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 .

I generally don’t publish code from the videogames because I don’t believe that code quality is as important in that industry. Short of the occasional patch, once the product is shipped, it’s done; there’s no ten-year lifespan to worry about.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I don’t even know where to start with it, short of saying that if any games developers are reading it, you should cover your eyes, now.

Finally – corporation tax return finally done for 05/06. Okay, so I’m only 2 months shy of having to do the 06/07 return, but there you go. Many thanks have to go out to Robert Turner and the people at Benson, Wood & Co of Airdrie, who did most of the work. Amount of tax owed: none! It would have been a few hundred pounds due to the fact that the Treasury changed the rules last April to eliminate the lower tax bracket that allowed companies to turn a profit of up to 10,000 UKP without having to pay tax . I guess that’ll teach me for actually running a games company that turns a profit eh? There was me thinking that all the other businesses in the industry losing money hand over fist were doing the wrong thing. 😉

First off, sorry for the hiatus in posting over the last month, the combination of massive busyness with work things and the pressures of finding just the right Christmas gift meant that blogging kept getting shuffled off the bottom of the to-do list. But here I am, bright eyed and bushy tailed, with a big stack of Chrimbo goodies, a newly printed end of year corporation tax return, and a big pile of unfiled paperwork, ready to bore you all to tears again.

It’s a miserable day in Edinburgh today, and the bus on which I write this is filled with coughing, sniffling people. Since it takes me about 45 minutes to get across town to Barco in the morning, I’ve been using the time to get some re-factoring done on the code, as well as writing up various project tenders and plans. There are NDAs to be faxed off too, although that’s mostly because we need to be under NDA to get costs on the development hardware to fill out the rest of the business case. Pete’s proposed a technology project that is interesting, but we need to work out all the numbers to see if it’s a profitable use of our time.

I’m still waiting to see the fall-out of the Christmas period’s sales, but it seems much as I expected so far. Microsoft ‘hit’ their target of 10m X-Box 360s shipped, although I suspect at least some of that is telling retailers and wholesalers to hold stock and they can pay for it later. But some fudging of the numbers seems to be standard practice. Sony seem to be much the same – claiming 1m PS3s shipped, although there are quite a few sightings of PS3s beginning to pile up in shops – the initial surge in demand has been mostly from people buying to re-sell, and its not been backed by any sort of real consumer demand since then. Nintendo are claiming similar but slightly higher numbers, but the crucial difference is that people are actually buying them to use, and its still quite hard to find consoles (and in fact extra controllers or copies of Wii Play) around Edinburgh. But that’s probably to be expected given the lower price point.

Looks like Phillips have finally got a title worthy of recognition supporting the ambX hardware that they were trying to persuade me to develop for last July at Develop Brighton – Supreme Commander were making a big fuss about their ambX support last week. I must admit I like the concept, and it sounds very easy to support, but it can only ever be an afterthought – a polish point for a good title – since the number of people out there who are serious enough to buy it has got to be pretty small. But then I don’t know market demographics on that sort of thing. Certainly I’m happy with headphones for my games, I’m not desperate for a surround sound experience for PC gaming.

Anyway, I’m almost at my destination now, so time to wrap up. I shall endeavour to keep blogging higher up the priority list for the rest of winter; with any luck my schedule will be a little looser now the holiday season is out of the way and the girlfriend is distracted by Rayman Raving Rabbids.

This news about the initial sales figures of the Wii amused me more than a little this morning. So far, pretty much all of the launch titles for PS3 have been unimpressive to say the least. I haven’t got my hands on either console yet, but Zelda, Rayman and even Wii Sports are all looking good, and I’ll be out on the 8th to try and pick up a Wii for myself and Pete. If the Wii’s sales momentum keeps up, it will be looking to eclipse the XBox 360’s by sometime next year, but unless some serious fan support (and better production rates) shows up, the PS3 is looking like a poor cousin. I’m wondering how much of a co-incidence the timing of the Gears of War release is – given that its a much more impressive title for the 360 than I’ve seen to date. We shall have to see how it pans out, but I’m sticking by my early bet on Nintendo.

