And so it has arrived. Finally, and after much Herculean effort from all involved, we have given life to a healthy baby game. Okay, so it’s more of a hulking 250 pound armoured law enforcer than a baby, but I’m still proud of it like a child. It’s occupied more than 14 months of my time so far, so it’s a great feeling to know that it’s soon to see the light of day.

Crackdown 2

It’s weird, I’ve spent the last month and a half working with the MGS and Ruffian teams to take the game they’d made and turn it into a demo form; I thought I wouldn’t want to play the demo again. I’d play the full game, sure, because I’ve never actually made it all the way through without cheating, and it’s a game where the pleasure is in the journey, not in the destination. But the demo is 30 minutes from the start of the game, and your progress isn’t saved, so I thought I’d just skip it and go to the main game. My wife and family finally got me an XBox 360 for my birthday on Friday, along with a stack of games (Halo 3, Halo: ODST, Forza 3, Bioshock 2, Assassin’s Creed 2), so I wasn’t short of things to play.

But like a digital drug, I found myself using my demo preview code, and playing the demo. I knew what to expect, and that didn’t make it any less fun. Shooting, punching, kicking, driving, exploding, all over the island. Not just once either. Four times through, to get 7 out of the 10 possible demo achievements. I even got my wife to play it through as well. That one I pretended was research for work: you don’t get much more inexperienced at 3rd person games than Vicki, and I wanted to see if we’d pitched the demo opening right. We had – she picked it up surprisingly quickly, didn’t die until much further into the demo than I’d expected. More pride – we’ve made something that can appeal to not only the hard-core, dedicated Crackdown fans, but also to newbies as well. Crackdown for everyone!

Ruffian Games

Not that I can take much credit for that really, it’s the stellar team at Ruffian who have done a fantastic job on the game. I’ve been privileged to work with them, and the wider team at Microsoft. This has been the biggest budget game I’ve worked on to date, with the highest aspirations, and the highest quality bar. It’s been a real eye-opener, and a great experience. Both teams are chock full of talented, enthusiastic folks, and my passion for the title they’ve matched and exceeded at every turn. I’ve got to give a special appreciation to our ex-colleague Peter Mackay as well – who went to Ruffian after leaving us last year. He’s done a great job on the audio for Crackdown 2, allowing the quality audio design to shine through. I was sorry to lose him as a team-mate, but I think he’s found a great new role at Ruffian.

The demo you can get your hands on tomorrow (June 21st), and the full game will hit the shelves from the July 6th. Get to work Agent!

Wow. Five whole years. In games industry terms, that’s practically ancient. And even more strangely for me, I’ve now been running my own business for longer than I spent working as an employee for anyone else. The work we’ve done over the past five years has been so varied that I struggle to remember all of it; there are some projects from when I first started out that I forgot all about it until I was digging through our backup archive recently. Of course, we’ve had our ups and downs – this past year has been especially hard on me in particular, what with all the travelling around, and working away from Edinburgh. But the very fact that we’re here and still beavering away I think says a lot. And I must extend my heartfelt thanks to my associate Tim for doing such a great job here in Edinburgh while I’ve been kept busy with Crackdown 2.

Year Six will, I think, be far more eventful for us than Year Five. It’s too early to say yet what it will consist of, but I think there will be less X360 development, and a load more iPhone work. Of course, my prediction skills are fairly awful, so I should probably not try to guess in advance. What we do know is that we want to get our own projects out there and selling, and the iPhone is a far better opportunity for us to do that than, for example, WiiWare. And there will undoubtedly be work-for-hire as well, which is almost always interesting in itself, getting a chance to help out on other fun projects, and do what we do best – give our clients the software development help they need to ship. And if nothing else, we shall see just how furry the beard can get…

The Crackdown 2 Crunch Beard

So after a weekend up north in Glencoe, trying to get my head back in some kind of productive space, I hear from my sister that she’s given birth to not one, but two miniature people today. So I’ve raised a glass or two to my sister’s new family, which pretty much excludes the possibility that I’ll do anything useful tonight.

