Here’s a little spiel I wrote up in response to a student doing research who was asking why we set up in Edinburgh rather than Dundee, and what I thought of Dundee as a creative hub. It’s got a bit of history of us in there, so I thought it would make a good blog post.

For us, really, it was a convenience thing. I studied in Edinburgh, and my first job (VIS Entertainment) was based in Dunfermline, so I commuted there for a while before they moved their office to Edinburgh. For 6 months or so I was seconded to the Dundee studio for a project, and the 2 hour commute each way took a real toll on my quality of life. Compared to that having an office in Edinburgh was a breeze, certainly much more social.

I’ve always loved Edinburgh as a city, it is an amazing city, with the warmth and personality of a smaller town, combined with the incredible history and range of night-life and culture that I think comes from it being a capital. So the best of both worlds I always thought. Glasgow is larger, but for me lacks charm and friendliness; Dundee has that charm and friendliness but lacks the same range of things to do that Edinburgh or Glasgow offer.

So all business motivation aside, I’ve always much preferred Edinburgh to the other options. When VIS went out of business in 2005, I had just moved flats and was committed to at least another 5 months of the lease. With that in mind, it was either Rockstar North, commuting to Dundee for a position with one of the various teams there, or trying to start my own studio as I had been thinking about for a while. With my own quality of life firmly in mind, I chose the latter, and started the studio, running it out of our spare room. The first 9 months or so was a struggle to find work, but I realised that there was a niche here in Edinburgh, for those developers who didn’t want to disappear into the behemoth that is R* North, but who (for personal reasons like me) couldn’t face shifting to Dundee, either relocating or commuting.

So rather than follow the herd and shift up to Dundee, I was determined to take advantage of both the personal enjoyment of living and working in Edinburgh and this talent pool. I figured that I would have a better chance recruiting people if I was running in Edinburgh, both experienced developers who wanted out of R* or Outerlight for whatever reason, and other people who would like to come and live in Edinburgh but who might not want to live in Dundee.

Of course, most of our business involves dealing with other games developers, and we do have a good working relationship with several studios up in Dundee. I do find that I spend a non-trivial portion of my time on the train up to Dundee to meet with those people, and that would be much easier if we were based up there with the other small studios. But many of our clients are down south as well, and so Edinburgh is well placed as a travel hub to get to all of those destinations.

Aside from the potential of easier collaboration with the many studios who are Dundee based, the other important consideration is premises rent. I gather that many of the studios who are tempted to the Seabraes developments are given massive discounts on the rent there, due to the council/Scottish Enterprise’s efforts to create a digital media hub. That’s a great thing, and certainly must weigh heavily on any manager who has to find space for their team. But for us, especially since we started out working remotely from home, this was never a pressing issue. When we reached a sufficient size where a shared team space was a good idea, we shifted out into our Palmerston Place office. By that point, with two developers, the proportion of our monthly outgoings which were rent was very small; with four developers it is even smaller. Salary has always dominated our cash-flow, and so rent price is less important than quality of life for the team.

We’ve been especially lucky in that both of our offices have come in at around 100 UKP per person per month, which even for Edinburgh is very cheap. Largely that is down to good fortune and timing, but it’s also because we’ve been prepared to look at non-traditional office spaces. Our first place was a room in a Georgian town-house in the West End of Edinburgh. The décor was fairly shabby, the services provided were minimal, but the place was nice; it had real character, and it was in a central location so that everyone on the team could get to it easily. There are plenty of pubs and shops and bus stops nearby, which makes it much nicer to work because you can get life stuff done. The new premises are set to be much nicer, the space is larger and it has a nice comfortable feel to it. The place is still being done up (hence the bargain rent), so it has many rough edges, but it feels like a good creative space. And again they are central so that quality of life is high.

The key thing I think for us is that the common feeling about Edinburgh (that property prices and rent are high) doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. We had quite a few options for office space, all within easily affordable price range, all central Edinburgh, all spaces in old buildings. The impression I get is that the myriad of old buildings in central Edinburgh have many quirky, odd spaces, which don’t allow the big, open-plan offices that companies seem to like these days. As a result, once your business expands beyond a certain size (10 or so people), it is very difficult to find a single space to suit, and so businesses have to go out of town, to spaces like South Gyle and Leith, before they find modern office-space that fits their specifications. And so the prices out of town rise, and there is a glut of small-sized offices slap bang in the centre of Edinburgh which keeps their prices reasonable.

As a small, creative business, we can make pretty much any office space work. We don’t have to have an open plan space, we would have been quite happy taking two mid-sized rooms in a town-house next to each other, and just wandering between them. So by being more flexible about the types of space we rent, we can fit into any of the odd shaped offices which central Edinburgh offers.

