We’re hoping to put a similar event on next year, hopefully bigger and more packed-out, so Teesside students watch this space. In the meanwhile, I’ve put my slides up on my portfolio page here.

The idea behind the event is that alumni from the University of Teesside return to give talks on topics they’ve learned about since leaving the University and entering the world of professional games development. Unlike the typical, “This is my experience of the games industry after my first few months there” talk (one of which I gave back in in May), this offers the chance for alumni to talk about a topic that matters to them – whether it’s the particular aspect of games development they’ve been involved with, or a technology they’ve explored or developed, or a particular approach to design. And, of course, it gives students an insight into aspects of games development they wouldn’t usually encounter as part of their course. The planned talks this time round are:

• Me, talking about multi-platform asset and build management using make and other UNIX tools.
• Peter J. B. Lewis, talking about working as a programmer in middleware, based on his experience at Geomerics in Cambridge.
• Luke Nockles, covering a variety of aspects of design, including game design, level design, and HUD and UI design.
• Steve Lee, talking about the role of design, getting a job in the industry, the meaning and value of elegance, and games as education / art.

There’ll also be a panel at the end which will likely focus on our early experiences in the industry but will be pretty open, so we’ll just go in whichever direction questions take us.

I’m really excited about this event and I hope that, if it’s a success, it can become an annual affair. Naturally I’ll be putting my slides up on this website once I’ve given the talk, so anyone who makes it should be able to find them on the portfolio page.

Disney Sing It is a karaoke game across all the major platforms (PS2, PS3, Wii, XBox 360 and PC) which allows you to sing along to Disney hits from the likes of High School Musical, Camp Rock, Hannah Montana, and Aly & AJ. It’s been a great experience working on it, particularly dealing with the peculiarities of multi-platform development and the issues involved with vast quantities (think many terabytes) of asset data. I’m afraid I must also confess to near-fluency in the Disney repertoire now!

I have added the game to my portfolio page.

…But wait a minute! No internet? Moved house in April? That’s right, I have not had the internet since April 14th. This being the end of June, that means I have gone for two and a half months without the internet, which is the longest I’ve managed without the net since 1995. Wow. Just, wow.

As you can imagine, a fair amount has happened in that time. I gave a talk at the University of Teesside in May, about my experiences thus far in the games industry. It went quite well, though due to unfortunate timing (one week before final ICA handins!) attendance was rather poor. I was invited up again next year, though, and at a better time of year. I and Peter Lewis have some interesting plans in store for that — but more on them in a few months’ time.

Work has remained interesting. Through a feat of temporal engineering, we are approaching completion deadlines at roughly twice the rate at which time passes. I am itching to talk a little more about it a little more, but as is so common, must await the project’s announcement first. I suspect this will happen in the next few months.

My new apartment is located in Hove, right near the sea, and is amazing. Firstly, it’s the first place I’ve ever had to myself — no flatshare here, no sirree. The novelty of that freedom still hasn’t worn off. A couple of weeks ago I was sitting on my sofa, with a glass of red wine, Tord Gustavsen Trio’s “Being There” playing in the background, and Flake’s “The Computational Beauty of Nature” in my hands, and I thought to myself, “this is good”.

Even the lack in internet has been an enjoyable novelty. I have no internet, no phone line, and even my mobile phone reception is virtually nonexistent within the flat itself. When I go home, I am quite cut off from the world. And although this has its disadvantages, particularly in terms of productivity at home, it has its advantages too. I haven’t been doing a lot of programming at home, but I have been doing quite a lot of reading about programming, and consolidating knowledge I already have — and I feel that it does give me a chance to think without being distracted by MSN Messenger or Wikipedia. I suspect I will soon set up an internet connection, but in the meantime I am quite enjoying going without.

Not having the internet, and by extension not being permanently tied to my computer, has also allowed me to devote more time to some of my other interests, too — particularly reading, and music. I’ve set up my keyboard for the first time in three years and started once again trying to teach myself to play. I feel I am making more progress than I have on previous occasions. I have also been taking advantage of my new life by the sea by going sailing quite regularly. Sailing is a brilliant sport, thoroughly enjoyable, and also very interesting when one stops to think of the mathematics and the mechanics behind it. I may stop to make some diagrams describing some of the interesting maths behind it sometime, but for now suffice to say just that it’s cool.

Anyway, that is just a little update, and quite possibly my last for a while, depending on how soon I arrange for the internet in my flat.

make, and the UNIX-style command line environment it typically utilises, is often forgotten or even scorned by programmers studying games-specific courses, or even some of those I’ve met in the industry itself. We’ve become used to IDEs which enable us to drag and drop files, edit them, compile, run and debug all in the same window. These have their advantages: the initial learning curve is much shallower, and they can deliver a tightly integrated experience (which is rather the point). They have their disadvantages too, however, and console-driven build management tools like make shouldn’t be discarded out of hand.

