Wow. Five whole years. In games industry terms, that’s practically ancient. And even more strangely for me, I’ve now been running my own business for longer than I spent working as an employee for anyone else. The work we’ve done over the past five years has been so varied that I struggle to remember all of it; there are some projects from when I first started out that I forgot all about it until I was digging through our backup archive recently. Of course, we’ve had our ups and downs – this past year has been especially hard on me in particular, what with all the travelling around, and working away from Edinburgh. But the very fact that we’re here and still beavering away I think says a lot. And I must extend my heartfelt thanks to my associate Tim for doing such a great job here in Edinburgh while I’ve been kept busy with Crackdown 2.

Year Six will, I think, be far more eventful for us than Year Five. It’s too early to say yet what it will consist of, but I think there will be less X360 development, and a load more iPhone work. Of course, my prediction skills are fairly awful, so I should probably not try to guess in advance. What we do know is that we want to get our own projects out there and selling, and the iPhone is a far better opportunity for us to do that than, for example, WiiWare. And there will undoubtedly be work-for-hire as well, which is almost always interesting in itself, getting a chance to help out on other fun projects, and do what we do best – give our clients the software development help they need to ship. And if nothing else, we shall see just how furry the beard can get…

The Crackdown 2 Crunch Beard

Picked up on when reading through some old posts on the sweng_gamedev list, and had to be shared.

So after a weekend up north in Glencoe, trying to get my head back in some kind of productive space, I hear from my sister that she’s given birth to not one, but two miniature people today. So I’ve raised a glass or two to my sister’s new family, which pretty much excludes the possibility that I’ll do anything useful tonight.

Suffice to say that while I’ve continued to work on CruiseControl.NET plugins, I’ve yet to write up anything useful that could be condensed into a blog post. My article on employee Terms and Conditions for IndieVision.net has been shunted to one side, again. I had a productive meeting on Friday with one of the developers of Visual Studio, making an effort to persuade them to include some games development friendly features with their next version (not 2010, the one after); hopefully one or two of them will make it in and I’ll have improved the development eco-system just a little bit.

But in general I’m still struggling with the long commutes to Dundee, and the limited amount of time in the evenings to be productive. So on that rather downbeat note, I shall finish up, and place a tick in the entry on my task list for “Development Blog”. Hopefully future entries will be more avuncular and jolly. Wow, how long have I been waiting to use that adjective to describe myself… 🙂

Aha! Just downloaded the WordPress app for iPhone, we shall see if writing blogs on the move lets me be more reliable with my posts. As I write this particular draft (lamenting the iPhone’s keypad) I’m on a bus on Princes St, moving between Microsoft at the East End and our own office at the West End. This afternoon I’ll be talking through our ideas for iPhone apps with Tim.

That’s right folks, we’re now all set up for iPhone development, MacBook, iPod Touch, iPhone, and a raft of ideas. As I’m swamped at the moment, Tim’s taking the lead on all this, and our first project will be a small productivity app that he came up with. More details and screenshots as we get closer to completion…

This started life as a response to a query about whether or not I knew of any books for learning games design for someone just starting out, but it is a common enough question I thought I’d promote it into a blog post (especially since I’ve been too busy to post recently).

There are certainly good books on games design, GameCareerGuide.com I think has a few articles listing good titles. I couldn’t judge their quality as I’m primarily a programmer rather than a designer. However I’ve always thought that trying to learn games design by reading books (or even going to lectures in a design course) is a flawed way of doing it. You wouldn’t try to learn to play chess by watching videos of someone else playing; maybe once you’ve already got a good grounding in the subject and you know enough to realise how much more there is to learn. But until you’ve got a good handle on the fundamentals, it would just be a deluge of information, with very little context.

My take on it is that, rather than spend a lot of money on books on the subject, that one of the best ways to learn about game design is by evaluating games. That is, playing a wide variety of games, and taking the effort to critically evaluate and compare titles. There are titles held up as great examples in their genres, like Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Halo, Command and Conquer, Call of Duty, Fallout 3, etc. There are also games which try hard but just aren’t as good. As a designer, you’re expected to know why some games are good, and why some are bad.

If you can take a pad and pencil and write down what are the good and bad points of these games, and compare them against other games, then you’re learning the fundamentals of game design. Does the user interface feel good, or is it confusing? Look at the challenges in the game and evaluate them – are they fun? Do they allow players to learn skills, and feel like they are progressing?  Is the difficulty curve sensible? Is there sufficient challenge and variety in that challenge?

