One of the good things about my new, doctor ordered, walk to the office in the morning is that it gives me 20 minutes or so of un-interrupted thinking time. I can’t do anything, no-one is asking me anything, so my mind is free to wander. This last week we’ve been brain-storming development ideas for our own games, finally. Engine and tools work is all very nice and satisfying, but without a clear end-goal, it’s not so productive.

So Pete and I had a proper idea generating session last week, and settled on a plan for making a small game as a first step. Well, second step really – as an intermediate step we’re making Pong, on the grounds that if the engine can do Pong, then it has all the components necessary to prototype game-play for our real first title.

The walk to work this morning though was about coming up with the concept for the real game though – we had some good game-play ideas, but nothing to tie them together into a game. I’m very much in favour of the few-short-paragraphs-of-exposition-then-into-the-game approach (think Super Mario Brothers), but we still need that exposition to give us something to focus the game style around. And a name for our protagonist always helps to coalesce ideas around as well.

So, since I didn’t have any pressing deadlines this week, I agreed to visit Paisley University and give a talk to the undergraduates there. Sorry, University of the West of Scotland:Paisley Campus (that’s soo got to bite them in the arse when it comes to their stationary). As an industry, I think we’ve somewhat dug ourselves into a hole in the past few years, by cutting back on hiring new people (and instead insisting on experience); now we’re facing a talent shortage, especially on the software side. We’ve seen the error of our ways now, and I see more adverts for graduates again, but that dry spell will no doubt have diminished our talent pool enough that it will take years to restore.

Nothing in the talk was particularly enlightening I’m sure, but I tried to impart a few of the things that you learn after your first years in the games industry: how to write a good CV, what it’s like working at smaller or larger companies, how to spot when your company’s about to go down the tubes. You know the sort of thing – stuff that no-one will tell you before you actually get your job, the sort of stuff you learn in the pub after work. I always remember talks from industry people when I was at Edinburgh, and they almost invariably had people saying “this is our company, look at how shiny it is, here’s our token recently hired graduate, listen to him tell you how shiny it is”. It was always about the potential for recruiting the graduates, and glossing over all the potential downsides.

So I tried to give a balanced view of the industry: a quick summation of the current state of the business, the potential likelihood that your employer will make you work unpaid overtime to ship the game, and the likelihood that the company folds while you’re still working there. Of course, I tried to stress the up-sides as well: the joy involved in making games, the rewards involved in shipping a title that people love. I hope it came out fairly balanced. Otherwise I must look like a bit of a numpty – why would I still be working in the games industry if the pros didn’t outweigh the cons?!

Anyway, if it didn’t come across in the talk, I’ll say it now – making games is great. It’s fun, it’s rewarding, and I find it hard to imagine how a job in the regular software industry would compare. Sure, there’s less money in games, but the non-monetary rewards are many.

And so we finally wrapped up the latest work we’ve been doing for Add Knowledge yesterday, with a trip up to IC-CAVE at Abertay to drop off the PSP kits and an archive of the final software. Our Scrum board has been slowly shuffling cards over to the ‘done’ side, and now it’s all neat and tidy.

Just in time for me to strip them all off and put them in a drawer. I should really look over our velocities and backlogs for the last part of the project, but for now I think it’s time to put it to one side. All in all we delivered what was asked for and on time, despite having to shuffle things around for a big demonstration in early October, so I think we can be satisfied with our recent efforts.

I think I’ll be spending the rest of the day making sure everything is tidied up after the deadline and that all the little bits of admin I’ve been putting off get done. Then, time for a relaxing weekend, and maybe some time finishing off Phoenix Wright 3.

Well, with the recent furore around Manhunt 2’s omission of certain developers from the credits of a game they clearly developed, the IGDA has put a reminder up about their work on establishing a Game Crediting Guide. It’s a fairly comprehensive guide now, and looking over it I agree with most of the  stipulations within. I could argue that attribution of team roles to individuals is perhaps not necessary (especially when some developers fulfil many roles and so appear in the credits many times), but that’s probably a rare enough case not to worry about.

Proper credits is certainly a real issue though, as it’s a tangible benefit to your team. Being able to point to a good and/or successful title and say “I made that” is of real value for their sense of worth and their career long term. While not being credited isn’t the end of the world, there are enough unscrupulous people that claim credit for the work of others that not being credited when it is due is sufficient cause for doubt on the part of an interviewer.

Credits are, in my experience, usually knocked together at the end of the development process, and not thought about in advance. The list of people is usually drawn up quickly, and if there has been a lot of movement in and out of the team, people can easily be missed. It’s the producers job to maintain a credits list throughout development, detailing who worked on the title and for how long, and it’s not a chore which should be neglected.

Finally, my biggest bug-bear is with the ordering of the credits. I’m sorry, but the publishers, external producers and company management are not the most important people for a game. The director comes first, followed by the core team, and then the less involved parties. It might seem like a good idea to pander to the management or external partners, but you’re selling your team short if you don’t proclaim them loudly to be the most important part of the game.