Each of the platforms we’re working with at the moment has an IDE associated with it: Microsoft platforms use Visual Studio .NET, while Sony and Nintendo both have CodeWarrior compilers set up, as well as their own alternatives. It’s quite easy to build and maintain a project / environment / solution for each individual platform, but running five concurrently is a different matter entirely. You know the story: somebody creates a new file and forgets to add it to all the different project files, or they write some code and check it in after compiling for one platform, not realising that it breaks the build on some of the other platforms… and so on. We’ve all experienced it in one way or another; most of us have been guilty of it at least once or twice. And with five different IDEs to load up and hit “compile”, who can blame us? Every check-in becomes a chore, which leads to fewer check-ins overall, which leads to difficult merges and difficult-to-track revisions.

One problem with using IDEs for cross-platform development is that they force you into a certain way of setting up your build. Sure, they try to add some flexibility with pre- and post- build steps, but if you want to do anything other than a simple compile it all gets a bit voodoo. make simply lets you run shell commands, meaning that it is not restricted to doing things in a particular order, to using a particular compiler, or even to compiling a particular language! The same makefile could compile C/C++ source files, link them into an executable, and run LaTeX over any .tex files it comes across, generating beautifully formatted documentation.

Indeed, this flexibility means make need not be limited to building the application executable. It can also process asset data ready for transferral to disc. Each platform will typically have its own texture format which is optimised for that platform specifically, and may have native formats for other media such as mesh data, videos, and audio streams. It pays to use these formats if possible, and make makes this pretty easy. It can be set up to handle all conversion, and move the new native-format files to the correct location in the directory structure.

Often this sort of asset processing is done using a custom tool written to do the job; typically a GUI tool written in C# or Python. Consider coding such a tool in C#, for example. It’s not difficult, but it would involve an unnecessary amount of work to accomplish something really quite simple. Python may be better — indeed, another build system, scons, is built upon it — but writing a full GUI tool from scratch seems like a waste of effort when what we’re trying to achieve is an automatic tool; one which requires as little user interaction as possible.

make allows us to set up dependencies to automate the conversion of asset files and move them into the correct place with ease. In addition to that, it will only perform these conversions if the source file has changed, which is a massive boon when you consider the length of time it takes to convert, say, video assets.

There are plenty of places to learn make, so I won’t go into the details of how to use it here, but for those reading who’ve never coded outside of Visual Studio, I urge you to take a look at make and see what it can do for you. Indeed, get ahold of Cygwin and familiarise yourself with it. The command line is far from dead, and as you learn how to take advantage of its many powerful features, you’ll likely find it changes the way you work.

But no, that’s not it. Actually what I’m talking about is this…

That’s a screenshot of my working environment at Zoë Mode (the code itself is masked out using a simple regex). I do most of my work in Vim running under Cygwin across both my monitors. I’ve installed ratpoison so that I can utilise all the screen space available to me, as well as cut down on mouse usage.

All that is fascinating, I’m sure. But the interesting thing about this screenshot probably isn’t the software or the environment. It’s probably the fact that everything’s pink. Yes, my xterm is set to a pink background, vim uses that default background – I’ve even set Windows to use the “Rose” theme packaged with it, with some minor tweaks to make it a bit pinker. Why would I do this? Why would I subject myself to near-fatal levels of pinkery? The answer, my dear Watsina, is elementary. I’m simply getting into character.

Method acting is a well-known technique practiced by many actors including Robert de Niro, Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, and some others who weren’t in Mafia films. Wikipedia describes it as “an acting technique in which actors try to replicate real life emotional conditions under which the character operates, in an effort to create a life-like, realistic performance.”

The game I’m working on at the moment is aimed toward the young female market. You see where I’m going with this? That’s right, through making my computer almost entirely pink, I hope to arrive at a deeper understanding of what it means to be a young girl. It means pink, apparently.

Here’s hoping I don’t find myself working on GTA any time soon…

It’s nice though; fun. You get the feeling you’re much more “close to the metal”, and you have to be much more aware of the machine’s resources.

Of course, the other major thing that’s happened is Christmas and New Year. This year – or I should say last year, on December 31st – I went to Oxford Services for the annual Oxford Services New Years Eve celebrations! Started a few years ago by Dave Shearn, this small gathering of friends grew this year to include 59 attendees (and a puppet). Shearn’s dream is that at least once every year we will have the opportunity to see all of our friends. It’s a lovely idea, and our Welcome Break certainly made for a great way to round off the year. I saw some old friends, and I met some new ones – whom I look forward to seeing again next year at Oxford Services.

