Year: 2011

Categories
programming recruiting

1,001

Most “gamification” achievements I couldn’t care less about (and this is the Dirty Secret of gamification – most consumers don’t care), … but this is one of the few that I do:

(and I post this in the full knowledge that it’s possible to game (i.e. cheat) your way to well over 2k rep on StackOverflow … but I’m chuffed anyway)

Unlike my experiences of the SO clones, SO is *still* a very high signal-to-noise ratio, in my experience. And so I still care about it – and value the SO score on other peopl’s profiles

(yeah, not-so-subtle hint: your SO score is now a standard part of any employer’s background checks, if they’re smart. Can make the difference between getting an interview or not, let alone getting the job)

Categories
games industry

It seems, Mr. Outsourcer, that you’ve been living -two- lives…

IMHO, there are two types of outsourcing in the games industry; one type is much easier for the outsource company to get off the ground, and is therefore much much more common.

Two types…

Type 1: lowest-hanging fruit

Signs:
…”we delivered EXACTLY your spec – including the bits we knew were typos”
… managers (but none of the staff) are ex-industry people with lots of management experience
… very low-cost (often: 20% or less of the cost of doing it in-house from scratch)
… professionally managed by account directors (may be *called* project managers)
… very VERY large number of clients and portfolio pieces
… always able to fit you in (they work very fast / efficiently, and churn stuff out fast; they can “scale up” relatively easily / quickly)
… terminology is usually about “booking you in”, etc – words from assembly-line companies

Type 2: specialists

Signs:
….expensive
… less interested in the spec, more interested in the overall goals
… the staff (not the managers) are typically ex-industry people with lots of experience
… you might have to wait 3-9 months for them to become avaialble for your project
… terminology is usually about “product development”, etc – words from development studios

It’s all in the Aspiration…

Type 1 companies are either making a fast (but small) buck, or are very smart. The smart ones are growing as fast as they can, and building up a cash pile. Sooner or later they setup internal, wholly-owned studios, and build their own product – which has a much higher profit margin. They offset the risks / costs by using their own (now huge) outsource teams to do lots of the work.

Type 2 companies often drift back and forth between being outsourced dev, and being paid-by-the-hour Consultants. These companies survive or fail a lot more on their pure skill and unique abilities/experience; their profit margins are much higher, but they have way fewer contracts and growth / scaling up their team is much harder.

How should you deal with them?

Most of what you hear about “working with outsourcers” really only applies to the first group, e.g.:

  1. write an AWESOMELY accurate + detailed spec. Triple the amount of time you normally spend speccing stuff, to make sure this one is perfect. (PS: as a side-effect, you’ll end up answering lots of design qestions you probably had been avoiding or weren’t aware of yet – that’s often hard work but helpful to you in long run)
  2. be damn sure they’re profitable and stable – these companies often operate on tiny profit margins until they’ve scaled up. The less-smart ones never manage to increase their profit margins
  3. don’t be afraid to hurt the business-relationship: in their business, they have to accept every project that comes along. These companies are ever-hungry for work (to fuel their growth). Bear in mind they have aggressive, skilled salespeople, and probably love to play hardball negotiation
  4. think of them as vendors, “selling” you a pre-packaged product that you specced 6 months earlier

For type 2 companies, I feel the rules of engagement are different:

  1. don’t waste time on detailed specs: much of these guys value is that they can and will (re-)write your specs for you to be closer to what you wanted/needed
  2. be very careful of the relationship – you’re dealing directly with high-skilled experts, and there’s relatively few direct-alternative companies. Don’t piss them off, or underpay them, or they might not work for you again – you’re not “negotiating with a salesperson”, you’re “distracting an expert who’d much rather be off working than sitting around arguing over price / service / SLA”
  3. think of them as freelancers (although they’re obviously a different beast – you’re paying them to do a lot more than just freelance, much more than just follow orders), working with you to build something day by day

One of these lives has a future, and one of them … does not

In my experience, the first group often have a clear goal of success and riches, and a specific business plan to take them there. Whereas the second group often operate more as a “lifestyle business” – i.e. the individuals a making a decent annual wage, they’re doing something they enjoy, and it’s low-stress. They like the work, they get enough profit per project that they can survive through “lean times” when the market goes into recession, etc.