Just back from Glasgow, after attending a seminar from OfCom about their Public Service Publishing work. Yes, I know, PSP. Confusing, and unwieldy to say the full version. Here’s hoping they change it before long. I’d suggest British Media Office, but that probably wouldn’t get past committee.

Anyway, the goal of the PSP is, as far as I can tell, to provide a vehicle for financing public service content, in the same manner that content like the BBC, ITV and C4 currently provide. I believe the remit goes something like “content that informs and entertains, and enriches our cultural heritage”.  The consensus is that the traditional TV broadcasters and producers are unsuited to finance new types of content, such as websites (interactive and regular) and games.

Of course, it is the games part that interests me. There is, I believe, huge scope for producing games which both inform and entertain. Specifically I object to the fact that we have to Americanise our games in order to target the largest possible audience. Even when set in fantastical or science fiction environments, we still get American voice actors to play our roles. Our children can readily identify many American cultural references, at the expense of our own. We don’t have fire-hydrants, our taxis are black, and our postal carriers drive red vans.

I think there are many games to be made that use British culture, settings and characters. Be that an adventure game based on Inspector Rebus, or a modification to a real-time strategy game to put it in a British historical setting. We invest much in British programming, for the education of our children or the entertainment of us all. For E.R. we have Casualty, for the Bold and the Beautiful we have Eastenders. But where is GTA: Liverchester? Okay, bad example.

Anyway, the seminar itself was informative, but not entirely heartening. The games industry moves very quickly. Project life-spans are measured in the order of months, not years – and I’m not convinced that the PSP would be able to move quickly enough to operate successfully in games. It was clear from the turn-out (a couple of dozen TV industry types, and only myself and someone from Realtime Worlds representing the games sector). Apparently in the London version of this seminar, games weren’t represented at all. And yet the shift in people’s habits, especially in the young, is clearly moving away from TV and towards games and the internet. While the PSP is a good step towards allowing new content creators access to public money to make worthwhile public content, it still feels like the traditional TV producers, who have little to no games experience (and I’d venture ability) are lining themselves up to be the ones to continue to recieve that public funding.

OfCom are still in the process of a ‘review’ stage that is feeling out the remit of the PSP, and from talk at the seminar, is more than a year away from even really getting going. With the rate at which technology is developing and public attitudes towards how they use media are changing, I can’t help but think that this is moving too slowly.

So in summary, I think the PSP is a laudable idea, but it needs to stop worrying about the bickering about what exactly the PSP should do (primarily by TV producers and broadcasters who feel their financing is being threatened), and get down and dirty and actually get to encouraging more public ‘new media’ content. Whether that be by financing, or simply by facilitating existing projects, whatever – as long as what they do results in publicly valuable content being produced that otherwise would not have been. Getting mired in an extended ‘consultation period’ where people argue back and forth is not only inefficient, it may mean that any action they take is just too late, and the free market will have replaced valuable public service content with commercialised pap (Beauty and the Geek anyone?), and may never get the public’s attention back.

Speaking strictly from a games industry point of view – unless the PSP is a responsive and fast moving entity, it will never be able to engage the help of the dedicated games sector, and may find itself quickly outpaced. That would relegate public service games to being second rate, pale imitations of their commercial counterparts, and so never gain the attention of the public they are supposed to serve.

Almost a month without posting – that’s very bad of me. We’ve been going all out to meet varying deadlines for Add Knowledge – most notably some demonstrations to senior politicians to enthuse them about the project. All has seemingly gone well, but not without a serious amount of effort for all concerned! Hopefully we’ll start to see some movement on the project proper soon as a result. We seem to have tamed the worst of the PSP, and although the debugger we’re using is horrible, it’s not been too traumatic to get our previous work converted over to the PSP and add some more features.

We’ve also been in the new office for a month now as well – it’s working out better than I had hoped. I was pretty productive working from home before, but something about being in an office environment focuses the mind somewhat, which is good. Having a space where Pete and I can collaborate when he’s working on our stuff is a good thing too. I’m determined to get a white-board soon though, as it’s really hard to communicate structure concepts when you’re drawing on paper or post-its.

Anyway, today I came back early, as I have two new cats that I went to pick up today. Lots of mewling and meowing, but they’ve settled quickly in the flat. Cats seem to be scarily good at making themselves at home wherever they feel like, so hopefully they’ll not mind too much when I leave them on their own tomorrow. Breakables hidden away in drawers first I think though.

It occurred to me while watching a re-run of a pilot for a particular popular sci-fi show, that perhaps people worry too much about the plot for their sci-fi games. Sure, the Phl’aarg forces might have strong and compelling reasons for attacking the Kerflump home-world, but let’s be honest, your average game player really doesn’t care.

In my view, the job of a back story for a game is to allow willing suspension of disbelief for long enough that the player can enjoy the game itself. If the game is fun, the player will remember the story with fondness, even if it does follow closely the plot of some more famous film or book. The key factor is that the story shouldn’t make the player cringe, and shouldn’t contain the kind of horrible glaring inconsistencies that they can’t ignore. Some of the most effective game back stories are the simplest. Mario has to rescue Princess Peach. Sonic has to free little animals from the evil Dr. Robotnik.