Suffice to say that while I’ve continued to work on CruiseControl.NET plugins, I’ve yet to write up anything useful that could be condensed into a blog post. My article on employee Terms and Conditions for IndieVision.net has been shunted to one side, again. I had a productive meeting on Friday with one of the developers of Visual Studio, making an effort to persuade them to include some games development friendly features with their next version (not 2010, the one after); hopefully one or two of them will make it in and I’ll have improved the development eco-system just a little bit.

But in general I’m still struggling with the long commutes to Dundee, and the limited amount of time in the evenings to be productive. So on that rather downbeat note, I shall finish up, and place a tick in the entry on my task list for “Development Blog”. Hopefully future entries will be more avuncular and jolly. Wow, how long have I been waiting to use that adjective to describe myself… 🙂

Aha! Just downloaded the WordPress app for iPhone, we shall see if writing blogs on the move lets me be more reliable with my posts. As I write this particular draft (lamenting the iPhone’s keypad) I’m on a bus on Princes St, moving between Microsoft at the East End and our own office at the West End. This afternoon I’ll be talking through our ideas for iPhone apps with Tim.

That’s right folks, we’re now all set up for iPhone development, MacBook, iPod Touch, iPhone, and a raft of ideas. As I’m swamped at the moment, Tim’s taking the lead on all this, and our first project will be a small productivity app that he came up with. More details and screenshots as we get closer to completion…

Maybe it’s the Scotsman in me, but when the yearly cold-snap hits Edinburgh in late November, it always cheers me up. It’s the time of year when the weather changes from being mushy and wet into being cold and dry. Scarves and hats are no longer a choice to make, they’re simply required. So even the weekly trips up to Dundee become pleasant trips out in the brisk cold. Mind you, in weather like this, the office heating becomes a must. Thankfully, the Microsoft office, in all it’s newness, has great heating.

Unfortunately, the heating in our office is less than stellar at the moment. Our part of the office is fine, but the people we share an office with (Alban Books), have little to no heat at all. They’re all huddled around electric heaters, and still cold for it. Worse still, the thermostat for the entire office is out in the hall, which is poorly insulated from the outside. So the thermostat is convinced that the entire office needs heating up, so our part of the office gets baked, and Alban and the hall remain frigid. And if I’m up at Ruffian, their heating is all screwy as well – with people wandering around with hats and gloves and scarves on all the time. But sadly I keep forgetting  my hobo gloves, which are in the office with Tim! So Waverley Gate is the only place with a reasonable temperature at the moment.

So to brighten up the blog, here’s a picture of the lovely rooftop garden at Waverley Gate. I don’t spend much time out on it, due to the aforementioned cold, but I do like to look out onto it while I’m making coffee or reheating last night’s leftovers for lunch.

This week’s blog entry finds me back on a train to Warrington to visit Evolution, a newly married man. My honeymoon, last week, was spent pleasantly disconnected from the wired world, in a forest cabin in Argyll. Not totally electronics free, of course, the laptop went with me and I had a chance to play through some Sam & Max, Spore, and replaying Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in advance of picking up the sequel which should be out around now. Other than that though, I left things in Tim’s capable hands. My boss at Microsoft, in addition to the shiny new laptop and office provision in Edinburgh, kindly consented to giving me a couple of weeks off around the wedding. I’m not really accustomed to taking time off any more though, so the weeks leading up to the big day I was still remotely monitoring the build systems down in Reading and keeping things ticking over. Happily the systems I’ve set up in the previous few months don’t require much maintenance, so this time away has been good in that it’s proved the reliability of the build setup.

TIGA

Near the end of October, I also attended a panel discussion at the Scottish Parliament that TIGA was pushing. This was partly for them to push their tax-breaks agenda in amongst Scottish politicians, but also a good opportunity for the Scottish games industry to show their faces to the wider world. We do tend to suffer from our normally clandestine dealings; if you’re in the industry everyone knows each other, but it was usually hidden away from the media or non-industry observers, except in small, tightly controlled PR moves. I’m glad to see that the industry has reached a level of maturity where discussing our needs with politicians and other interested parties is feasible and useful.

