Lots of beavering away on our first milestone at the moment, hence the quietness on the posting front. We’re not delivering what we’d like to, due to bits of kit and software turning up late, but we’re still delivering! All nuts and bolts stuff at the moment – nothing you could call a game, or even a full engine.

We’ve been following the Scrum process carefully, and it seems to be working out well. It hasn’t seen any real stress yet, but it has been good in that it gives us visibility of our goals in a very physical sense. It is sometimes very hard to get a grip on a software project, given the lack of tangible results of your work. But breaking down the project into stories and putting them on cards allows us to say “everything that is to go in the end project is on one of these cards. Move all the cards onto the ‘done’ pile, and we are finished.” That is a good morale booster, because each of the cards can be more easily broken down into tasks, and we can say definitively that it’s either done or not. And so we get a good handle on what we have to do each fortnight/month, and whether or not we are on target or not.

I’ve always maintained that the best way to improve team spirits and morale is not having parties, nights out, or team building days – it is to give the team a chance to succeed. Teams are filled with smart people, and they’re aware of whether or not the team as a whole is doing well, and they are likely to be down-hearted if it isn’t. Breaking down the project into milestones gives us a chance to succeed every month, even if the overall goal is harder to see, and hard to hit. Conversely, I think there are few things worse than putting a team through a tough crunch period, then when it’s done saying: “That was great guys. Now straight onto the next one,” without acknowledging the value of that success.

Of course, the end of our second tax year is not nearly so significant a date as the 2 year anniversary of our date of incorporation. But that was yesterday, so I’ve missed it! Gah. In my defence, I was working very hard yesterday, as I was feeling productive. And I still have a wretched viral infection, although I’m not feeling as bad as I was at the weekend, so no celebrating for me. Boo, hiss.

Anyway, here’s a quick link to another new start-up – Power of Two Games, run by Charles Nicolson and Noel Llopis, both of whom post regularly on the game-dev mailing lists and have done some great stuff which we’ve learned from here (not least of which, UnitTest++, a version of which we use at the Company for our own unit testing). All the best to the guys, and it’s great to see that I finally have an office that’s bigger than someone else’s!

Site was down for a little while again this morning, due to this problem. I realise this particular outage wasn’t their fault, but I’ve been annoyed recently at our hosts (Dreamhost), so I think I’m going to take down the link on the side, until I feel confident again recommending them to others. This post by my friend Gossip sums up my take on it really (yes, this is a ‘me-too’ post).

Anyway, didn’t quite appreciate the fact that it’s Easter holiday weekend, and so have a bored girlfriend hanging around, annoyed that I don’t have more time to spend with her. So I’m trying to do bits of work here and there and the rest of the time enjoy a relaxing weekend. I guess this is yet another case of me needing to remember how to work less and enjoy more!

Finally finished Zelda: Twilight Princess last night – very good final sections which made good use of all the game-play mechanics introduced gradually over the game. A properly satisfying final cinematic, and end-bosses that weren’t ridiculously hard like some games insist on. Admittedly, I was crippled and hung over, so had no intention of getting up from the couch and going to the PC to consult the walk-through that I’d been cribbing off the whole game, so it was good I could do the last bit on my own. I think all in all I used the walk through for about 20% of the game, which is a good learn-to-cheat ratio for me.

Also, the end of March saw the end of our financial year, which means that I have to go through all of our accounts for the last year and make sure everything tallies and cross-checks. Oooh, paperwork, yeah. Got to love it. Anyway, preliminary numbers suggest we made a small loss this year – which is great! No, seriously. We made a profit last year, but then Mr I-don’t-like-small-businesses Brown changed the rules so that any profit, no matter how small, gets taxed (previously there was about 10K UKP of profit allowed before tax kicked in). So we made a small loss which ate some of the overall profit we’ve made since incorporation, which means no tax for us this year. Yay! Turn-over’s up around 50% on last year, which is about consistent with taking on Pete part-time.

So, all in all things for 2006/07 went all right. Not great, just all right. I’d have liked to see things kick off last summer when they were supposed to, but the project we were angling for stands or falls based on the government’s whims, and getting money out of them is like bleeding a rock. I have much higher hopes for this year, so tonight I will be raising my glass in toast to the future.

Annoyingly, the site was down for several hours this morning, putting a major crimp in my efficient mood this morning. Apparently Dreamhost are having (yet more) woes with their NFS servers. Still, all is well now.

