeys I seem to take – its been quite noticeable that when I’m not in the home office I’m pretty much crippled as far as work things go. Of course, I had to get the Company VAT registered to take advantage of the ability to claim VAT back, but I’m sure the extra paperwork will be worthwhile.

Well, I did start writing a post about this at the time (a week or so ago now), but it turned into a windy rant about bad industry practices; then I ran out of time to finish it up and it seems to have been eaten by WordPress since then. Since it would probably be very depressing to type it all again, I can sum it up in some very simple points:

1. Letting your staff work an extra month when you know you don’t have the money to pay them is totally, flat out, unacceptable. At least VIS had the courtesy to tell us at the start of the month so we didn’t work any days for free.
2. The way the Edinburgh staff were treated was shocking – being flat out lied to so that they’d migrate the equipment and incur travel expenses that had no itention of being reimbursed is just shoddy management.
3. Letting your company run down all its money and go bankrupt, then when it goes into liquidation immediately starting up a phoenix company with none of the debt and scavenging all the assets for cheap is, frankly, tantamount to fraud in my book. How you expect to hire back developers onto such a team after seeing the way the previous company went is beyond me. Unless of course its all just a temporary thing so the maximum amount of blood can be sweated out of the assets before abandoning everyone to their own fates (again).
4. Damn – thats 3 out of the 4 big Scottish players out of business in less than 14 months; leaving Rockstar North and Real Time Worlds as the only large employers.

I must admit to being a little selfish in this matter – as I mostly want other Scottish games companies to survive so I can poach their good staff when I get the opportunity. But with the liquidations going on, more and more talent is migrating south of the border (where there’s a drought of good people), and there’s little to tempt them back up. And then, there is a hurdle to any new developer wanting to set up shop in Scotland – the fact that talent would have to be relocated in to get it going.

Its small wonder so many good people are leaving the industry – they’re being offered no stability, no decent prospects, and companies which want to offer them opportunities and build are being priced out of the market.

Anyway – my condolences to those people out of work because of this, although from those I talked to on Wednesday while there, I think it might be better off redundant than continuing to work there!

Huzzah. Finally some time to chill out and calm down. Over a month of deadline crunch with Barco has somewhat taken its toll. Today will be entirely devoted to games and catch-up reading.

Some talk over on The Chaos Engine about the forecasted crash of the games industry (due to rising costs), and asking why the big publishers (EA, Activision, Ubisoft) aren’t doing anything about it. For example, trying to rein in the relentless next-gen march, even when it massively inflates costs. The general consensus is the upcoming problems are real, and largely inevitable; but that publishers aren’t doing anything now because they’re still making money.

Massively short-sighted in my opinion – its like we’re a big Katamari ball rolling down a mountain; the outlying bits (the developers and smaller publishers) are being smashed off along the way, but the inner core is just keeping its head tucked in and hoping it will be left at the bottom. Even collecting new bits along the way (as the smaller publishers/developers reform and try again) won’t help in the long run, not to mention the carnage that its causing along the way (in the form of massive venture capital losses). It will only take one bad experience investing in a developer/publisher that falls apart under the current development conditions for a big VC to swear off the games industry for good – making it even harder for new developers to form and build.

In other news – more rumblings about the future US release of Brave, for which I’ve been doing a little bit of work. More details as and when I can…

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

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

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

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

Tweaked the site template a little, because Pete pointed out that it didn’t put the author name on top of the post. Sorry for any confusion – I asked him to put up his email because it summed up what I thought about the RevolutionWii. Man, what a stupid name. Why would you take a perfectly good name like Revolution, and scrap it in favour of a word which isn’t even pronounced the way they want people to pronounce it. Hellooo – you can’t just string letters together and then tell people to say a different word. Letter combinations imply certain pronunciations – double-i implies ‘aye’, as in hippopotamii or platypii.

Anyway, enough of such pedantry. Contract at Barco has been extended for another little while, so I’m still making the trek over to Leith every morning, and trying to hold onto the XP principles even in the face of imminent deadlines.

Update: And I’ve fixed the annoying excerpt-ifying of the RSS feed, which would truncate entries to 50 words. How can I be expected to express myself in 50 words! So now we get the whole entry. Turns out the correct URL isn’t the one I was using before either, so use the entries on the right to subscribe to the correct feed…

Before you think it, no, I’m not nostalgic for the olden days. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to see any of the ‘art’ that I’ve made in the past will tell you there’s no way I could make games from my bedroom without someone else providing the visuals.