So, in most cases, there’s a high rate of “successful” type-1 companies (high turnover, employing 50…100…or several hundred…staff, lots of cash flowing around). Successful in sales terms, but … typically struggle to make anything beyond a low profit margin.

And a very low rate of “successful” type-2 companies (most of them are just pootling along, happy in their own little world, but neither growing nor shrinking – from an investor perspective, that’s a dismal failure: you’ll never get to sell your stake for $$$).

On the other hand, it’s usually the second group that contains the really huge successes (albeit a very small minority): the companies that pivot, the teams that come up with a huge money-making idea “unexpectedly”. There’s few better ways for a group of experts to “invent” the Next Big Thing, than to service dozens of clients a year for a couple of years and bide their time till they spot a gap in the market. By that point, they’re in a perfect position to capitalize on it…

Categories
fixing your desktop iphone

Apple UK Contact Email Address

…because Apple hates giving customer support, and buried this address deep in their website, in a tiny font where it’s almost impossible to find:

contactus.uk@euro.apple.com

…and they just screwed-up an order we’d made, but all their emails were sent from fake Apple email addresses (“You have replied to a confirmation-only address that cannot accept incoming email.”).

The only alternative they offered was an expensive pay-per-minute phone number. I’m obviously not one of the True Mac Faithful: I don’t agree that *I* should pay Apple to fix *their* mistakes :).

Categories
amusing iphone

Apple: “Yes, we have iPhones in stock. But you can’t buy them”

Apple UK continues to show that they don’t have a clue how to operate a retail operation.

We’ve got an app that’s demoing today and tomorrow, and it would help if I had an extra iPhone4 to run it on. So, I try to buy one from the local Apple shop.

Hi, do you have any iPhone 4’s?

“Do you want a contract?”
“No”
“Well, in that case: no. We don’t have any” ([To Other Guards] I told him we already got one)
“But … if I *do* want a contract, you’ve got some?”
“Yes!”
“But you won’t sell me one of those, even though you have them?”
“No!”

When will you have [these magical non-contract] phones?

“No idea. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe not”
“…”
“Here’s a phone number – you can call them at 9am tomorrow morning and they’ll tell you if we have any that day”
“So, I can call, and reserve one and collect it that day?”
“No. They’ll only tell you if we have one RIGHT NOW when you call – it could be gone when you get here”
“So, this number is totally useless?”
“Well … it’ll tell you whether maybe we probably might have one. We don’t do reservations any more. We used to, all the time. But then we … uh … stopped”

http://store.apple.com/uk

“Order now, in stock, ships in 24 hours”

Categories
games design marketing and PR programming

“Do I look fat in this?” … “You do now!” (Kinect FAIL)

Here’s an excellent idea: use Kinect to display clothes on people in real-time, inside a fashion retail shop:

http://ar-door.com/2011/05/virtualnaya-primerochnaya-dlya-topshop/?lang=en (Scrub to 0:25 – first 30 seconds is moronic marketing-person bumf)

This has huge potential:

  1. Much much faster than browsing – potential for more positive purchase decisions in less time
  2. Less space lost to changing rooms – fewer rooms needed for same number of customers (space is often at a premium in retail outlets)
  3. Show an enormous range of stock while keeping very little on-site
  4. Show every size, rather than just the sizes that are in stock on-site

But hey – wait a minute – look closely at the person who’s posing in each case. Why does the on-screen person look like they weigh twice as much as the person who’s in front of the camera?

Ah. I see. It’s that recurring problem again: marketing companies that don’t know where to hire skilled tech staff. Here we’ve got 3D model wrapping apparently done by someone who’s never heard of Convex Hull. This is basic Computer Science (IIRC it’s taught in almost every CS undergrad course today) – wrapping string (or cloth) tightly around a solid object is an interesting and very common problem.