I realise of course that your questions are all relating to Dundee, and I’ve only talked about Edinburgh, but the answer to me is clear. We are based in Edinburgh, and unlikely to move, because:

1. Edinburgh’s great
2. Edinburgh’s cheap (enough for us)
3. Edinburgh has a talent pool we can take advantage of that a Dundee company can’t
4. Shifting to Dundee would make it easier to work with other Dundee businesses, but harder to work with everyone else

There are many good people and businesses that work in Dundee, and they probably disagree with me on the personal preference for Edinburgh as a city (in fact I can think of several off-hand who do, and tell me so on a regular basis); they would be better people to ask about why Dundee has been such a success. As an outsider, I certainly feel that incentives have played a part, but I think that probably a bigger factor is that the studios in Dundee are often started by Dundonians. And there are some very talented Dundonians, and the very fact that there are a lot of talented teams there already encourage more teams to set up alongside. So Dundee has a critical mass of talent, which itself helps to keep other talent nearby (its nice to know that if you’re relocating to somewhere like Dundee, that even if your new job goes belly-up, there’s plenty of other jobs nearby so you don’t have to relocate again).

The telling fact is I think that when one of those studios dies (e.g. Visual Science), the people involved with that will start up new businesses. The fact that those founders choose to start up again in Dundee and not relocate somewhere else does suggest that Dundee is a good place to run a creative team. Whether the incentives are forming an unnatural situation (i.e. those businesses would have moved elsewhere had incentives not been offered) or not is an interesting question, but one better answered by someone who’s started a business and chosen Dundee.

Amongst various things I had to sort out today, I was asked to write out a blurb for a potential client about improving build processes and automating/scripting things in the development pipe-line. It’s a subject I get quite passionate about, because unlike so many things in games development, it’s a nice task to do. There are clear, quantifiable goals (“make creating a build a one click process”, “speed up turn-around times for artists by 50%”), and usually plenty of options about how to get there. It is also a nice, self-contained task that you can just wade into and make progress on, unlike for example gameplay coding, where you can often get blocked on feedback from the creative team, having to rework things and so on.

I think that’s possibly why I like to spend time on improving our pipe-line at the weekends or in my off-time; even though I could spend more time on the big pile of client work that needs done, I find myself tackling little bits of our own pipe-line because I know it’s a task I can get done without any other input.

On that note, with some more collaboration with the developers on some little niggles, we finally switched our creaky old makefile based system over to using JamPlus properly. Both build processes still run side-by-side, but the JamPlus version has a fraction of the number of lines in the makefile, runs much faster doing dependency checking etc., and in general is much cleaner and will be more maintainable going forward. I’ll have to walk the guys through what’s there so they can maintain it too, but after that I should be able to scrap the makefiles altogether.

Next step is the art/audio asset to platform binary conversion process, and this is why I really wanted to switch over to JamPlus. Our previous art pipeline would always rebuild platform assets, even if the source assets hadn’t changed. That was fine early on, when all of our tools ran lightning fast and we had few source assets, but very quickly it grinds when you introduce slow tools (such as our font encoding tool that does smart packing of glyphs and colour conversion), or many assets. Also the build scripts which make those assets are all Lua based, and so we have different technology for building code than for building art and audio. I’m pretty hopeful that we can make JamPlus fulfill both functions, and in the process get fast dependency checking for our art assets so that only the assets that have changed get rebuilt. But for that I’ll need a free day, and those are few and far between right now.

Exciting news! And pictures!

We’ve finally shifted to our new place in Belford Road. It’s really just around the corner from our old place, but is generally much nicer, larger and more flexible than our old place. If you look back at the pictures of the Palmerston Place office it’s clear that we struggle to fit all four of us into the room, what with all the boxes and kit and other things. The new place has a lot more room to breath and so everyone gets more space. Plus we have a whole wall that we can have nothing but white-boards on, and I won’t need to hover behind Pete’s desk to draw on the white-board while he’s trying to work.

Enough talk – some pictures and a movie link:

Exactly what we’ll do with all this space I don’t really know yet! Obviously looking at the movie you’ll see the place is still being worked on – thankfully that just means that we get a good deal on the rent in return for putting up with dust and loose ends everywhere. But even with that, it feels like a much more creative space than the last office, a place that I can see us making games in.

In less upbeat news, we’ve been somewhat idle over the holiday period; one of our more important clients has had to stop giving us work due to a publisher they’ve been working with having trouble. So we are currently casting around for new clients and opportunities. Sadly that does mean that we’ll probably have to trim sails for a bit to get through the rough patch, and exactly what will happen we can’t really predict. And in the meantime we will just have to fill in our time by experimenting with some new gameplay ideas that we keep talking about but never get any proper time to do anything about.

Okay, note to library developers. When you’re providing documentation for your class library, a bunch of pages like:

SomeObject::GetID method

Gets the ID for the object

Does not mean that you have thorough documentation. Seriously. That is all.

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!