You can play a game and look beyond the immediate experience, to see the mechanics behind the game, and judge whether they work or don’t. You can look at several different games in the same genre and pick out what they have in common, and where they are unique. You can spot bad design just by playing a game, and then think of ways that you might avoid those flaws. Anyone can do those things, but a good designer is great at doing them. A good designer does that without even thinking, they celebrate the good in games they’ve played, and vilify the bad. And no-one can be a good designer without experience of games, lots of games, all different sorts of games. If you want to be a games designer, you should be playing as many games as possible.

The only other thing I would say, and it may sound harsh to those who come here hoping for insight because they want to jump straight in as a designer, but it’s better to clear up any misconceptions now. Practically no-one becomes a games designer as their first job in the industry. Really. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who was a designer as their first job in the industry, and I know a fair few designers.

The competition to become a designer is fierce, and it is very hard to prove your worth in an interview. Most often, designers start in another facet of the industry – most commonly in the art or programming side, but also sometimes from QA / testing – and while they’re at a studio in that role they can demonstrate their ability as a designer and persuade the management that they would be useful in a design role. And even then there are dozens of people at a studio, all of whom have varying amounts of talent in design, and only room for a few people in actual design roles.

So if you really, really want to get into games, then don’t focus solely on design, you need another role. At most studios, in most roles you will have some design input into the game you’re making, especially if you are keen and get involved in design discussions, even more so if your ideas are good. But if you’re expecting that you’ll do a Computer Games Design course at University X and then swan straight into a straight design role (even a junior one), then you are going to be sorely disappointed.

I must admit, I’m a bit of a CruiseControl.NET fan. It drives most of our automation systems, and provides us a backbone from which we can hang many different systems. I use it both here at the Company, and when I’m doing tools consulting with other teams. That said, it’s not without it’s flaws and limitations; not least of which is the lack of documentation on custom plug-ins.

There are a wide variety of pre-built plug-ins already available, for source control systems like Perforce and Subversion, and build systems like Nant and MSBuild. These usually work pretty well straight out of the box, if you’re building a vanilla continuous integration server. That is, every change made to source control results in a build of some sort. I’m not going to dwell on why that’s a good idea (it is), I’m only going to say that there are times when you need something different. There are inelegant ways around this, but in truth CC.NET has all of the customisability to let you do this properly within the system – by defining your own plug-ins.

Reading the documentation on CC.NET, you get only a single page of documentation on custom plug-ins, and that page is pretty spotty at best. It shows you a “hello world” plug-in, with no clues as to what information you get into the plug-in, when your plug-in’s methods will be called, or how you’re supposed to pass either status information or logging back to CC.NET itself. In short, it’s pretty useless, other than to highlight that the facility is there, and give you enough of a pointer to get you into the code and poking around.

Sure enough, with Auto-complete on, you find that there are lots and lots of information passed to you, and by debugging and breakpointing inside your plug-in, you can get a feel for when your code is called. Making CC.NET load and unload your plug-in is refreshingly easy and fairly robust, and once you figure out how to pass parameters to your plug-in by specifying them in the config file, you can see the possibilities open up. More importantly than the sample building plug-in though is that, through a bit of digging, you find you can also define your own custom source control plug-ins, and with the combination of those two things, you can do pretty much anything you want.

In one particular situation, I’ve been working with a Perforce (p4) source control system, and a rather black-box build system for the game itself. Rather than wanting a build made of every single commit to the p4 repository, I needed it to make only particular builds – those marked as verified by the developer’s internal test team. This is a pretty common situation when you’ve got an automated build system – you have a raw source control system that lies underneath, which operates at the level of atomic commits. But above that is a logical structure, which only people understand – that operates at the level of ‘nightly builds’ and milestones. You have custom logic which you can apply to the system, using some basic rules. So in essence you have a virtual source control system, built on top of the raw version. By writing a custom source control plug-in for CC.NET, you can expose an interface to your automated build server, so that it recognises when something new is available from that virtual source control, and only builds exactly what you want.

CC.NET offers great flexibility, and those people who develop it, know all about that flexibility. But information on what you can do, and how, is rarer than hens teeth. So over the next few weeks, I’m going to write up and publish here some examples of real-world plug-ins that I’ve written. That should hopefully give readers enough context to go off and write their own plug-ins, to suit their own needs.

Disclaimer: all of the points made here refer to CruiseControl.NET 1.4.x, not the later versions of the system. There are some big and eagerly awaited advancements in the newly released 1.5 version, that many people like myself will have to avoid for now, until it’s bedded in.