OK, it’s version one; “we’ll fix that in beta”; etc. Except … you’re demoing this to:

  1. women
  2. in a fashion store
  3. in public
  4. when they’re about to pay money
  5. for clothes

…and you’re making them look:

  1. uniform weight (which for short, young Muscovites is – according to the video – usually “much larger than reality”)
  2. saggy (look at the video – they failed to register / stretch the clothing for the head/neck-to-knees length; in most cases, the women’s busts are aroudn their waists, and their waists are around their knees)
  3. masculine (most women’s clothing hangs; it’s soft, flexible; here, the Kinect models have no physics, not even primitive struct-based bending, let alone springs. Doh)

All of which put together makes this a FAIL. Technologically it’s all fixable, but from a sales/marketing perspective it’s enough to send many people screaming. Fingers crossed that the company (ARDoor) manages to make huge sales anyway – the potential here is enormous, and some of what they’ve done looks great (I like the simple interface, and the giant “Smile!” instruction).

Categories
amusing iphone

The ultimate excuse for iOS developers…

Rebooting again, everything killed thanks to Xcode4, I thought of xkcd’s comic on “compiling”, and a little modification came to mind:

Appropriately, working with Xcode3 often suffered from time wasted for the weak compiler to churn through relatively tiny projects. We’ve moved on – Xcode4 has a much better compiler/linker/build toolset – but it’s brought it’s own (worse) problem to replace it…

Xcode4 commits IMHO the second-worse (*) sin for an IDE: serious memory / CPU leaks; run it for long enough (as little as 1 hour) and it will crash badly, and drag down your whole computer with it. Since you cannot work without the IDE, this means you waste hours every week just rebooting over and over again. Apparently, OS X has little protection against rogue apps – the whole OS seizes-up, mouse cursor stops working, etc.

Varies from machine to machine, and project to project. e.g. high CPU machines (fast Quad-core) seem to be affected only very rarely (if ever). With some machine/project combos – e.g. dual-core machines around 1.6Ghz CPU – this happens multiple times a day, every day. They’re fast machines, generally – it’s just that Xcode has some fatally bad code somewhere. Xcode3 on the same machines was fine.

(*) – worst sin: data-loss; an IDE that corrupts your source code / build settings. Those just make me lose the will to live.

Categories
games industry web 2.0

GameStop Network: (possibly) the World’s worst Advertising proposition

(a.k.a.: “how not to advertise on the internet, lesson 101 for Advertising Agencies who have no idea how “advertising” works, or what it exists for”)

Tonight, as I tried to show someone a game, it took 12 – twelve! – refreshes of this page
 before Gamestop would stop replacing a URL with a flash advert for something unrelated.

The advert was for cat food. !. !!. !!!111!!!!!!!11. Some stupid crap that I don’t want, and which Gamestop *should know without doubt* that I’ve seen 50+ times before; they know this because every time I view that page, I’m logged-in to the Kongregate badge-tracking system (via cookies and auth).

(they also know that I have *never* clicked on the ad; it doesn’t take genius to work out that I have zero interest in the product, and that every time they show it to me, they are almost certainly damaging the client – what kind of ad-agency is so stupid as to *not* realise how bad this is?)

Maybe … they are very, very stupid – and deliberately pissing-off players with adverts they’ve already seen – or, perhaps, they are charging advertisers 50 times (or more) to show adverts to the same individuals over and over again. It damages the website’s reputation, so presumably (educated guess) reduces the usage of the Kongregate domain; I’d be surprised if they’re doing it without some kind of remuneration…

(NB: this new take on ads did not exist until GameStop purchased Kong; I feel reasonably confident in guessing that neither of the Greer siblings had anything to do with this insanity)

If I worked for the advertising agency that had an employee who was stupid enough to sign this deal with GameStop, I’d be suing for breach of contract, fraud, or negligence right now; this is *not* how advertising works. Not even the most basic level of 1990’s-era checks have been put in place: IMHO either GameStop is screwing their clients, or they’re just really, really stupid (I’m betting on the latter).

Categories
games design programming

Love failure: make better games, faster

In my experience, most people can grasp one, but not both, these concepts when prototyping a game:

“If you fail, there will be dozens more”
“failure is ok! That’s what prototyping is for, so go crazy!”

Too often, I meet people who go crazy – but only once. It ends horribly, and they give up in shame.

Just as often, I meet people who make lots of stuff, quickly – but it’s all generic derivative crap; they never took creative risks.

The linked article above is a must-read for any serious designer: it’s a post-mortem from the Experimental Gameplay Project guys (“design + implement a new game every week for a whole semester” – if you haven’t played the games, or read about the concept, I can’t recommend it enough). I *frequently* tell wannabe-game-designers to go do exactly the same themselves – there’s no better way to learn the art and craft of game design.

