A few months ago I ran a survey to find out which programming-languages people were using with Entity Systems: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/18JF6uCHI0nZ1-Yel76uZzL1UfFMI21QvDlcnXSGXSHo/viewform I’m about to publish a Patreon article on Entity Systems (here if you want to support me), but I wanted to put something up on my blog at the same […]
games industry
175 posts
TL;DR: experienced CEO/CTO/TechDirector with long background in programming, sales, and business management (Corporate, iPhone/Android, Games, Education) looking for strategic roles in USA, UK, and Asia. After a year-out to do a post-graduate degree in Education, I’m looking for something new and exciting to do next. My primary goal is to […]
In case you weren’t aware, in a nutshell: Dev writes game, gets share of profits when sold Publisher manufactures game ($10 loss) Publisher sells game to retailer at $30 ($20 profit) Retailer sells game to public at $60 ($30 profit)
There’s tonnes of blogs out there, so I only talk about the bits that other people have missed, or were too polite or inexperienced to cover. Often that means I’m the one pointing out the flaws (most people don’t want to write bad things. Screw that; ignoring the bad points […]
Six months ago I tweeted a handful of obvious ways that you could make the Unity Asset Store greatly more profitable. One of the Unity folk reached out to me, claimed that Unity was highly invested in improving this and asked for specific suggestions. So I wrote longer, detailed versions […]
Background Every Saturday, thousands of indie / hobbyist game developers publish screenshots of their in-progress games. Unlike most forms of marketing, this is: honest / genuinely representative (it’s actual content) interesting (show’s the dev’s intentions) exciting (pictures of games are usually more fun than words) i.e. … it’s an amazing […]
Step 1: Do not buy the book with this title. Writing a book is tough, and I respect the time and effort that goes into it. But I don’t rate a book highly simply because it was hard to write: it has to fulfil it’s purpose, and help the reader. […]
A bunch of indie game devs (including various friends of mine) are doing an AMA right now on Reddit. Go have a look (and ask some questions) if interested. I found the answers this question a bit depressing though, given that the audience has increased 100-fold in the last 2 […]
Ashelia/HellMode’s review of Tomb Raider 2013: “Tomb Raider triggered me, sure. But it didn’t do it needlessly. It didn’t do it tactlessly. It didn’t do it for a cheap rise. It instead captured a real emotion and a real experience millions of women will encounter in their life. Some of […]
This year: I hadn’t even left the talk before I got this email: This is excellent. Easy and automated (using the RFID tags in the pass itself, that’s scanned as you walk in the door), it’s quick and accurate. As a bonus, I can rely on it to give me […]
Carlo Delallana responds to the sensationalized report that “I think most game designers really just suck”: “One of biggest problems that game designers face in their path towards mastery is respect. It’s easy to respect an artist with a demonstrable skill, no average person assumes they can do what an […]
Background Last year, Pearson ran the first ever Innov8 competition, giving tech startups a chance to make their own innovative new product/project. The grand prize was £5,000 towards building the product. Most of the teams were adults (even: real companies), but a team of students from Blatchington Mill School won, […]
Some good observations on tech business strategy here Low-margin can still mean high-value-business: “Most people just look at a company’s margins and judge the quality of the business model based on that, but the cash flow characteristics of the business can make one company a far more valuable company than […]
While upgrading Unity, I noticed the current download page is a great example of how it SHOULD be done: Unity 4 has some … issues … with backwards compatibility – but at least they made the “need an older version?” link prominent. And how many old versions can you download? […]
The 21st century will be dominated by “digital” culture and art. History suggests that non-digital art will flourish too (while becoming a smaller, more specialized, part of a larger pie). So it’s all good: more people will have more opportunities to create – and more access to experience – a […]
I noticed a few months back that Pat Wyatt has been blogging rgularly and in a lot of detail last year. This (IMHO) is big news: Pat is an awesome developer who held key positions in the teams behind many of the bestselling computer games (e.g.: Diablo 1 + 2, […]
(background: after 8 years as one of the world’s mid-tier MMO games, City of Heroes (+ City of Villains) is being shut down. The community banded together to ask if they could take over running the world that meant so much to them; NCsoft (the publisher, and a company I […]
35 years of game-consoles, and their original retail price, adjusted for inflation: i.e. a (reasonably) direct comparison of how expensive they were at the time they were launched. Some quick observations: NeoGeo and 3DO/Jaguar were insanely expensive – and, of course, sold very poorly and went bye-bye. Until the Wii […]
Jon just published an interesting letter about the current state of cert processes for game consoles / platforms. There are some real problems with certification today. Unfortunately, Jon’s post doesn’t really touch upon them, and seems to go instead after the IMHO untrue and unhelpful claim that iOS is better […]