I’ve been down-beat about the merits of TIGA’s tax-break lobbying, both from a personal political viewpoint (I don’t like subsidies) and from a small business perspective. The tax breaks proposed seem to be of most benefit to larger companies, to encourage them to set up large studios in the UK. While I like that idea from the point of view of improving the general health of the development community here, it’s unlikely that we as a small outsourcing studio would see any direct benefit from these policies. I was uncomfortable to think that I would be the only nay-sayer in the room, but I was glad to find that the other smaller studios are similarly cynical about the policy.

More interesting to me was the other topic dwelt on by the panel – the push towards better education and training for new developers, and better opportunities for students to secure a role in the games industry. I’ve been worried for a long while about talent draining from the industry, for various reasons, and recent business conditions are making developers less and less likely to take risks on graduate developers. Anything we, the government, or the educational institutions can do to make it easier for developers to take on graduates is a win in my book, both in the short and long terms. I was very interested to hear some of the programmes that Abertay has been developing along these lines; reaching out to industry with prototyping teams (I’d imagine making use of the White Space facility), helping students get placements inside studios, etc. While I’m not in favour of any one institution being the only place to go to get into the industry, it’s good to see them leading the way. I made a point of saying to the politicians in the room that if they wanted to really support the long term development and stability of our industry, they’d do well to support and extend these programmes. Especially if those programmes were also made available to students/graduates across the higher education field. I’d love to see an avenue for straight Computer Science students to get into the industry, without them having to take the risk of doing such a specialised degree as a games industry course.

Anyway, it was a good panel, with interesting points all round, and while I don’t think that anything new or earth-shaking was said, I think I’m more positive about the long term prospects of the industry as a result of attending.

This week is back to work properly though; this day down with Evolution to demo the stuff that Tim’s developed the last few weeks, and the rest of the week settling into my new routine with MGS. That will be splitting my time between Edinburgh (I’ll try to get a few pictures from Microsoft Edinburgh’s lovely roof terrace with its wonderful views over the Waverley valley) and Dundee. As is usual with any time off, especially when I’m disconnected from the Internet for any length of time, I’m itching to get stuck back into things and start delivering useful stuff again. There were quite a few things on my list leading up to leaving Reading, but none that could be started in earnest until I was back. Hopefully now that I’m not exiled in Reading, I can settle into some sort of sensible routine, and still leave time for more regular blog posts here than I’ve managed recently.

2 more days in Reading, tick tock, tock tick. The new laptop MGS have ordered for me has turned up, and all in all it’s very shiny. Well not so much shiny as glowy. Seriously. There’s like a dozen different backlights, under the keyboard, around the trackpad, and the little alien logo on the top cover, all of which can be set to any colour you like. Which is absolutely overkill, and yet the loveliest little feature I’ve seen in a long while. All of mine are set to dark blood red of course, as it should be!

Windows 7 is working out really quite well as well – the new taskbar system is very much how I think of things when I’m working with many windows. I was always quick to turn off the grouping of windows under Vista, because it was just annoying. The grouping under the large icons in Windows 7 however seems a lot more natural, and I no longer have the “so many windows the taskbar gets flooded” effect I used to suffer from. I’m trying awfully hard not to be a Microsoft corporate shill, but it does feel like this is thankfully a better successor to XP than Vista was. We’ll see how things pan out with driver support and Nintendo, but I’ll probably upgrade the office soon enough.

Not much else to say really, I’ve been under the weather a bit, so fairly unproductive, but I’ve been fine with that for a while. I’ve been working on our Space prototype and sorting out some really interesting problems to do with scale and large objects, but I’ve reached the point where I need a few hours with some whiteboards, some loud music, and some serious thinking time, before I can progress to the eureka solution which feels like it’s hovering just beyond my grasp.

In the meantime, I’ve been killing time with Edge (the subject of the shenanigans from Tim Langdell, which are now thankfully almost done with – in case you haven’t heard, he’s losing), iBASS (a legacy from my younger days, which has been somewhat disappointing in it’s obtuse puzzle design), and a return to Left 4 Dead prompted by testing out my super-powered laptop (which by the way runs L4D like a dream, as long as I remember to put earphones in because the fans are super-loud).

