I was debating with myself over whether or not to attach a picture of our Wii development kit to this post to add a bit of colour. In the end I decided not to, as you could probably construe it as a breach of our promise to Nintendo to keep everything super-secret and hidden. Boo-hiss. Anyway, suffice it to say that we’re taking advantage of a lull in our work-for-hire burden to devote to our own game prototyping. For future reference, I’m going to talk about it as Biscuit, because that’s the name I use in all of our planning documentation. The name doesn’t really have any relation to the work we’re doing, I just liked the idea of a biscuit powered engine.

Conjures up all sorts of images. 🙂 So yes, the development kit has been dusted off, the stories board has been cleaned out and refilled with relevant story cards, and we are ploughing through the mountain of documentation for the Wii and getting stuck into getting our test game ported over. Much fun!

In other news, since he made grumbling noises when I asked him to write a blog post, I feel compelled to announce Pete’s news that he managed a First from his Software Engineering degree – we’re all quite proud. So I think that’s three Firsts and a Masters for Charlotte: I wonder if that qualifies for some sort of tax break. Probably not. :-/

A month without a post! That’s just not on. Bad Chris, bad! At first it was because I wanted to write a good post about our new team members! But then it was all about the long hours I was putting in for our Four Door Lemon work, to help them get a title out of the door. It’s never nice when you’re so busy you don’t have time for the little stuff, but I’m hopeful that things quieten down a bit now.

So yes: new staff! As I mentioned before, Charlotte Moseley and Tim Angus have joined Pete and I, to make a nice round number of four. They’ve both been beavering away in the office since the start of May.

Even better, now Pete is finally putting his degree course to bed, he’ll be joining us in the office full time as well. So definitely a full house, since our office is only really big enough to fit four people comfortably. We shall have to see about some bigger space at some point soon, so we have room to grow when we next feel the need to.

We couldn’t let the first day with all four of us in the office go by without marking the occasion though, so I shooed everyone out of the office and round the corner to the Mercat for some celebratory drinks. The wonderful thing about having an office in the centre of Edinburgh is the ready access to nice places to eat and drink after work. Apologies for the grainy picture quality, but I only had my phone camera with me, having stupidly forgotten to bring the proper one! And of course I’m the cameraman, so it’s not a proper team photo. I’m sure we’ll sort one of them out soon.

Quick rule of thumb for anyone wanting to court Scottish games (or regular) developers: If you promise coffee and/or breakfast, make sure 1) the coffee doesn’t run out, and 2) the breakfast consists of carbohydrates. And no, chocolate Hob Nobs don’t count as breakfast. Bonus points for the saw player though, she was good, and it was a suitably random intermission!

Some pictures from the mingling here. I’m not in any of them thankfully, as I was somewhat hung over (and the short supply of coffee wasn’t doing anything to help matters), but you can spot Mr Baglow of Indoctrimat/SG.biz and Andrew Richards of CodePlay in the background of one picture at least. Still, some interesting mingling and people to meet, including the folks from Glasgow-based WeeWorld and some other small local developers who I didn’t know existed.

Interesting article here from the Rampant Coyote; also on our blog-roll, so I thought I’d jump them up the order. Basically it is bemoaning the fact that games developers are in a losing business right now. Well, those who are in the traditional publisher-fronts-all-money-as-advance-against-sales model are at least. I wouldn’t like to speculate on whether or not other developers are profitable or not, but the sales input versus development costs mis-match is something I’ve harped on about here before.

Rampant Games itself is an indie games portal/developer, with a wide range of games, all developed by independents. I haven’t actually played any of the games I must admit, but I still cheer for independent developers who stake out their territory and do well there. The blog is a mix of opinion pieces and development stories, but personally I like it for the in-depth coverage of the progress of their new game (Frayed Knights), which looks quite fun and is just entering the beta stage now.

JC Barnett‘s Japanmanship is our next link from the side-bar. One of the more widely read developer blogs, not just because the content is funny and insightful, but also because it’s one of the few insights that western developers can get into the sometimes impenetrable world that is Japanese games development.

It seems that although a few hardy souls have emigrated to Japan for development jobs, it’s still very hard to get accepted there. Personally I don’t see the appeal, especially given the way that foreigners get treated by the natives, but there’s no denying that Japan has always been a significant centre of gaming. The fact that western developers are generally unable to sell significant numbers of games (or consoles, in Microsoft’s case) is indicative of the culture mismatch between us that even these days of globalisation hasn’t diminished.

Regardless, the blog is a good read, and mixes tales of life of a gaijin in Japan with gaming chat and insight. Particularly funny to read are the tales of passive (and not so passive) combat on the subway.

So, despite the fact that the blog looks no different on the surface, we are actually running on WordPress 2.5 now – the latest and greatest update to the blogging software. The Control Panel in which I write all the posts now looks radically different though, it looks much snazzier and dare I say it more “Web 2.0”. Which of course is a farce, as what I really wanted was something that was fast and slick and quick to use, rather than shiny with rounded corners and draggable buttons. Still, it does the job, so I’ll stop being so cranky now.

Yes, we’re not just taking on one new staffer, due to a fortuitous mix of circumstances we’re bringing on two! We have Charlotte Moseley, a graduate developer with knowledge of C# who is coming on and getting up to speed with our Evolution work; also we have Tim Angus coming to join us. Like Pete and I, Tim also worked at VIS until it went out of business – had things gone differently a couple of years ago he would have joined us much earlier, but instead he ended up in “regular software land”. Luckily we’ve tempted him back to the straight and narrow of games development, although in truth he’s never really left: he’s been driving Tremulous in his spare time!

Both of our new people will be coming to the new office close to the start of May, and I shall harangue them until they introduce themselves properly here and get added to the about page.

Oh yes Chris, that’s a great idea. Now you’ve learned to use the automated posting feature, why not use it on every post even when there’s no real need to. That way, when you try out embedding a YouTube video for the first time, you can go away to Runcorn for a day, and leave the blog to be totally shafted for ages until you come back to check it.

No brownie points for me today – although all should now be fixed. Feel free to go check out the actual YouTube clip for Goo! that I was trying to embed, and I promise the next time I will check what the post looks like on the actual site before I post it.

So we’ve been working with Evolution Studios since early February. Familiar for developing the World Rally Championship series, and more recently Motorstorm, they are now part of a much larger group since becoming part of SCEE last September. We’re working on support tools for Evolution rather than assisting with their game development in any way, but with such large teams and a wide range of titles in development, it’s a challenging task. The work is interesting, and we’re learning to love C# and hate it’s oddities. Also I’m getting to know the train down to Runcorn quite intimately, as we visit Evolution regularly to go over recent developments and decide where to go next. I can honestly say it’s an enlightening experience, although at the moment the biggest thing learned is don’t ever, ever attempt to eat any of the food provided in the Warrington Bank Quay station “buffet”.

We’ve been working with the folks at Four Door Lemon since the start of January now. They share many similarities with us as a studio – they are relatively small, and provide middle-ware and game development services to all sorts of clients. They are however a bit larger than us, and have a lot of work on just now, so it was a no-brainer for us to collaborate. We’ve been working with their Lemon engine for a while now to develop some small games that FDL needed made, and it’s proved relatively easy to implement some pretty complicated stuff in a short space of time. For confidentiality we can’t go into any detail here as to the nature of the games we’re developing for FDL, but hopefully we’ll have some tales from our on-going work with FDL that will be of interest.