Maybe it’s the Scotsman in me, but when the yearly cold-snap hits Edinburgh in late November, it always cheers me up. It’s the time of year when the weather changes from being mushy and wet into being cold and dry. Scarves and hats are no longer a choice to make, they’re simply required. So even the weekly trips up to Dundee become pleasant trips out in the brisk cold. Mind you, in weather like this, the office heating becomes a must. Thankfully, the Microsoft office, in all it’s newness, has great heating.

Unfortunately, the heating in our office is less than stellar at the moment. Our part of the office is fine, but the people we share an office with (Alban Books), have little to no heat at all. They’re all huddled around electric heaters, and still cold for it. Worse still, the thermostat for the entire office is out in the hall, which is poorly insulated from the outside. So the thermostat is convinced that the entire office needs heating up, so our part of the office gets baked, and Alban and the hall remain frigid. And if I’m up at Ruffian, their heating is all screwy as well – with people wandering around with hats and gloves and scarves on all the time. But sadly I keep forgetting  my hobo gloves, which are in the office with Tim! So Waverley Gate is the only place with a reasonable temperature at the moment.

So to brighten up the blog, here’s a picture of the lovely rooftop garden at Waverley Gate. I don’t spend much time out on it, due to the aforementioned cold, but I do like to look out onto it while I’m making coffee or reheating last night’s leftovers for lunch.

This week’s blog entry finds me back on a train to Warrington to visit Evolution, a newly married man. My honeymoon, last week, was spent pleasantly disconnected from the wired world, in a forest cabin in Argyll. Not totally electronics free, of course, the laptop went with me and I had a chance to play through some Sam & Max, Spore, and replaying Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in advance of picking up the sequel which should be out around now. Other than that though, I left things in Tim’s capable hands. My boss at Microsoft, in addition to the shiny new laptop and office provision in Edinburgh, kindly consented to giving me a couple of weeks off around the wedding. I’m not really accustomed to taking time off any more though, so the weeks leading up to the big day I was still remotely monitoring the build systems down in Reading and keeping things ticking over. Happily the systems I’ve set up in the previous few months don’t require much maintenance, so this time away has been good in that it’s proved the reliability of the build setup.

TIGA

Near the end of October, I also attended a panel discussion at the Scottish Parliament that TIGA was pushing. This was partly for them to push their tax-breaks agenda in amongst Scottish politicians, but also a good opportunity for the Scottish games industry to show their faces to the wider world. We do tend to suffer from our normally clandestine dealings; if you’re in the industry everyone knows each other, but it was usually hidden away from the media or non-industry observers, except in small, tightly controlled PR moves. I’m glad to see that the industry has reached a level of maturity where discussing our needs with politicians and other interested parties is feasible and useful.

I’ve been down-beat about the merits of TIGA’s tax-break lobbying, both from a personal political viewpoint (I don’t like subsidies) and from a small business perspective. The tax breaks proposed seem to be of most benefit to larger companies, to encourage them to set up large studios in the UK. While I like that idea from the point of view of improving the general health of the development community here, it’s unlikely that we as a small outsourcing studio would see any direct benefit from these policies. I was uncomfortable to think that I would be the only nay-sayer in the room, but I was glad to find that the other smaller studios are similarly cynical about the policy.

More interesting to me was the other topic dwelt on by the panel – the push towards better education and training for new developers, and better opportunities for students to secure a role in the games industry. I’ve been worried for a long while about talent draining from the industry, for various reasons, and recent business conditions are making developers less and less likely to take risks on graduate developers. Anything we, the government, or the educational institutions can do to make it easier for developers to take on graduates is a win in my book, both in the short and long terms. I was very interested to hear some of the programmes that Abertay has been developing along these lines; reaching out to industry with prototyping teams (I’d imagine making use of the White Space facility), helping students get placements inside studios, etc. While I’m not in favour of any one institution being the only place to go to get into the industry, it’s good to see them leading the way. I made a point of saying to the politicians in the room that if they wanted to really support the long term development and stability of our industry, they’d do well to support and extend these programmes. Especially if those programmes were also made available to students/graduates across the higher education field. I’d love to see an avenue for straight Computer Science students to get into the industry, without them having to take the risk of doing such a specialised degree as a games industry course.

Anyway, it was a good panel, with interesting points all round, and while I don’t think that anything new or earth-shaking was said, I think I’m more positive about the long term prospects of the industry as a result of attending.