Yet more spam in the Akismet box though – it makes me wonder how there is value in those things, and just how much money the people sending the spam (or at least the people paying to have the spam sent) are actually getting back in for it. I’m still thinking that the Internet will have to go the way of the micro-transaction as the only way of getting rid of the spam. By which I mean, having an account through which you pay some pittance of an amount to send emails and/or post comments on blogs. Some amount small enough that an average person will hardly notice (like 0.1p per post), but that makes the sending of millions of emails/comments more costly than it’s worth.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it would be tricky to set up a site/plug-in that manages a system like that. Say 10000 free comments/emails a month, but you have to register and log-in to post/send. Anything more and you have to enter credit card details to unlock unlimited posting, and are billed at some fractional rate. Get buy-in from the ISP’s so that people automatically get an account with their ISP so they don’t have to register manually. It would have to be nicely integrated, and you’d have to persuade site owners to set it up… Anyway, enough distractions.

Planning for our 3 month project is pretty much settled for now, we should be signing agreements soon and getting cracking on the work. It’s a big pile of stuff, but I’m confident we can manage it – as long as the development kits turn up in a reasonable time!

A big sigh of relief this morning – back at my own desk, drinking my own coffee; no more 45 minute commute. Also feeling substantially healthier than last week, thankfully. I’m conscious of the factor over-working played in my body’s rebellion against me, and so even though I have a huge stack of work to be getting through, I am going to make an effort to only work 9 till 5, Monday to Friday for a couple of weeks to give my system a break.

On the agenda for this morning: some routine checking up on our finances and future, some emails and phonecalls to make relating to our next project, and then some planning work. I’ve decided to use the manual XP recommended way of tracking work (8×5 cards, with items written on them), for which I need to actually go and buy some stationery, but I am putting that off until tomorrow.

A minor side note: since the forums are currently sitting dusty and unused, I’m going to put them into hibernation until they are needed again. While I like the idea of a discussion and feedback place, there isn’t much call for that for the next little while, and the constant phpBB security patching process is quite annoying. It is also, even fully patched, a potential security hole in the site, so minimising our exposure seems prudent. Plus the fact that it makes the site seem stagnant, and if the blog is the only frequently updated part of it, I’d rather that be explicit.

Have been feeling more than a little run down over the past few weeks, I’m sure due to the 6 day weeks since the start of the year. As a result, the cold which has hit me the last week or so is doubly unpleasant. But the end is in sight! I’ll be winding up my contract position at the end of the week, and turning my attention fully towards our next job – the prototype educational title. I hope that the return to working from the home office and lack of commute will allow me to return to more sensible working conditions (and update this blog more often). Anyway, in the meantime, some ginger and lemon tea for steaming, and making sure I have a ready supply of tissues.

WordPress compromised.

Only briefly, but it was up here for a couple of days at least. 🙁 Anyway, all fixed up now, and its unlikely the exploiter would target such a small blog as this.

Still, on a much brighter note, we’ve had some funding approved for our prototype plan, and are now just waiting on some PSP development kits and some other details to get started on making things! This is for the educational title alluded to previously, of which I will share more details when we can.

Various updates to the website software this week, nothing major, just security fixes for WordPress and MediaWiki. Dreamhost have also been having some data-centre issues recently which have meant some downtime, but nothing major.

Other than that, the last couple of weeks have involved a bit more relaxation for me in an effort to not go crazy before I see the spring-time. A weekend holiday and more time reading books rather than coding has helped a bit in that respect. I’ve still not had much time to myself though, down to more planning efforts for our educational prototype, and a bunch of other niggling paperwork things that I’ve had to sort out. On the bright side, as we’re coming towards the end of our second financial year, we have a lot more information that I can look back over and see just how much the business costs to run, and so better estimate our finances for the future. There’s still more paperwork for income tax, National Insurance, VAT, corporation tax, and all of the accounting obligations we have as a limited company, but it’s all fairly routine now (if still somewhat annoying).

Coming up over the next few weeks we expect to hear something more concrete about our new project, and so Pete is doing a lot of groundwork around that accordingly. I must say that I’m also looking forward to working more time in the home office, and avoiding the 45 minute commutes to Barco!

Not had much of a chance to stop this week, so this one will be brief. Much of this week was spent looking at a plan for a prototype for our educational title – trying to find out what’s achievable in a fixed time-frame with fixed resources isn’t the best way to make a game, but in some respects it’s good (at least you know when you have to aim for). Add to that a bereavement in the family, a driving test (which I passed), and the usual 6 day week at Barco, and there’s not much time left for fun things!

Hopefully next week will be more relaxed, and will include: investigation of a couple of small games for pitching to XBox Live Arcade or Nintendo’s Virtual Console, some build framework things for our engine re-factoring, and finishing the second dungeon in Twilight Princess .