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.

And we’re back! By which I assume that the scheduled down-time while our server was migrated to another data centre has been completed without a hitch. I did intend to post here that it was going to happen, but it did in fact catch me by surprise because I thought it was supposed to be last Friday.

My only real mistake was to start reading some of the comments on the Dreamhost status blog regarding the move. Despite the fact that they were open and up front about the move – giving warning on the status page as well as by email more than 2 weeks in advance, they are still customers who feel free to bitch and moan in a most personal and horrific way. Seriously – this sort of stuff really makes me sad to see the sort of attitudes people have these days. Nowhere in the Dreamhost sales pitch does it imply that your 8 USD a month was somehow buying you a service that would be up for absolutely 100% of the time, and yet these folk think that even the best handled server downtime is grounds for some personal abuse. If I were running Dreamhost, I wouldn’t hesitate to respond to any of those “this is unacceptable” comments with “Oh I’m sorry, here’s a refund for the rest of your service, don’t let the door hit you in the arse on the way out”.

Anyway, trust in Dreamhost’s tech staff aside, my paranoia has been in high overdrive recently, so I had taken this opportunity to double check that our nightly backup procedure was working properly – and I was pleased to find it had. Which means that, should Dreamhost fall over at a critical juncture, we can fall back on our local mirror of the server and only lose work done since the previous night. Not that I’m expecting DH to fall over – they seem to have gotten on top of their random downtime issues, and since I’ve been tracking it with an external tool we’ve only been off-line for 4 hours out of the last 6 months, and no more than 2 hours in a single outage. Why don’t we just host our work locally and use an off-site backup? Well, we do a lot of collaboration with other client, and upstream bandwidth from the office is rather precious. That and the fact that Dreamhost already have quite a few mechanisms in place to restore connection and hardware problems, so they’re probably far more reliable than our local server machines anyway.

Of course, even that’s not enough for us, paranoia wise – not only do we have the primary copies in a well maintained place off site, and secondary copies in the office, we also keep physical (DVD) copies of the repositories in yet another location. Of course the first two are all automated, but the third requires me to actually go over and poke the office server to make a DVD and take it away with me. Unfortunately my attempts to train the local squirrels to do automate the process for me have been unsuccessful, but I have high hopes…

Or so it feels – I can barely keep my eyes open. A combination of a very long couple of weeks and a cat who my girlfriend has somehow trained into believing that scratching on our bedroom door from 3:30 am onwards is a good way to get food has left me more than a bit bleary. And today was the day that I was supposed to try out some decaffeinated filter coffee in the machine. Yes, I realise it’s breaking the cardinal rule of programming, but I can’t seem to get the balance right between coffee that’s so strong it makes my teeth jump by mid-afternoon and weak watery rubbish that tastes of nothing. Anyway, I just can’t see that happening, so it’ll be the regular coffee today, at least until I can perk up a bit.

We kick off on the second of our work for hire jobs this morning, so now we are splitting our time between jobs. Not many details to share as yet because I haven’t cleared it with our clients, but I hope to rectify that soon and have something to say here about it. Still not heard back from our licensed developer application yet, but I’m putting that down to applying over the holiday season introducing an extra delay. Admittedly, we’d have little time to do any solid work on it right now, but I’m hoping that things will settle into a more forgiving routine soon.

Interesting piece here with quotes from Jon Hare (ex Sensible Software) that popped up in the Google Alerts for my name (yes I know, how vain is it to be searching for myself, but it throws up the ‘other’ Chris Chapman as well). Two major points I agree with:

1) the quality of programming has dropped with the move to larger teams; I think that is somewhat inevitable though, you just can’t sustain the same team dynamics that you get with less than a dozen team members. Personally I think the approach of scaling up not by having a larger team, but by using multiple small (<12) teams has merit. Of course, the ability to do that hinges on being able to break up the development effort into tangible pieces that can be tackled by the teams.

2) British developers are continually being forced to ‘globalise’ (i.e. Americanise) their products in order to try and maximise sales in the North American market. But to do that, I think we are selling ourselves short – not just in terms of making the most of the British sense of humour, but also the culture we have here. There are a lot of stories to be told, and game ideas which could only come from a British team – but I think they are being passed over because the publishers think that they won’t sell in the broader marketplace. I’m very hopeful that reduced barriers to market from downloadable content will help the balance shift back towards interesting titles (and not just be an excuse for more shovel-ware)

Pros:

• 40 minutes saved walking to and from office = 40 minutes extra work time
• Hot tasty food for lunch instead of just sandwiches
• Can use break time to go out and do much needed food shopping

Cons:

• Cats alternating between walking on my keyboard while I’m typing, and lying nearby looking grumpily at me because I’m not playing with and/or feeding them
• Harder to concentrate (see point about cats)

Well, I think it’s about even on those. Never mind – back in the office tomorrow, so Bertie won’t starve to death in my absence. Working on a Saturday you say? Well that’s down to the sheer volume of work we’ve got on at the moment – the quiet time from before Christmas has been replaced by a deluge, and never one to shy from a bit of hard graft, I’m working a bit extra. I’m pretty confident we’ll settle back into a normal routine once both contracts are established, but for now it’s a little chaotic. Certainly I’m well aware of my previous rants about 9-5, Monday to Friday being the only sensible way to work, but at least temporarily I’m happy to push a little more if it means we deliver what the clients need.