Other choice quotes from the article include:

… how bad can it be?

“Although they were utter failures, the whole team was thrilled to take such a bold risk to prove the failure of audio-only gameplay, and I could point with pride to my hideous creations.”

… for all those misguided individuals who still think designers shouldn’t learn to code:

“Each member of the team had to be comfortable with all aspects of game development. Everyone was responsible for their own programming, art, sound, and everything else that went into the final product.”

(as Designers, you should aspire to be the games-equivalent of a Product Manager: making the final, shipped product come together as an awesome whole, rather than locking yourself in a cupboard doing your little niche thing, and ignoring the end-product)

…an observation I made a few years ago, and lead me to plan a 4-day week for our studio:

“after much investigation, it appears that you just cannot schedule creativity.”

…Scrum: start with a vertical slice of cake, and add slices, not layers:

“we found that gathering art and music with some personal significance was particularly fruitful”

(if you want further correlation of this, IIRC Jonathon Mak made the same point a few years back at GDC: Everyday Shooter sucked and was dull when he prototyped “game mechanics without animations”, and lead him down the wrong paths of improvement; you cannot take the style out of gameplay, it’s too tightly interwoven)

…how to: Simulate a prototype … in your head:

“It’s really easy! All you have to do is imagine your game audience saying, “Wow!” And then just work backward and fill in the blanks. What’s making them enjoy your game? What emotion are they feeling? What is happening in the game to make them feel that way? ”

Go read the article…

If you’re not convinced already, here’s their Handy Cut-Out List! (which won’t help much till you read it, as each line is one of the sub-headings:

Setup: Rapid is a State of Mind

* Embrace the Possibility of Failure – it Encourages Creative Risk Taking
* Enforce Short Development Cycles (More Time != More Quality)
* Constrain Creativity to Make You Want it Even More
* Gather a Kickass Team and an Objective Advisor – Mindset is as Important as Talent
* Develop in Parallel for Maximum Splatter

Design: Creativity and the Myth of Brainstorming

* Formal Brainstorming Has a 0% Success Rate
* Gather Concept Art and Music to Create an Emotional Target
* Simulate in Your Head – Pre-Prototype the Prototype

Development: Nobody Knows How You Made it, and Nobody Cares

* Build the Toy First
* If You Can Get Away With it, Fake it
* Cut Your Losses and “Learn When to Shoot Your Baby in the Crib”
* Heavy Theming Will Not Salvage Bad Design (or “You Can’t Polish a Turd”)
* But Overall Aesthetic Matters! Apply a Healthy Spread of Art, Sound, and Music
* Nobody Cares About Your Great Engineering

General Gameplay: Sensual Lessons in Juicy Fun

* Complexity is Not Necessary for Fun
* Create a Sense of Ownership to Keep ’em Crawling Back for More
* “Experimental” Does Not Mean “Complex”
* Build Toward a Well Defined Goal
* Make it Juicy!

Categories
fixing your desktop

Mac users: Regular Expressions app temporarily @ $0.99

I use regexp a lot, very useful, but OS X has weak support for them – Apple’s products rarely support regexp for search/replace.

In particular, the latest version of Xcode (Xcode 4) has no support, which is tragic. So … I wrote an app that makes it fast and easy to do a search/replace with full regexp support.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/regular-expressions-helper/id429461864

BONUS: it does it all in realtime – so you can see the results as you type (useful if you’re not 100% sure of the syntax you’re using).

It just went live on the App Store, and it’s temporarily at $1 – grab it now, I’ll be putting the price up after the weekend. Here’s a teaser screenshot from the v1.1 that will go up soon:

Categories
entrepreneurship recruiting

Given the chance, would you…

…trip someone over, or … Help them stand?

Visiting London, this question comes up a lot. Just now, I was on a train where as we pulled into the station the driver announced that the train on the neighbouring platform was the Express train to same final destination; he encouraged passengers to run to the other platform, and promised to wait if the other train left too soon.

I was the first person to reach the other platform; just as I arrived, the other driver started the engines and slowly pulled away.

You might pass this off as coincidence, but I’ve seen it many times first hand from London transport Employees: they delight in fucking over as many people as they can. I’ve even been threatened by London Transport staff, and was too naive to realise their behaviour was illegal.

