Going well so far – already crossed 2 big things off the huge todo list that has collected while I’ve been in Brighton. Have quite a few more to deal with, including a summary blog post covering the talks I attended and my take on the whole thing. Will probably have to go in industry rants, but more on that later.

Summer’s definitely here though – sitting outside with a laptop and hoping the wi-fi extends that far is definitely the order of the day.

Writing this entry from a pub in Brighton, a few hundred yards from the Develop venue. Turns out I lucked out with my choice of hotels, as it is just round the corner from the conference. Should make for much less scope for embarrassment after the post conference drinking. I’ll be doing my bit putting the company around, but there are far more interesting talks than I realised, so I’ll have to do all the networking and business stuff in the breaks.

All things looking positive in the deal I’ve been trying to sign – we won’t know more until the end of July, but we have (I think) an achievable plan, and a budget acceptable to both sides. There are still a bunch of obstacles to overcome to make it work, but I’ll be doing some work in advance of signing the deal to smooth the way, on the grounds that I’d rather make things easy now than hedge on failing to sign the deal.

Time to finish up now – looks like my table is being usurped by a funky looking band. One guy has a banjo, I think I’m going to run away now…

Gah, now I remember why I stopped using MS Project for planning – it has a nasty tendency to fight back in strange and unusual ways if you try to do anything out of line with how it thinks you should be making a plan. Great if I was a real-estate developer and needed to plan painters and builders and electricians, not so good when I have to plan games development.

The only thing Project is really good for is tracking resources and dependencies between tasks, and coming up with raw numbers as to how long things will take given X many people who can work for Y amount of time. Using it to try and order tasks or define exactly how things work is madness though – I far prefer the Agile methods for that, which involve reevaluating every couple of weeks and choosing the most important things to work on.

So after my planning blitz, I’m off down south for the weekend, followed by a trip across to Brighton for the Develop conference next week. Its easier to just stay down there and work from hotels/coffee houses in Brighton than to come back up and down on Monday/Tuesday, so essentially I’m away for the whole week. I’ll still be working on trying to close this development deal however, as it is quite an attractive deal. I’ll probably end up taking a few games down with me as well though – I’ve gotten hooked on KotOR again, trying to get through it playing for the dark side.

Writing this entry from the latest addition to the Company’s inventory – a shiny new Dell Precision M65 notebook. I finally got fed up with the fact that I was essentially hamstrung whenever away from the home office, just due to not having the software/data available to me to work, even when I found time. So now I can work while travelling, and should hopefully be more productive.

Lots going on the last couple of weeks, trying to sort out a plan for a potential development deal which would allow us to ramp up and start hiring more people. Nothing confirmed as yet, but the project is interesting, so I’m eager to make a go of it!

Looks like the release date for Brave (US) is going to be the second week in August this year; don’t know how solid that is, but I’ve passed off the components of a Brave build to Evolved, hopefully they should be moving forward with that.

Well, before DC went under (literally just the day before luckily), Tenon (the liquidators of VIS) got me to go retrieve all the assets relating to Brave from the server machine that DC had bought from the liquidation of VIS. So, I now have a little more than 250GB of assets sitting on a disk in my office – representing pretty much the whole 4 and a half years of development. I must say, it was fun strolling down memory lane looking at the old demo and concepts for it.

Not looking back in the code though. <shudders> There’s quite a bit of code in the history of it that I’d dearly rather forget. Let that be a lesson to you children – don’t make a demo in a few months and then expect to be able to reuse the demo code to build the real game!

But there was plenty of marketing stuff though, which has all winged its way to the new US publishers (Evolved) who’ve been putting the game around a fair bit! Good stuff. I believe IGN are going to be running some more coverage on it, and hopefully we’ll see some more of the concept and marketing stuff put out. There’s some lovely concept work and a whole raft of screenshots that were never published in the original SCEE marketing push, hopefully the US people will see them instead!

Other than that, busy busy working on Barco contract still (it was extended another month), mixing in all the stuff I’ve been meaning to do for a while. My shiny new Dell Precision laptop is on its way; should be here next week for when I get back from the Lake District. I’ll have a couple of weeks to fill it with equally shiny software, before its off to Develop at the start of July. Hopefully the laptop will mean I can be productive even on the seemingly neverending train and bus journeys I seem to take – its been quite noticeable that when I’m not in the home office I’m pretty much crippled as far as work things go. Of course, I had to get the Company VAT registered to take advantage of the ability to claim VAT back, but I’m sure the extra paperwork will be worthwhile.

Well, I did start writing a post about this at the time (a week or so ago now), but it turned into a windy rant about bad industry practices; then I ran out of time to finish it up and it seems to have been eaten by WordPress since then. Since it would probably be very depressing to type it all again, I can sum it up in some very simple points:

1. Letting your staff work an extra month when you know you don’t have the money to pay them is totally, flat out, unacceptable. At least VIS had the courtesy to tell us at the start of the month so we didn’t work any days for free.
2. The way the Edinburgh staff were treated was shocking – being flat out lied to so that they’d migrate the equipment and incur travel expenses that had no itention of being reimbursed is just shoddy management.
3. Letting your company run down all its money and go bankrupt, then when it goes into liquidation immediately starting up a phoenix company with none of the debt and scavenging all the assets for cheap is, frankly, tantamount to fraud in my book. How you expect to hire back developers onto such a team after seeing the way the previous company went is beyond me. Unless of course its all just a temporary thing so the maximum amount of blood can be sweated out of the assets before abandoning everyone to their own fates (again).
4. Damn – thats 3 out of the 4 big Scottish players out of business in less than 14 months; leaving Rockstar North and Real Time Worlds as the only large employers.