But my point is, twenty years ago you could make a game with a team of one or two developers (be they programmers or artists). You’d be developing on the NES, Spectrum or Commodore, and your games probably retail for 15-20 pounds sterling. Skip forward to 1991, and you’re developing for the SNES or MegaDrive – your team is around 8-10 people, and your games probably retail for about 40 pounds. Then on to 97 – you have the Playstation and N64, by now your team is around 20 people, and your games are probably retailing for about 40 pounds still. 2002, you’re on the PlayStation 2 or XBox, your team is now 40 or so people, and your game is still retailing for 40 pounds. 2006, you’re starting on a PS3 or XBox360, average team size is now pushing 100 people.

To pluck a cost figure from the air a team of 40 or so people developing on PS2 resulted in a cost of between 1m and 2m pounds per title. Looking over develop‘s top 100 list this year, there are many, many games on the top studio’s books that aren’t making back half a million pounds. Okay, so thats just from the UK market, and the US market is much larger, but you see my point that margins are getting tighter and tighter.

The games industry is being led along a growth path where revenue is rising fairly linearly (10% a year is a generous figure), but costs are rising exponentially! The old system where publishers used the massive revenues from the titles that sold well to underwrite the cost of the games that flop is falling apart, solely down to the diminished profits they can make from successful titles. The increasing fragility of both developers and publishers is, in my opinion, just a worrying symptom of the underlying problem. As we let costs spiral out of control, we start to price ourselves out of business.

Even an established and successful studio can be crippled by more than one bad title or deal in a row, because the costs involved in getting even a poor title close to market are growing rapidly massive. Much as I’d like to blame the publishers for the problem (for attempting to keep their costs down by mistreating developers rather than encouraging efficiency), I think in the end the issue lies with the hardware manufacturers. We are moving onto the next generation of hardware, when we’re not limited by technology, but by the level of complexity the market is willing to pay for. Sure, if the consumers were happy to pay double for twice the complexity, or if twice as many units sold when the technology improved, then it would be sustainable, but its not.

Roughly the same consumers who bought the current generation of console will buy the next generation; when they buy games they expect them to be at the same 40-50 pound price point, because they don’t see enough value to justify paying any more for the games. So in the end, the games industry tries to make more complex, expensive games, for the same revenue as before, just so they don’t get left behind.

So what’s my proposed solution? Well, for console games, I don’t think I have one, apart from maybe to keep producing quality games for PS2 for as long as possible. For PC games I think its clear – make games at the same level of costs as now, and try to make use of better technology and middleware to improve the quality, rather than trying to increase complexity to match what the hardware is capable of.

Console timeline cribbed from here.

GI.biz covers in their weekly newsletter this week the announcement that most of the major film distributors are cancelling or massively scaling back their future UMD format releases, and talks about the death of an unloved and mostly unwanted format. I think most of us were saying that right from the start, when they announced the format the PSP would use, and then touted it as a portable movie player. Why would I pay money for another (lower quality) version of a film I already have on DVD, to watch it on my PSP on the few occasions where I have a couple of hours to kill? How it made business sense to Sony in the first place I have no idea.

I also had the pleasure to attend a BCS lecture given by one of my old colleagues from VIS, who was talking on the nature and history of the games industry. He brought up some points relating to the exponential growth of the size of game team needed to produce a top flight title, and it struck me just how bad things actually are these days in the games industry. Anyway, in the post lecture drinking session, I found myself expounding various different problems in the industry today, some of which have solutions which we [the industry] just aren’t doing, some of which I can’t see a fix for.

Anyway, I think I’m going to write up some thoughts on my stance on the whole she-bang, and make a new category here called ‘Industry Rants’. Don’t get me wrong, I love the games industry and am dedicated to it, but some things about the way we work today are just stupid.

Man, just installed the new CPU fan on the server machine, and the difference in volume level is astounding. Its almost quiet enough that I’d be happy leaving it on 24/7. 🙂

Hmm, just fired up the server machine, only to have it emit a loud electrical sounding pop midway through the boot process. Its a blind machine with no monitor or keyboard, so no telling what it was doing when it happened, and it’s booted fine after checking for any obvious fuse or chronic failures inside. Still, time to double check the logs to make sure the off-site backup process is working as expected. Oh, and to find a torch and some fuse-wire in case the next pop takes out the fusebox as well!

I think its time I considered retiring that machine. It was only a couple of years old when I got it, but something’s been not quite right with it since the start – erratic failures, constantly having to boot it twice due to random disk failure checks on startup. Plus the fan-noise is awful. There’s a replacement CPU fan in the post at the moment, but I don’t know if it will be enough, or whether the PSU fan is just as noisy.

Anyway, totally unrelated, but interesting too: SketchUp. Great, user friendly little building tool, easy to use, and just what you need to quickly knock up 3D concepts for game maps, buildings, etc. User licence is 300 and some dollars, sans VAT, but as an intermediate tool between nothing and Max or Maya, it seems worth the price. Which reminds me, really need to look into getting VAT registered…

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