But on a smaller scale are all the ordinary citizens who passively aggressively respond to perceived slights by barging others as they enter or leave a tube train, or deliberately walk slowly and block the pavements and escalators. When I was one of them … In my mind, I was exacting petty revenge on the woman who barged everyone out of her way when entering the train, or the man who jammed his briefcase in the closing doors so theyd re open and let him in (delaying the train and risking breaking it in the process – I’ve been on London trains that were cancelled because of exactly this).

But some years ago I realised you have a choice at each such moment; two paths lie before you, each goes to the same destination, but the journey is markedly different, and will change you; which path would you prefer to be defined by?

I still resent the petty bastards like tonights train driver who watched people run to his train then pulled away at the last moment – perhaps I even resent them more, as I think about the escalating pyramid of misery and vindictiveness they cause – but it’s also mixed with a small measure of pity, that these sad people will probably never again be truly happy, too wrapped up in their schadenfreude over others.

Categories
games industry recruiting

UK: J2EE/Web developer for games backends (Blitz)

“We are looking for a passionate and experienced individual to help with the design construction and maintenance of a variety of web-based entertainment and social media game service”

This being Blitz, the job is of course in Leamington Spa, which rules it out for most people :(.

But if you’re a web/server/java developer looking to get into a mainstream games company, could be a good start.

Categories
bitching Web 0.1

Web 0.1: flickr still doesn’t support OS X

…as in: after 5 odd years, on OS X the official uploader still “requires” you to either lose all your data every time it stumbles, or … force-crash it. Which, paradoxically, keeps your data intact. Confused? You should be.

e.g. you get 50% through uploading a few hundred photos, and your broadband has a momentary slowdown. Ten seconds appears to be all it takes. Because the flickr app doesn’t do basic error handling, it’ll hang at this point – forever.

If you do the obvious thing and hit “cancel” (there’s no “retry” button – why would you want to retry?), it deletes your data.

If you quit, it also deletes your data. (this is the mistake I made just now. That’s 20 minutes of editing image data I now have to do all over again. Sigh)

The only options are:

1. pull out the network cable, causing it to hard-crash … and “enable” the retry button
2. force-quit the app, causing it to crash … and when you restart it, it will automatically load in all the data

So, note to self: if flickr uploader hangs, FORCE KILL the ****er. Don’t do anything sensible or sane – it won’t work.

And … note to flickr: there’s quite a lot of Mac users these days; might be a good idea to start supporting them.

Categories
amusing games design

My next game will be named: Power Battle Love Magic … III

(because sequels always look better in SEO, no?)

http://www.achilleseffect.com/2011/03/word-cloud-how-toy-ad-vocabulary-reinforces-gender-stereotypes/

I’ve always wanted to do a “mash-up” of the words used in commercials for so-called boys’ toys. I did a little bit of this in my book, but now, thanks to Wordle, I can present my findings in graphic form. This is not an exhaustive record; it’s really just a starting point, but the results certainly are interesting.
…
The results, while not at all surprising, put the gender bias in toy advertising in stark relief.

Categories
fixing your desktop

OS X: if your laptop grinds to a halt, and it’s the OS, not the app…

OS X still has some fragility (or bugs?) in kernel-related code, it would seem. I just had my laptop go to 150% CPU usage … with no apps running. “top” showed that the rogue process was the core kernel process (PID 0) – i.e. only way to stop it is to reboot.

But I’ve noticed that some bugs related to the kernel can be “fixed” simply by hibernating and de-hibernating. e.g. with Wacom tablets, early versions of OS X 10.6 would often get “stuck” with the right-mouse-button permanently clicked. (IIRC, that got fixed around 10.6.3 – either by Apple or by Wacom)

So, I tried it today: close laptop lid, wait 1 second, re-open.

Magic! Kernel process un-f***ed itself, and system went back to normal. Many times simpler and quicker than rebooting :).

(EDIT: although … a few minutes later, I’m now seeing 0.5 second delays on keyboard interaction and mouse movement, every few seconds. Seems the OS X kernel is still FUBAR. Gah.)

