June 27th, 2008 by adam
So, here’s a question for Agile developers: when you’re using Scrum as your development process, and your game is in pre-production, at what point do you move to Production? And, more importantly, how can you tell (that you’ve moved)? Is Scrum in fact a permanent Pre-Production, right up until the moment you launch? And if [...]
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June 27th, 2008 by adam
What is Pre-Production in games development? What is Production? What’s the difference? I’ve just written a (draft) post that requires you to know those things well before it makes sense, and I started off by including a grossly over-simplified idiot’s-guide to these things. Then I looked back and saw it had become as long as [...]
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June 25th, 2008 by adam
Someone at work forwarded around this article/manifesto about how “Great story is the Holy Grail of gaming”. I read it, and replied that I found every single paragraph had at least one stupid claim or ridiculous statement in it, and that overall the manifesto was basically a load of ****. It was a Monday morning, [...]
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June 19th, 2008 by adam
If you do much work administering linux servers – or, especially, if you DON’T do much, but occasionally need to – then it’s a massive time saver to be fluent in one of the text-based file editors that are found on all versions of Unix. As a developer working with game servers, I’ve found the [...]
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June 15th, 2008 by adam
Based on my unscientific quick straw poll, the majority of computer-literate people have no idea how WLAN / wifi / wireless LAN security works and – worse – are actively exposing all their data and passwords to all services, having convinced themselves that they are “mostly” safe or secure. I’m posting this in the (possibly [...]
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June 11th, 2008 by adam
At the Casual Games conference at GDC 06, one of the audience stood up and asked the panel of Serious Games or Casual Games industry experts whether they thought that Brain Training was going to do similar numbers in the US as it had done in Japan, and how that might change the face of [...]
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June 11th, 2008 by adam
I just heard this talk at the MMOGfest academic mini-conference last week – apparently, it’s mostly the same as the talk he gave at the independent MMO conference earlier this year, but I think a lot of people didn’t manage to go to that one, so it seems worth reporting here. Like all the other [...]
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June 9th, 2008 by adam
I’m seriously fed up with the mediocrity (you could use worse words; I’m being civil here) of most MMO publishers’ patching systems for MMOs. The very least you should expect as a player, even back in 2001, should have been something akin to the PS3 / 360 patching systems today: the most basic “fire and [...]
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June 3rd, 2008 by adam
We were talking about backups recently, and I remembered one of the things we did at MindCandy to great success that I now consider essential to any online game which has a live database: use your live backup as the input for all your development machines. NB: this is all about backing up LIVE SERVERS, [...]
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