I must admit to being a little selfish in this matter – as I mostly want other Scottish games companies to survive so I can poach their good staff when I get the opportunity. But with the liquidations going on, more and more talent is migrating south of the border (where there’s a drought of good people), and there’s little to tempt them back up. And then, there is a hurdle to any new developer wanting to set up shop in Scotland – the fact that talent would have to be relocated in to get it going.

Its small wonder so many good people are leaving the industry – they’re being offered no stability, no decent prospects, and companies which want to offer them opportunities and build are being priced out of the market.

Anyway – my condolences to those people out of work because of this, although from those I talked to on Wednesday while there, I think it might be better off redundant than continuing to work there!

Huzzah. Finally some time to chill out and calm down. Over a month of deadline crunch with Barco has somewhat taken its toll. Today will be entirely devoted to games and catch-up reading.

Some talk over on The Chaos Engine about the forecasted crash of the games industry (due to rising costs), and asking why the big publishers (EA, Activision, Ubisoft) aren’t doing anything about it. For example, trying to rein in the relentless next-gen march, even when it massively inflates costs. The general consensus is the upcoming problems are real, and largely inevitable; but that publishers aren’t doing anything now because they’re still making money.

Massively short-sighted in my opinion – its like we’re a big Katamari ball rolling down a mountain; the outlying bits (the developers and smaller publishers) are being smashed off along the way, but the inner core is just keeping its head tucked in and hoping it will be left at the bottom. Even collecting new bits along the way (as the smaller publishers/developers reform and try again) won’t help in the long run, not to mention the carnage that its causing along the way (in the form of massive venture capital losses). It will only take one bad experience investing in a developer/publisher that falls apart under the current development conditions for a big VC to swear off the games industry for good – making it even harder for new developers to form and build.

In other news – more rumblings about the future US release of Brave, for which I’ve been doing a little bit of work. More details as and when I can…

…has been made, based on this breaking news. I was humming and hawwing about whether I even wanted a console, or whether I’d stick with PC (all the recent titles I’ve wanted have been on PC, bar none).

Speaking of which – stand-alone Tremulous has finally been released! No more need to dig out the dusty old copy of Quake III you had.

Boy do I need a holiday though – its been 5 months straight now without a day off (or at least, not one that I didn’t have to make up at the weekend). I’ve been trying to put aside time for side projects (notably a game pitch demo using Torque and some more website work), but its all been taking second place to the main contract for Barco and some other part-time remote work. Not to mention all the paperwork and faff that goes along with the financial year end at the start of this month.

Still, coming up to the end of the Barco work at the end of this month – high on the priorities list are: getting VAT registered (so I can splash out on a shiney new lap-top), finishing up this game pitch demo, catching up on all the GDC/E3 footage, and a hundred other little things on the to-do list that I can’t even think about until I can get a good solid week-day in the office. But all of that can wait until I’ve taken a few days to relax, as I think I deserve a break…

Tweaked the site template a little, because Pete pointed out that it didn’t put the author name on top of the post. Sorry for any confusion – I asked him to put up his email because it summed up what I thought about the RevolutionWii. Man, what a stupid name. Why would you take a perfectly good name like Revolution, and scrap it in favour of a word which isn’t even pronounced the way they want people to pronounce it. Hellooo – you can’t just string letters together and then tell people to say a different word. Letter combinations imply certain pronunciations – double-i implies ‘aye’, as in hippopotamii or platypii.

Anyway, enough of such pedantry. Contract at Barco has been extended for another little while, so I’m still making the trek over to Leith every morning, and trying to hold onto the XP principles even in the face of imminent deadlines.

Update: And I’ve fixed the annoying excerpt-ifying of the RSS feed, which would truncate entries to 50 words. How can I be expected to express myself in 50 words! So now we get the whole entry. Turns out the correct URL isn’t the one I was using before either, so use the entries on the right to subscribe to the correct feed…

This post started out as an email to Chris regarding his recent post, Decline of the bedroom coder. Apologies in advance for crude language:

The increase in complexity is certainly reducing the accessibility of games – the recent report of “teenagers playing less games than their parents” may back this up, but it’s probably mostly down to the amount of other distractions for them. YouTube, Google Video etc…

One thing that I realised recently, and I am annoyed at myself for not ‘getting’ it sooner, is that Nintendo is very clever, MS are fairly on the ball, but Sony are very … very dumb. Notice that even since the days of the SNES, all of N’s hardware were clearly below the technical levels that were possible at the times, but always above the invisible ‘this looks shit’ border?

Nintendo clearly appreciate that games are getting more expensive to produce and less accessible due to increasing technical demands – this is what the Revolution, and to a lesser extent the DS, seem to be all about. Lower specs than the rest, innovative controller to bring in new audiences, and a back catalog of classic games to recapture the jaded players.

Even MS has pretty much got it right, although I’m highly confused that they switched to PowerPC as Apple went Intel. The backwards compatibility list is somewhat underwhelming, but then the Xbox didn’t have any killer apps anyway.

And isn’t Geometry Wars the Xbox 360’s biggest seller, and what is it, a $15 Live title that was cooked up in someone’s spare time? That’s gotta have some people (mainly artists) crying and shitting their pants as their current AAA project slips. “What, we’ve been wasting how many years of our lives drawing gloss maps? We could have been billionaires already!”

Sony developers are certainly going to have fun trying to simultaneously exploit 7 CELL processors and whatever else crap the PS3 has installed, while Revolution coders will already be very familiar with their environment. Xbox 360 chaps will be happy with their DirectX.

Sony just don’t get it. Even the PSP is a shit to develop for, and from what I’ve heard, comparatively the DS is a breeze, just like the GBA.

But I’d love to get a game of my own on Xbox Live though. A man can dream… *sigh*