I did make one New Year’s Resolution this year, though I only thought to make it on the 4th, and that involved keeping closer track of my money. That doesn’t necessarily mean spending less, I should note, just being more aware of where my spending tends to fall, and perhaps using that awareness to redirect it toward more productive endeavours. With this in mind I’ve installed GnuCash, and I’ve been playing with it the past few days. It’s a reasonably nice piece of software – while not as powerful as the tool my mother uses, Quickbooks, or other tools such as Quicken or Microsoft Money, it seems to suit my purposes quite well. Since my desktop broke I’ve been using my laptop most of the time, on which my primary OS is Ubuntu Linux, so those packages weren’t really an option anyway.

As a result of all this, I’ve found that managing ones personal finances is not unlike playing a Resource Management Game such as SimCity. This makes perfect sense, of course, since these games are designed to simulate real-world economics – nevertheless, I hadn’t quite looked at it that way before. It’s really quite rewarding manipulating my budget to accommodate different things, and trying to improve my high score offers the real-world benefit of also increasing my wealth!

The only rather annoying thing about GnuCash is its reports system. If you want to define a new report other than those templates that come with the application, you have to write a script to generate it in Scheme. This is not a trivial task; one of the sample reports weighs in at 521 lines – and Lisp-variants are supposed to be eloquent! On the bright side, the reports that come with GnuCash are really very good, but I do occasionally come across functionality that would be easy to implement were I using a spreadsheet, but which are a pain to try and wedge into GnuCash. Maybe I’ll come up with some solutions as I get more use out of the program in the coming months, but either way it’s a nice piece of software.

The other thing I spent my Christmas break doing was helping my Dad with his website. This got me back into web design, or rather, programming for websites. I was using Zen-Cart, which is written in PHP, but what I really want to learn now is Ruby. It’s cool, glamorous, and everyone’s using it, which are rubbish reasons – but hey, it’s a hobby. It does look really nice though! I particularly like its stance on typing – duck typing is an idea I’ve been growing to like more and more recently without having heard the expression, since it’s essentially what C++ offers through templates, though C++ does it with a lot less style. I’m really intrigued to see how Ruby feels to use, since it was designed with this style of programming in mind. At the same time, I would feel a lot less safe doing this sort of thing within an interpreted environment. One thing I love about templates is that they are a compile-time flexible typing mechanism.

We’ll see how it goes…

As a result I’ve now moved to Brighton and am due to start work on Monday. I’m looking forward to finding out what I’m going to be working on – I don’t even know yet which platform I’ll be dealing with. All will be revealed, though, in a mere three days!

The timing was pretty good, too. We were just coming toward the end of the current project at Virtual Playground and there wasn’t too much pressure on any of us, so I didn’t have to leave everyone scrabbling to hire a replacement. Also, my graduation from the University of Teesside fell neatly in between the two jobs, last weekend. Naturally, I had the cheesy graduation photo taken.

I hadn’t been back to Middlesbrough since July, so it was nice to see old friends. Unlike many of my colleagues at the University, I don’t really miss Middlesbrough at all. It was nice being able to get lunch at Etsuko for £1.99, but the Japanese restaurant here in Brighton, Pompoko, is really much better – although four times the price and cheap at that! No, Middlesbrough as a place doesn’t hold any appeal for me at all, but I do have good friends there.

I stayed for the first night with my former housemate AIDS, and his girlfriend Kaz. They have recently had a daughter – I believe she was two and a half weeks old when I visited. Her name is Kaitlyn, and it was a pleasure to meet her. I’d been warned that she could make a lot of noise, but she seemed very well-behaved during my time there! She’s an absolutely gorgeous baby, so of course I had my photo taken with her, too.

My computer is still broken, but I’m now thinking it’s the PSU which is on the blink, and that’s pretty easy to replace. However, right now it’s both broken and on the other side of the country to me, so I can’t test this theory. Meanwhile, I’m using my laptop, but as my desk is also still up in Newcastle I don’t have the best working environment at home. As a result I’ve not really used this week off for anything much useful, just a bit of reading and a bit of writing, and some exploring around Brighton.

I was recently reading about GOAL, though, as it was mentioned in passing on the sweng-gamedev mailing list. I quite enjoyed my brief experimentation with Lisp during the AI module in my final year at Uni, so I’m intrigued to see how it would be applied in a games scripting environment. I’m tempted to pursue my understanding of Lisp once I get set back up with a desk and so forth, but on the other hand I can’t escape the feeling that learning Lua would be far more practical.

We’ll see how it goes… for now I’m probably going to concentrate on work at my new job before I take on any other major programming projects. I also have a load of other ideas which I’ve started and not fully developed – some with friends, some on my own – so I may pick one of those up again.