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.

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…

GI.biz covers in their weekly newsletter this week the announcement that most of the major film distributors are cancelling or massively scaling back their future UMD format releases, and talks about the death of an unloved and mostly unwanted format. I think most of us were saying that right from the start, when they announced the format the PSP would use, and then touted it as a portable movie player. Why would I pay money for another (lower quality) version of a film I already have on DVD, to watch it on my PSP on the few occasions where I have a couple of hours to kill? How it made business sense to Sony in the first place I have no idea.

I also had the pleasure to attend a BCS lecture given by one of my old colleagues from VIS, who was talking on the nature and history of the games industry. He brought up some points relating to the exponential growth of the size of game team needed to produce a top flight title, and it struck me just how bad things actually are these days in the games industry. Anyway, in the post lecture drinking session, I found myself expounding various different problems in the industry today, some of which have solutions which we [the industry] just aren’t doing, some of which I can’t see a fix for.

Anyway, I think I’m going to write up some thoughts on my stance on the whole she-bang, and make a new category here called ‘Industry Rants’. Don’t get me wrong, I love the games industry and am dedicated to it, but some things about the way we work today are just stupid.

Man, just installed the new CPU fan on the server machine, and the difference in volume level is astounding. Its almost quiet enough that I’d be happy leaving it on 24/7. 🙂

Hmm, just fired up the server machine, only to have it emit a loud electrical sounding pop midway through the boot process. Its a blind machine with no monitor or keyboard, so no telling what it was doing when it happened, and it’s booted fine after checking for any obvious fuse or chronic failures inside. Still, time to double check the logs to make sure the off-site backup process is working as expected. Oh, and to find a torch and some fuse-wire in case the next pop takes out the fusebox as well!

I think its time I considered retiring that machine. It was only a couple of years old when I got it, but something’s been not quite right with it since the start – erratic failures, constantly having to boot it twice due to random disk failure checks on startup. Plus the fan-noise is awful. There’s a replacement CPU fan in the post at the moment, but I don’t know if it will be enough, or whether the PSU fan is just as noisy.

Anyway, totally unrelated, but interesting too: SketchUp. Great, user friendly little building tool, easy to use, and just what you need to quickly knock up 3D concepts for game maps, buildings, etc. User licence is 300 and some dollars, sans VAT, but as an intermediate tool between nothing and Max or Maya, it seems worth the price. Which reminds me, really need to look into getting VAT registered…

Okay, I’ll fess up – Alfred the Oranda is now fertilising the plants in the rockery, and was replaced by Bertie the, well, Common. Yes, I know, Bertie the Common doesn’t sound as fancy, but he seems to be a bit hardier than his predecessor, so we’re not going to hold that against him.

In more relevant news, I’ve been talking with people at a rather large games company down south about working with them on projects coming up after my contract at Barco ends – nothing confirmed as yet, but very interesting prospects nonetheless. It would be nice to get my hands dirty with some next-gen kit anyway, as I’ve yet to play with any of the new toys which my contemporaries have been working on, and I have a variety of interesting avenues I’d like to investigate with regards to multi-core programming.

The game proposal I mentioned previously has been worked over a couple of times to the point at which I can see a real game in there, interesting and definitely one I’d like to make. I think its got real potential to go places, if I can find enough time to develop a prototype to test out the core mechanics.

And in other news, looks like Atari are looking a little shaky. I recall this happening to BAM just before they bought VIS, although I think Atari are in a stronger position (mostly due to their size). Can’t help that Infogrames are struggling either. This is the same company that was supposedly going to grant VIS a contract for SOE2 which would bail us out of a hole, shortly before that disintegrated because they were ‘restructuring’. And speaking of the kiss-of-death which is BAM, what happened to them? Their web site’s disappeared, but they’re still being tentatively traded (okay only a fifth of a cent per share, but still). All very strange.

I guess my point is – what’s with all the publishers? Developers are always complaining about how the publishers take all the money; and yet it seems there’s always one going under or about to go. Do you think that their cut-throat treatment of developers is finally coming back to bite? Run roughshod over the developers until they go under, then find yourself short of quality products by Q4 a couple of years later? Well, its probably a lot of things, but I can’t help but thinking that the publishers who are on the brink are there because they keep churning out bad games which don’t sell; maybe a little more nurturing of developers would get them better, more reliably good products to sell.