Categories
entrepreneurship games industry recruiting

“if you train your staff, there’s a risk they’ll leave; if you don’t, there’s a risk they’ll stay”

On twitter the other day (but Twitter’s crashing at the moment, so I can’t find the original author).

Coincidentally, came up in a private games-industry forum today too, where someone was actually trying to argue it’s a *good thing* that their employer pays below-standard wages for all engineering staff. WTF?

Anyway, I think it’s a great quote. Just remember that “train” can be replaced with “pay” and “treat humanely”; a lot of weak company directors (and managers) talk themselves into the idea:

“If I keep my staff downtrodden, lean and mean, and low self-esteem … they’ll be forced to carry on working here, no matter how bad it gets. They won’t have the self-belief needed to leave!”

…but are too scared/panicked/stupid/lazy to think of the obvious immediate side-effect: what kind of product is going to be produced by people in that state of mind? Definitely not “quality”, or anything that will increase the success of the business…

Categories
bitching marketing and PR

London Digital Agencies: Stop spamming, please

Why is it that these days every time a London-based “digital agency” or “mobile agency” gets hold of your email address, they IMMEDIATELY sign you up to their spam mailing list? Even some outside London have started doing this too.

YuzaMobile is the most recent example – why do it? It doesn’t benefit them: their spam has just thoroughly convinced me that I never want to let any of my clients or partners anywhere near them. They have a cavalier disregard for basic comms etiquette.

How did they get my email?

Well, I sent a single personal email to one of their directors who I’d met at an event.

How does that square with “spam me now, please!”?

I have no idea.

Categories
games industry recruiting

2011 Games Salary/Contractor rates survey

If you’re working in web/games/etc, please fill out the short survey on salary, contractor rates, project size, etc

Once the survey is closed, the writeup will appear here – feel free to bookmark this page!

Until this, this is a HOLDING PAGE POST to workaround a design flaw (and some bugs?) in Google Docs.

Interim results: 150 responses so far, but if you know people who are NOT programmers, get them to fill out the survey!

Categories
amusing community games design iphone marketing and PR

Top steps tips viral mobile iphone success profit

Did that get your attention?

In the last day or so, I’ve seen a barrage of crap on this topic – much of it ACTIVELY destructive (it’ll make your iPhone apps less successful than if you didn’t do it!). I’m not going to hotlink most of them – they don’t deserve the attention – but some of them mix bad with good, e.g. a guest post from someone with some good points, but also glaring inaccuracies.

So, some myths:

Thursday is the best day to launch an app

No. It’s one of the worst days. Why? Because every idiot who ever read “Thursday is the best day to launch an app” … now launches their apps on Thursday. Duh!

Facebook and Twitter sharing will make your app “go viral”

Virality is based on value, not on the presence of a corporate logo. Find some *real* iPhone developers, and ask them what happens if you launch an app with sharing in it.

Only apps that are already spreading virally, and heading for major success, ever benefit from this integration.

i.e. don’t bother until you actually need it; in some cases, for big apps, where you’re confident of 100,000 initial downloads … you may need it at launch. Most apps don’t.

Choose carefully every word in your iTunes description

Nope. Ask any experienced developer how many of their users read the iTunes description, and they’ll probably laugh at you. There’s a really, really good reason for this (but this is a post on what NOT to do, not what to do).

Check-in makes your app as popular as FourSquare

Um … WTF? How stupid are you?

“You need check-in on everything. Let your users check in to articles, blog posts, events, places, shopping items, videos, or even slide share feeds ☺.

People love to tell their friends where they are and what they are doing, so just make it easier for them.”

Who’s that from? Oh, yes – a company that doesn’t actually make apps, but sells a product to churn out crummy identikit apps, where “check-in” is one of their features.

No. In general, it just annoys people. Unless it’s part of the app’s core activity – but in that case, you never had an option to “not” include check-in. (also: why are you even trying to compete with 4square? Have you any idea how tough that is?)

Chart ranking is everything

Again, this is from the school of:

“I am a marketing person who doesn’t make apps, and doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Nor do I bother to ask anyone who does”

…because this info is several years out of date (i.e. a lifetime in App Store terms). In fact, for the last 10-18 months, chart ranking has been largely irrelevant in a lot of sectors – largely due to the surge in FAAD and their ilk.