As I write this, with clammy skin and fuzzy-head, I’m thinking that my current trip back to Edinburgh is going to leave me with some unwelcome left-overs. My fiancée has picked up a horrible and intense cold-like illness, and as I’ve been providing care, it’s pretty likely I’ve now got it too. I can feel the start of it – the back of my throat starting to rasp, the contents of my head feeling like they are swelling to a size bigger than my skull. And as I’m heading back down to Reading tomorrow, I think I’m going to end up suffering through the worst of it on my own.

As bad as mooching around the house in Reading while ill will be, it will give me a good excuse to take some time off and relax; something I’ve not managed to do in a while now. I’ve been working pretty much flat out on Microsoft related work, culminating in this trip back home (well, technically Dundee, but I’d be in trouble with the missus if I didn’t use it as a reason to have a long weekend back in Edinburgh). While there’s been time off, it’s been wrapped in working weekends to make up for the time lost. I don’t really like doing that, but I’d committed to getting something achieved by today, and working through was the only feasible way to get that done.

So it’s probably good if I’m forced to slow down a bit and return to some sort of normal schedule. I’ve come to the end of the initial contract with Microsoft, but since I’ve been doing useful work, we’ve agreed to extend it further, with some conditions. Namely, that I no longer have to be living and working full time in Reading. Hallelujah. I’ll be getting married next month, and I wouldn’t rate my odds of seeing 6 months married if I was still living away from home. Instead I’ll be based in Edinburgh, with some significant amount of time on-site with the developers, and regular visits back down to Reading.

It’s been very taxing trying to maintain things in Edinburgh remotely, on top of a full time contract at Microsoft, and visits to Evolution. I seem to spend all of my time on trains. But the new working arrangements should be much more manageable, and allow me to get back some semblance of a normal life. If nothing else, it will allow me to get some time in the same office as Tim – who’s done a sterling job avoiding going stir crazy being in the office all on his own for almost 6 months now.

Okay, this isn’t strictly in-keeping with the theme of the blog, but I’ve found random posts like this can be very helpful in diagnosing and fixing problems. Google is your friend, and makes it easy to fine articles that describe your issue. My issue – that my Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi stopped working at some point last week (start of September 2009), didn’t come up in too many searches, and the answers that did come up weren’t very helpful. So here goes with my experience, and a fix.

Symptoms

You’ve got a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi card, and you’re running Windows Vista. It’s got the latest drivers installed. Probably it was working just fine up until the end of August. Windows Update prompted you with an update to your sound card, or maybe it just got installed automatically. Now the sound card is producing no output. Windows Media Player fails to play movies and audio with cryptic errors that basically boil down to “can’t play file”. If you right-click on the Speakers or Microphone in the Sound control panel, and select Test, it pops up a message box saying “Failed to play test tone”, and stays resolutely silent.

Annoying, huh? So you go searching on the web, and find a bunch of posts talking about Audigy cards, and “failed to play test tone”, which recommend that you disable this or that setting in the Creative volume panel, or in the sounds control panel. None of this helps your problem at all. And that’s probably right – because the “failed to play test tone” message could happen for a bunch of reasons – all it really means is that Vista can’t talk to your sound card properly.

As far as I can tell, this is some specific problem with the Windows Update to the sound card. Not sure what, or how, but we have two similarly configured machines at the office, and they both went in the same way, over the same period. Thankfully the fix is a straightforward one, and it’s to re-install the drivers.

Solutions

First off you’d probably just uninstall the drivers and then reinstall, this you can do quickly. We found it didn’t help. Then you think “oh, I’ll go to the Creative site and download the drivers manually”. Great. Except there’s like a dozen versions of the SB X-Fi, all with different connectors at the back, all with slightly different names, and all of which have different drivers. And here’s you looking at device manager which just says “SB X-Fi”. But which one!