If you are going for a more complex story, consistency is more important than fleshing out details. Once you’ve persuaded the reader/player to make the first jump to your story, try not to force them to make any more. You might persuade them to accept that magic is real, or that technology allows you to move instantaneously between points, but don’t change the rules afterwards to suit some awkward bit of plot development. Choose your universe rules at the start, keep them consistent and simple, and then base your story around those rules. The player then has a nice consistent world view, they understand what’s going on, and they’re happy because there aren’t constant surprises.

If you omit details, the player will happily imagine the rest of the universe according to the basic world rules that you’ve established. Take Star Wars for example – you are shown a very small section of the universe, and the rest is simply implied. By not fleshing out endless irrelevant details, you avoid accidentally introducing glaring inconsistencies, and also avoid boring the player. Take it from the point of view of a character in your world. They don’t care about the mechanics of inter-stellar travel, they’ve been living in a world with it for a long time. It is mundane to them – they wouldn’t dwell on the details, they dwell on how it affects them. So don’t follow the Star Trek model of baffling the viewer with science details, instead show them the parts which affect them – e.g. travelling between point X and Y will involve hyperspace, and will take Z amount of time.

Well, BT have (finally) managed to sort themselves out and install a phone line into the new office, which was the only thing holding up us moving in. As such, I popped along yesterday to have a look again at it properly, and I’ve now got the keys! Very exciting, and I much enjoyed just sitting in the big leather chair and trying to think of all the things that I’d need to sort out to properly imagine working there. I think most notably the place needs some coffee! Can’t think straight without coffee. Here are some pictures so you can judge for yourself – it’s bare just now, but I’m sure I’ll manage to get some character in there soon enough.

Our lovely view (it’s 3 floors up)

Nice big leather chair for my desk. A bit ratty, but hey, furniture that’s free you can’t complain about.

Pete gets the littler desk (have to enforce my dominance over the proles somehow)

And room for “employee number 3” when they turn up.

So, once there’s an obligatory Lara Croft poster up, PCs with cables trailing all over the floor, and a whiteboard or two covered with cryptic programmer like notes, I’ll post some more pictures for you to compare. I’ve also got to update the website with the new address and directions to us, but I think I’ll wait until we’re all properly installed. Have to make the move go pretty smoothly though, as we’ve got lots of work on in the next month, and not too much time to do it. So I should get back to it!

You know, it’s days like this I’m glad I don’t have to go outside to work. Miserably cold, damp and grey. But for me it’s almost a good thing – no glare in my eyes making it hard to see the monitor, no stiflingly hot room once the PSP kit and both PCs have been on for a while.

Most of the performance optimisations have been done now – turns out the horrible slowness was almost entirely down to the big textures, which far exceeded the texture cache the PSP has. So trimming colour depth, dropping the resolution a little, and swizzling the textures have all combined to get us back to a healthy normal frame-rate again. Not the 60fps we get on the PC, but certainly playable. So it’s time to put the optimisation bat back down again, and wade into new features (animation and audio next).

On balance though, the PSP hasn’t really impressed me so far. I realise that hand-helds are supposed to be underpowered, but I just groan whenever I have to try and read something on the low-resolution screen. We haven’t ventured into using UMD for loading yet, but I suspect that would irritate me even more – the load times are already over 10 seconds, and that’s loading a tiny amount of assets. I’d be interested to get our hands on a Nintendo DS for comparison – it’s probably got similar issues, but I’ve got “grass is always greener” issues right now.

So as I’m waiting for a nearly full rebuild to complete, I thought I should write up a blog entry. Previously I’ve not been writing much because of the upheaval due to moving and generally been busy sorting out a whole bunch of things. This last few days however, I’ve not been writing much because I’ve had my head deep in coding work, which is much more enjoyable! Of course, from your end-user perspective, it doesn’t really matter why.

Anyway, this week has been particularly busy with coding, because we’ve finally got things visible and running properly on the PSP, almost as well as they were on the PC, which is immensely satisfying. Unfortunately, it has highlighted all of the things that we need to fix because the PC let us get a way with a lot, performance wise, and still ran well. But that in itself is good, because it means we get to wade in and tackle some nice solid problems like “the texture format is too fat”, or “we’re making too many state changes”; for which we can see solutions, apply them and instantly see results in the form of improved performance. It’s a standing rule that you shouldn’t optimise too early, because you’ll end up wasting effort. However, when optimisation is appropriate, it’s definitely a satisfying task. As problems go, those are the ones programmers like the best.

Although we should have moved into our new office by now (by last week in fact), BT have been dragging their heels sorting out getting a phone line installed, and while my new landlords have been very understanding about it all, it’s been quite frustrating. I would have liked to have been in and set up by now, so that it was no longer nagging at the back of my head that we have to move in the future. Still, I’m sure the wait will be worth it, and instead I code away here, surrounded by still packed boxes of kit, all still waiting to move to the new office before I unpack them.

Right, build’s done – back to palletisation.