Oh, and with regards to people who have emailed me lately about recruitment, I apologise for the delay in getting back to you, but paperwork has been somewhat shuffled to the back of the agenda. The situation will be rectified soon, I promise.

Hurrah – we survived another holiday season. No, not holiday season, that’s a bit too P.C. Christmas damn it! We survived another Christmas. It doesn’t just have to be for the Christians. It’s a holiday all about giving, receiving, and generally keeping the happy little consumer driven market afloat for another year. But I’m certainly not going to complain, as I came out of it with Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid 3 and Zelda – enough to keep me going for quite a while.

Regardless of how much Christmas is about buying of things these days, its still nice to see family, share a little happiness, and generally over-indulge a little. But once it (and the inevitable drinking too much on Hogmanay) are out of the way, I’m happy just to get back to some sort of routine. The new work that we were supposed to start before the holidays has finally kicked off, and we can get stuck in and get some solid stuff produced.

Work on our own technology has continued apace over the holidays though, and we’ve romped through the preliminary work we were doing to test out our engine. We’ll have to see how things balance out with external contracts, but I’m hopeful we won’t have to shelve our own work entirely, and can continue on prototyping our little game ideas to see what’s fun and where we can go with them.

So as I look out, bleary-eyed, at the huge puffs of steam being vented past our window by the building’s boiler, I’m kind of sorry that moving to a proper office has meant that I can’t just stay at home in the nice warm flat and work from there on frosty days like these. Still, the office itself is warm enough, it’s just the trip to it that means I have to brave the icy conditions.

Just read an interesting article here on longer term planning with the Scrum methodology. Good stuff, but there’s still the big chasm of “how do we get the publisher to sign up to this”. Until the people paying the money are okay with the less detailed milestone definitions that come along with agile planning, there will continue to be issues. It’s all very well running teams on agile internally, but until there is a solid contractual way of satisfying the publisher’s need for security with the developer’s need for flexibility, there will still be problems. At the moment the milestones are defined fully at the start, but it’s a naive producer that doesn’t expect the content of those milestones to change. It’s at the developer’s disadvantage though – the contract states that they are bound to deliver what’s in the milestone list, and if they don’t the publisher is within their rights to cancel the project at their discretion. They generally won’t, but it’s a quick get out if they want it. Even if the publisher and the developer both know that the milestones have become meaningless, when they’re written into the contract it means that there needs to be a re-negotiation to fix them again.

Personally I think it’s far better to start out with a high level statement of intent – that the developer will be working on a particular title for the publisher, and that they will use their best efforts to deliver builds of acceptable quality. The regular delivery of those builds is part of the process, and the method of arbitration as to what is ‘acceptable’ is written into the contract as well. That way the publisher still retains the majority of the power (control over what they deem acceptable), but they can’t use that control to avoid their responsibilities to allow the developer reasonable time to deliver something acceptable.

Okay, so we have had our Jobs page up for a while now, but ever since we started I’ve had a continual stream of emailed applications from potential employees. Some are impressive, some are not, but this post isn’t directed at any of them in particular. It’s intended as a guide to anyone else who is thinking of applying, so I’ll put a link to it on the right hand side.

First off, one of the biggest positive factors for a prospective employee is to show enthusiasm, both for developing games and for our company. We have this web-site and blog – it’s always been there, it’s fairly open. You could readily skim over everything on it in 5 minutes. So if your application clearly shows that you haven’t put in that small amount of effort, expect it to be either binned outright, or at least given short shrift. I make an effort to write a personal reply to every application, but the ones that annoy me get very little attention.

That point is at the core of why most applications that turn up in my in-box will fail, but I can sum the rest up in bullet points (most of which represent actual applications).

1. DO understand that you’re applying for a games job, not just a ‘software’ or ‘IT’ job. Those who end up at games companies are primarily those who have a real passion for games, and that comes through readily in a good application.
2. DON’T show ignorance of who we are and what we do. There are two of us, and we primarily do custom software development for other games studios. And yet we get applications which:
   1. talk about things like meshing with our organisation and looking forward to working in a large team.
   2. ask about jobs on our QA team
   3. are an impersonal email, even though the applicant worked with Pete and/or I at VIS
3. DON’T send a generic “please I would like a job at your company” email. This includes:
   1. not mentioning our company at all
   2. not making sure the cover letter is appropriate to our company,
   3. the worst sin of all: sending the exact same email to every games developer in Scotland, and leaving all of those email addresses clearly visible in the To: line of the email!
4. DO make sure your email and CV are free of spelling and grammar mistakes. Bad spelling and grammar says to me: “I’m so slack that I can’t be bothered to spend the 15 minutes it would take to look them over properly, despite the fact that I’m applying for a job that might be hugely important to the next few years of my life”. Frankly that’s not a person I’m necessarily keen to employ.

Paying attention to these details take a very short amount of time. There aren’t so many games companies out there that you can’t do them for every place you apply to. Personally I think for the potential reward (i.e. getting a job), they’re worth it. I’m sure more bad examples will appear in the future, so I’ll be keeping this post up to date.