Its been quiet on the posting front recently, mostly because I’ve been working overtime on my contract role, with various planning and build automation things occupying the extra time. But I’m taking some well deserved time back in the home office this week, and tackling the pile of paperwork that has accumulated in my absence. Double curses to the inland revenue now that I have to deal with VAT returns as well as payroll and corporation tax. When the CBI are complaining about the massive tax burden the UK industry is bearing, they’re talking not just about the amount of tax, but the sheer size of the administration required to keep up with all the obscure rules.

Please note, we’re shifting mail providers just now, so if you send an email and it bounces, please wait a couple of hours and re-send. Thank you.

Update: This should be all working now, if not please comment here. For those interested, we shifted to using Google Mail over Dreamhost’s internal email; mostly because that was the interface I used most when browsing, but also because it means Dreamhost isn’t a single point of failure for us. If DH is down, people can still mail me, and if Google is down, I can use this blog or DH mail as a backup.

We have a winner! Got to love that Potatamoto guy.

Pete and I have been banging our head against tools, makefiles and cross-platform compilation this last week, along with a continuing spree of unit tests. Barco time is sucking up my 9-5 day, but I’ve been working while commuting, and doing paperwork in the evenings. Speaking of which, its time to figure my way round our first VAT return.

Game of the week has to be the Battlefield 2142 demo – big stompy mechs in a combat scenario = much squishing and crunching of bones. Fantastic!

Greg Costikyan announced the other week that the site is now ‘real’ (i.e. bugs are now proper bugs, and not just beta flaws ;-)), so I’ll drop in a link here.

I’ve been browsing the site, and found a bunch of games I want to try, which is surprising, given my cynical take on games these days. Not a lot of time to try though, so I think it may have to be relegated to the 30 minutes on the bus in the morning (I’m at Barco for a brief spell).

I’ve been playing Defcon (available through Steam) a bit – lovely classic game, simple concepts but which combine together to become radically complex when played. I can’t even begin to get my head round some of the strategies needed to be a good player, so I settle for massive early strikes which makes me think I’m doing well, only to be crushed mercilessly by the retaliatory strike. D’oh!

Also got the Battlefield 2142 demo yesterday for a quick blast – looks good, and a decent successor to Battlefield 2 (which has also sucked away some of my precious gaming time). I’ll probably pre-order it, although I’ve got to order a Wii first. Hopefully the rumours of increased production rates are true and the queues for a console will be diminished. Big slap in the face to Microsoft and Sony if that’s true – normally the news is that production rates are less than hoped. I’ve given up bothering on Sony’s continuing stupid press releases and general fumbling of the ball, you can find that elsewhere.

Randomly bumped into one of the few people I’d lost touch with since VIS on the bus last week – Jonny Dobson the director/head of programmer/etc. Still in the industry as an independent (Insurgent Games with Craig Hunter), keeping busy doing consulting work. Yay for a Edinburgh games success story.

Very funny Mac Hall today – describes pretty much every new game artist’s desk.

A mixed bag of work the last couple of weeks, small amounts of work on lots of different projects. Unfortunately Brave came back again, so submission 1.02 had to be made; cross fingers that it goes through okay this time, as the only big bugs remaining were all caused by what seemed to be a faulty burn of the discs.

The only thing that stands out of note is the time I’ve spent writing unit tests for a lot of old code. While I can’t hope to get full coverage on such a large body of work, it has been quite an eye opener. Two major bugs, and a few minors which just never came up (or the code which exercised them managed to work around it in some way). Now I throw up my hands and admit – one of the majors was mine, but everyone who wrote this stuff should have known better. Anyway, a very poignant  reminder of just how useful test driven development is.

For reference, we’re using UnitTest++ by Noel Llopis and Charles Nicholson. Very nice – lightweight, took me 10 minutes to get integrated and compiling a test against our code, and has continued to do its job well through writing 100+ tests now. All in all exactly what a good tool should be – doing its job without me ever having to be aware of it.