This week is back to work properly though; this day down with Evolution to demo the stuff that Tim’s developed the last few weeks, and the rest of the week settling into my new routine with MGS. That will be splitting my time between Edinburgh (I’ll try to get a few pictures from Microsoft Edinburgh’s lovely roof terrace with its wonderful views over the Waverley valley) and Dundee. As is usual with any time off, especially when I’m disconnected from the Internet for any length of time, I’m itching to get stuck back into things and start delivering useful stuff again. There were quite a few things on my list leading up to leaving Reading, but none that could be started in earnest until I was back. Hopefully now that I’m not exiled in Reading, I can settle into some sort of sensible routine, and still leave time for more regular blog posts here than I’ve managed recently.

2 more days in Reading, tick tock, tock tick. The new laptop MGS have ordered for me has turned up, and all in all it’s very shiny. Well not so much shiny as glowy. Seriously. There’s like a dozen different backlights, under the keyboard, around the trackpad, and the little alien logo on the top cover, all of which can be set to any colour you like. Which is absolutely overkill, and yet the loveliest little feature I’ve seen in a long while. All of mine are set to dark blood red of course, as it should be!

Windows 7 is working out really quite well as well – the new taskbar system is very much how I think of things when I’m working with many windows. I was always quick to turn off the grouping of windows under Vista, because it was just annoying. The grouping under the large icons in Windows 7 however seems a lot more natural, and I no longer have the “so many windows the taskbar gets flooded” effect I used to suffer from. I’m trying awfully hard not to be a Microsoft corporate shill, but it does feel like this is thankfully a better successor to XP than Vista was. We’ll see how things pan out with driver support and Nintendo, but I’ll probably upgrade the office soon enough.

Not much else to say really, I’ve been under the weather a bit, so fairly unproductive, but I’ve been fine with that for a while. I’ve been working on our Space prototype and sorting out some really interesting problems to do with scale and large objects, but I’ve reached the point where I need a few hours with some whiteboards, some loud music, and some serious thinking time, before I can progress to the eureka solution which feels like it’s hovering just beyond my grasp.

In the meantime, I’ve been killing time with Edge (the subject of the shenanigans from Tim Langdell, which are now thankfully almost done with – in case you haven’t heard, he’s losing), iBASS (a legacy from my younger days, which has been somewhat disappointing in it’s obtuse puzzle design), and a return to Left 4 Dead prompted by testing out my super-powered laptop (which by the way runs L4D like a dream, as long as I remember to put earphones in because the fans are super-loud).

As I write this, with clammy skin and fuzzy-head, I’m thinking that my current trip back to Edinburgh is going to leave me with some unwelcome left-overs. My fiancée has picked up a horrible and intense cold-like illness, and as I’ve been providing care, it’s pretty likely I’ve now got it too. I can feel the start of it – the back of my throat starting to rasp, the contents of my head feeling like they are swelling to a size bigger than my skull. And as I’m heading back down to Reading tomorrow, I think I’m going to end up suffering through the worst of it on my own.

As bad as mooching around the house in Reading while ill will be, it will give me a good excuse to take some time off and relax; something I’ve not managed to do in a while now. I’ve been working pretty much flat out on Microsoft related work, culminating in this trip back home (well, technically Dundee, but I’d be in trouble with the missus if I didn’t use it as a reason to have a long weekend back in Edinburgh). While there’s been time off, it’s been wrapped in working weekends to make up for the time lost. I don’t really like doing that, but I’d committed to getting something achieved by today, and working through was the only feasible way to get that done.

So it’s probably good if I’m forced to slow down a bit and return to some sort of normal schedule. I’ve come to the end of the initial contract with Microsoft, but since I’ve been doing useful work, we’ve agreed to extend it further, with some conditions. Namely, that I no longer have to be living and working full time in Reading. Hallelujah. I’ll be getting married next month, and I wouldn’t rate my odds of seeing 6 months married if I was still living away from home. Instead I’ll be based in Edinburgh, with some significant amount of time on-site with the developers, and regular visits back down to Reading.

It’s been very taxing trying to maintain things in Edinburgh remotely, on top of a full time contract at Microsoft, and visits to Evolution. I seem to spend all of my time on trains. But the new working arrangements should be much more manageable, and allow me to get back some semblance of a normal life. If nothing else, it will allow me to get some time in the same office as Tim – who’s done a sterling job avoiding going stir crazy being in the office all on his own for almost 6 months now.