Oh, yes: http://xkcd.com/869/ …please, FOR THE CHILDREN, don’t put a “make it look like an iPhone app, but remove 90% of the content” theme on your website.
Yearly Archives: 2011
139 posts
Here’s a long (long!) video interview with Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve (one of the biggest / most successful games companies). (incidentally: this post is shorter than intended. Someone at WordPress considered it acceptable to DELETE your post if your login cookie timesout before you hit the save button. Completely […]
I don’t normally call-out individual investors, but this tweet from Max Niederhofer underlines something I’ve been thinking about for a while: I’d like to see a culture of equity investors admitting (publically) their missed investments as often as they big-up the ones they made. Biggest angel investing screwup of mine […]
I’ve just done a round of fixes for the source-examples of ES’s. Github projects updated on this page: http://entity-systems.wikidot.com/rdbms-with-code-in-systems Changed: Added a complete Java implementation of the most basic ES example Fixed some minor bugs in the Objective-C basic ES example; added some missing classes Added a missing class method […]
I’ve given that site two serious attempts – I had nothing to gain from it, I was just trying to share best practice and info from within the commercial side of the industry. I wanted it to work. StackOverflow (which it’s cloned from) has been a huge success, and the […]
Have you had emails like this recently? Urgent position – lead programmer I need an awesome programmer for this fantastic company based in X. It’s an amazing team – probably the best I’ve ever seen – real household names, and they’ve got a cool office, like nothing you’ve seen before. […]
Spotted this (the notion “DevOps”) courtesy of Matthew Weigel, a term I’d fortunately missed-out on. It seems to come down to: Software Developers (programmers who write apps that a company sells) and Ops people (sysadmins who manage servers) don’t talk enough and don’t respect each other; this cause problems when […]
Courtesy of Tom, I played the DA2 demo a few days ago. It’s the first Bioware game I’ve played that was so inherently dull and boring I lost all interest after 10 minutes. This rarely happens to me with any game, let alone one from a mega-studio like Bioware. I […]
Notes to advertisers: checking the author’s name, email address, and what the blog is about, and acknowledging how odd their advertising attempt is – these are all good things. You’d be surprised (or depressed) how often people cold-contact me without doing any of the above. I almost feel sorry that […]
A year old, this quote, and the original source is from EA marketing (i.e. accuracy / provenance needs to be carefully checked), but still interesting, from Joey Brezinski: “Its so sick trying to take a video game trick and make it reality, it just takes way longer with your feet […]
…if you: finish it and design it and build it and test it and refine it and launch it and sell it and market it …for me. This was the tempting offer whispered in my ear this evening by a hard-up web-developer at a networking event, once we were alone, […]
Sob. I just lost about a dozen incomplete/unsaved documents due to a bug in OS X. Seems that sometimes, for no particular reason, OS X just deletes all your autosave information. (and … there’s plenty of threads about this on Apple.com and elsewhere. No response from Apple so far. Sigh) […]
Another excellent post by Christer – a Direct of tech @ SCEA – on calculating independent, verfiable salaries for people in videogames industry: “Unlike salary surveys, where people can claim arbitrary wages (and the submitted salaries are never posted), the H1-B data contains actual wages! In other words, it is […]
In the UK, it’s probably illegal to make you work on a Sunday: If [your employment contract] doesn’t [specifically say “you must work on Sundays”], then the only way of making you work on that day is by a change to your contract. This is something that must normally be […]
I reckon this is just a case of indie developers (finally) starting to understand the concept of “marketing” in a bit more depth than the 101 stuff. With my PR hat on, this is great stuff: highly contentious (and potentially dangerous) quotes – and yet, nowhere near as career-damaging as […]
It’s much easier for journalists to write stories about doom and gloom – you get the emotional outbursts from stressed people, you get stories (of rags to riches to rags; of loss and pathos; of fear and uncertainty; above all: of the contrast between “playing games” and “making them”). But… […]
Oh dear, Sheridan’s. Money talks? After winning so much (accidental?) respect in the games industry, for defending against The Wicked Edge of The West, you then had to go and sue developers for using the word “Stick” in the names of their games. Reaction? Well … severe enough that this […]
Another interesting post from Dan Lee Rogers on whether the money paid for ngmoco last year was reasonable. (hint: Dan is clearly rather doubtful, IMHO with good reason) E.g. … Further, Ms. Namba stated that DeNA’s purchase decision was based ngmoco’s ability to create hit iPhone games, which begs the […]
I just got two more emails about GDC attendance, and had to apologise that I won’t be there. Hopefully, this post will head off some of the rest. Disclaimer: for the past 4 or 5 years, I’ve run one of the main calendars of unofficial GDC events. Every night of […]