At last, I have returned from exile in Dundee, and rest easy in my regular office chair back in the enlightened city: Edinburgh. Much to do, including integrating our logo with the website, finishing up the coding standards (probably to be hosted as a publicly viewable wiki on the Company site), finishing up the basic project plan for the demo, and cracking on with the coding itself. I’ve poked and prodded a couple of artist friends, so hopefully we’ll be able to get some concept art up for the project – that always helps give projects shape.

Onwards!

Oh, and quickly before I trek off for another day – we have a new logo. Courtesy of Dave Keningale @ 4J Studios

I really, really hate 4 hour commutes. Blergh.

On the bright side, I’ve gotten a fair amount of work done. Some design sketches as to possible environment layouts for the demo level, quite a bit of production work. Laying out initial milestones and cash flow has been good just for getting things solid and on paper, and seeing where work needs to be done to make the project attractive to external funders/publishers. Its definitely looking a lot more feasible and attractive than it was 3 months ago.

But the best part has been reading Scott Meyers’ “Effective C++: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs. I agreed with almost the entire book, and even the couple of minor points I found fault with, its purely because I’m looking at it from a games point of view rather than a regular software view. Anyway, the book is now required reading for anyone who will be writing code for the Company. I’ve still to finalise the coding standards, but this book will form the core of the C++ side of things. If anyone wants to borrow my copy they can, but I strongly recommend you buy it yourself. I’m ordering the follow up book as we speak, I’m sure it will be equally useful.