So after trying two different versions and getting it wrong (it tells you it can’t find a device of that type on your system), I decided to try a different tack, and this worked right off the bat. Here are the steps:

1. Start Menu -> Computer, right-click and select Manage
2. Select Device Manager from the left hand side
3. Go to Audio devices in the right hand tree
4. Right click on the X-Fi device that should live there, and select Uninstall Drivers
5. It should ask for confirmation – tick the check box that says “delete drivers” – you don’t want the same old drivers to be reinstalled (this is the key step)
6. This should take away your X-Fi, and leave you with no audio device (or even if you had onboard audio like we did, shouldn’t make a difference).
7. In the device manager, right-click on your computer and select “Scan for hardware changes”
8. This should bring up the usual hardware detected icon in the task area in the bottom right. Let it do it’s thing
9. When it prompts you about drivers – let Windows find the drivers for you. It should either download fresh drivers, or download a slightly older driver which comes with Creative’s auto-update software. But basically follow through with the driver install process, and you shouldn’t need to do anything special
10. It’ll probably prompt you to restart your machine. If it doesn’t, restart anyway.
11. It should reboot and finish up the driver installation when it restarts – now you should have your sound back just as before.

Hope this helps people (and if the solution works for people, feel free to link it elsewhere).

So, since I was just a stones-throw (okay, two and a quarter hours by train) from Brighton, I took advantage of Develop this year. I’ll cover the interesting talks in a subsequent post, but for now some thoughts from the conference itself.

My boss at Microsoft was kind enough to let me go through them for a pass, which allowed somewhat cheaper rates, at the cost of having all of my independent developer peers see my badge and run screaming from the representative of the big-bad-evil corporation. They were mostly tempted back with sweet and soothing words, but I did have to spam business cards as far and wide as possible to reinforce my credentials as a similarly small and indie business.

Sadly the last train back from Brighton was too early to partake in the kind of party networking that goes on after conference hours, but since I’m a total lightweight, that’s probably a good thing. Less potential business partners scared away by Professor Drunk and all of his loud and firmly held opinions on the failings of the industry.

That said, I was pleased to find kindred spirits amongst those I talked to in the early evenings – conferences are always a good way to gauge the general sentiment of the industry, and get a view from your peers untainted by media bias. Of that, the main themes I took away this year were: a) boxed retail games are not a good place to be, b) digital distribution of smaller titles is the only way to go, but is sadly lacking in many respects, and c) the funding gap between the retail behemoths and the self-funded indies is ever-widening, and still a barren wasteland.

Most of those are things I’ve been saying for a while now, but I’m glad to hear that it’s not just us, and these are industry wide issues. There is much optimism, and cause for hope. But the market we operate in is still settling, and no-one has any sure wisdom. What has become clear is that Nintendo’s strategy (or lack thereof) with WiiWare has condemned a promising opportunity for indies into something of a dead end.

While it’s cheaper to develop for the Wii, it’s still not ultra-cheap; the massive install base is very much skewed towards non-traditional customers who are unlikely to hunt out WiiWare and the Wii Shop in the same way that a traditional gamer would; the Wii Shop itself suffers from all of the terrible navigation issues that I’ve complained about before. The simple fact is that it’s an effort to buy things through WiiWare, and the only way we could tempt all those Wii-Fit to part with their cash is if it were suggested to them as part of using the system. Of course, I realise that we could reach them with targetted marketing, but let’s be frank, if we had the money to do targetted marketing we wouldn’t be in this position.

What we’d like, as indies, is a marketplace with customers actively searching for goods; where the quality of our titles is the differentiating factor, and the cost to bring games to market is as close to the cost of producing the titles. When you’re as small as your average independent, cost to get to market is key. Let’s imagine a title that costs £150K to develop. If we pitch it at a platform which requires £500K of advertising or other costs to get it to market, it doesn’t matter that would return £800K. Sure, that’s a decent return, but we don’t have £650K to put in. We’ve probably got the £150K, if not in cash then at least in sweat equity. But there’s not a queue of financiers out there willing to front the additional costs to get to market.

Although on this note I was chatting to Chris Swan of Blitz, without even realising who he was. And I must give much kudos to Blitz for being one of the few players prepared to put their money where their mouth is, and work with small independents.

So I’m both heartened and disheartened by my time at Develop. Heartened by the young and successful independents who I had the pleasure of meeting and drinking with, but disheartened that there are no platforms (or platform holders) with the vision to foster a market where smaller independents can operate