Engaging with “the community” will give you huge sales

Sad but true: first you need a success before you even have something we’d call “a community”. You need a substantial number of downloads – AND daily actives. “Ten of your mates downloading it once” does not a community make.

Variant: for games, pandering to the TouchArcade community

Ask a game developer how easy / successful it is to promote your game on TA.

Again: back when almost no-one was doing it, this helped enormously. But that was years ago. Now … good luck getting any visibility amongst the sea of other developers doing exactly the same thing.

And finally…

If you feel you want even more “gotchas” and things to avoid, have a look at Jake Simpson’s very recent (February 2011) experiences of trying many of these – and more! – and having them fail miserably.

NB: Jake’s experience was particularly harsh, and actually goes more negative than I think is accurate, in general. At some point, I’ll do a followup that looks at the good parts (things you SHOULD do, that never seem to get old).

But, let’s be clear: mostly, this is standard Marketing. If you’ve hired someone to do your marketing who even bothers to read these sites, you made a mistake. Instead, find someone who’s good enough at marketing to invent the tactics they need all by themself. Preferably, hire someone for their skill at marketing “strategy”, not for their knowledge of “tactics”.

Categories
games industry

Space flight: like jumping, just it’s a really long way

And for another useful and not-at-all ridiculous comparison, we have a new studio called People Pilot:

Each project team at People Pilot will be comprised of contractors: “It works well for audio, so I’m betting it will work for art and technology too,” says founder Roland Peddie.

EDIT: I just an image that perfectly captures Roland Peddie’s statement here:

Following Peddie’s excellent logic, I expect we’ll soon be seeing:

  • 80% of the industry made redundant (after all, audio teams do fine with only a handful of staff)
  • …along with most of the Project Managers and Producers (small teams don’t need all that “management” stuff)
  • This silly concept of “fun” will be ditched entirely
  • And this obsession with “game engines” will also vanish. Really, it’s pretty simple, guys: just look at the audio frameworks. That’s how it should be done!

Incidentally, there’s a huge difference between audio contractors and normal contractors. Audio contractors are:

  1. desperate for work (short supply, long demand)
  2. relatively constant quality (see above: survival of the fittest)
  3. non-critical to a project (as in “critical path”)
  4. don’t live each day with the option of doubling their salary tomorrow by taking a job in mainstream IT

…so it’s a hell of a lot easier working with them. I fear that Mr. Peddie is going to have a rude awakening when he starts hiring code and art contractors. It’s essential with contractors, but “reliability” isn’t a word usually associated with artistic personalities. Good luck to him, but … I suspect it’ll just end up as another notch on the board for “this “Hollywood” model is inappropriate for the games industry, and overall a pretty dumb idea”.

Categories
fixing your desktop

OS X 10.6.6 breaks Macbook laptops? – beware upgrading…

Short story: if you try to do *any* iPhone development with a 1st/2nd/3rd gen Pro or Air right now, you may screw-up your laptop – massive overheating. I did. My Air is now almost unusable – thanks, Apple!

Apple is currently:

  1. Forcing all iOS developers to use Xcode 4, even though it only went live 1 week ago
  2. Forcing all Xcode 4 users to run OS X 10.6.6., even though it only went live a couple of months ago
  3. …and 10.6.6 appears to have an overheating bug

For me, I installed the 10.6.6 update, and immediately my laptop went into massive overheat. Nothing brings the temperature down. Multiple processes are being run on high (up to 100%) CPU that normally do not show up, the load factor is enormous. CPU temperature over 80 celsius, with nothing but a single firefox window open. Sigh.

I believe this is a bug with the much-praised “make OS X use your dual-core CPU to Da Max” that came in recently. Only, that’s a really stupid idea on laptops, especially when running on battery, with no apps that need the CPU)

(NB: that was the same window, with the same tabs, as before I upgraded to 10.6.6 – I saved / restored the session. Whatever’s broken, the 10.6.6. upgrade currently seems the most likely cause)

Sadly, there’s no way out (can’t downgrade) and no way forward (no patches available yet).

i.e. the bad-old-days of Microsoft’s “auto-updates” and the critical bugs they often caused. At least Microsoft had the excuse they couldn’t test all 100,000,000 combinations of hardware – Apple doesn’t. They’ve only got a few hundred to worry about :(.