Here’s a bit of comedy (or so I thought) for you: I’ve been sorting out Professional Indemnity insurance for the contract work I’ve been doing, and boy is it awkward to sort out. Anyway, the one firm I found who do it online (Hiscox) are the only ones who got back to me in any reasonable length of time with a quote.

So, I’m going through their online purchase procedure, and filling in more details; there’s a lot of yes/no questions where the yes answer boils down to ‘are you a risk’. E.g. ‘are you a crook’, ‘have you made any previous claims’, ‘do you make medical/aviation equipment’, etc. Then there’s a question:

Are you responsible for any of the following?
• Internet Service Provision, Application Service Provision, or games development
• full implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning systems
• full implementation of Customer Relationship Management systems.
• specialist work in relation to the security of networks and systems such as design of security systems, and vulnerability and penetration testing? (This does not include standard virus, firewall or router protection)

So somehow, games development is considered as bad as all these other (obviously) risky professions. How come?

I’ve worked in games development for a good while now, and I’ve seen some dodgy business stuff going on, but it rarely if ever came down to a litigious claim against the other party. Even when there was good reason to make a claim! If anything, negligence in the games industry is less likely to result in a serious breach of contract. If you screw up a business client’s database, chances are they’ll notice it, and complain and bluster and claim damages. If you screw up a game’s save and restore system, the players will moan and rate the game less, but it won’t come to a damages claim.

Maybe it’s down to the ge
nerally poor specification treatment that games contracts get. It is easier to see the specification of a business software contract and follow it to the letter; a games development contract requires a flexible approach to what work needs done. Then, of course, more flexibility leads to vagueness of responsibility, and the possibility of a claim being made as both sides disagree on what needs done.

I’m out of the office 9-5 for the next 3 weeks or so, working on a client’s site instead – if you need to get in touch better to use email or my mobile. Nothing games related, just a short-term technical contract to get some cash in. On the plus side – getting to play with Dreamweaver and finding out just how much easier it makes HTML/CSS development; there’s a good reason why it costs so much to buy! I did have an interesting discussion with a colleague here about a possible casual game idea that might be worth pursuing, I’ll have to give it some thought when I get a chance and may try to build a design.

I’m also following the articles over on GamePolitics about the Alabama video-games suit (Strickland et al vs Sony et al) – hopefully the judge will be sensible and throw it out on its ear, but you never know 😐

Just a quick note here to let Technorati know this blog is mine…

Technorati Profile

Yay – someone at TIGA has gotten round to updating the members list to include all the recently joined members (including us). We’ve actually been members for months now, but I had been holding off on publicising it on our front page, because with no mention of us on their pages it would look like we were lying. 😉

Anyway, I’ll edit our site later to include their logo and link.

P.S. Eek, just noticed – the link doesn’t even go to us. 🙁 Looks like its a cut and paste of the address above. Well, I’ve prodded them about it being .co.uk instead of .com, hopefully it’ll get fixed soon.

Sorry for the lack of posting the last couple of weeks, a combination of many distractions meant I never quite got round to writing. I’ve shifted gear recently and stopped focusing on the more risky potential contracts; instead I’m trying to concentrate on sorting out more solid things to make sure cash-flow works out. What does that mean for me personally? Well it means I’m learning C# for one thing, as it seems to be the language of choice for the majority of the software houses (in Edinburgh at least). It also means I’ve shelved the projects with less short-term potential (the little experimental games, etc.) to try and make the most productive use of my time. 🙂

Amen

I’ve finally got my hands on a couple of copies of Brave (one for my little cousin who I promised my free copy to, one for my own posterity). Of course, I don’t actually have a PlayStation 2 to play it on, but its nice to know that I have a copy and that 4 years of my life weren’t spent on something that I then lost without a trace! 🙂

For anyone who’s interested, I also have a couple of trailers of the game on the website – the official Sony trailer (34.4MB), and an unofficial VIS trailer (20.1MB) that didn’t make it to the public domain. Our internal one doesn’t have the dramatic orchestral theme (straight out of the bin marked ‘epic’ at Sony no doubt), but I think it shows the character and the feel better.

News in today that Peter Jackson’s production company will be working with Bungie, Universal and Fox. Good news I think – it certainly seems a better candidate for a game-to-movie conversion than Doom. Plus the Halo ring structure is kind of outdoors (discounting the unusual sky backdrop), so they get to set it in New Zealand and pump some more money into their economy. I always like to see the Kiwis get ahead (although I’m compelled to admit its because I’m secretly hoping they’ll all get so rich they’ll start giving away free plane trips over there).

Of course, game-to-movie conversions are always going to be at least a little cringe-worthy, even when the game story is good, the movie can’t fit everything in (like a book-to-movie conversion) and it loses its magic. At least movie-to-game conversions can expand on the movie’s plot and get you more involved in the world.

One good example I found recently though was the book that Raymond E. Feist wrote after the success of Betrayal at Krondor. I’ve never played the game (I know, I know, how can I call myself a gamer), but I can see the shape of the game in the book, and feel just how the various stages would map to quests and sub-quests; and how the character/group mechanics would work. You can even almost see the levelling mechanics at work in the character of Owyn. If only all medium crossovers were so effectively possible.

Well, Greg Costikyan seems to have caused quite a stir with the announcement of Manifesto Games (a new independent games portal site). I think he’s hit a common chord with a lot of the disillusioned game developers out there with his articles bemoaning the state of the games industry.

Anyway, I’m glad to say the Company will be helping out in the construction of the site; as I’m keen to see the project succeed. Of course, the fact that it gives us a better avenue to publish any games we develop (which would no doubt be niche market and thus hard to get out to potential customers) is a fringe benefit. 😉

Interesting article here on EVE/CCP’s use of IBM server tech to sustain their scalable server technology. I must admit I’ve always been impressed by their ability to grow the universe without having to break it into shards. Since massive universes have always been my thang, I’m curious as to the mechanics behind their scalable technology. I can see where the game mechanics help hide the boundaries between servers and where load balancing can be achieved, but I’d still like to poke around under the hood to see the little tricks they do to make it practical.