Recently we chose Jira as our new bug database, for reasons mostly explained in my previous post (at least, those were my reasons – other people were involved, no doubt with their own reasons). We were on Bugzilla before, which did us proud for many years, but we needed something a little more fully-featured in [...]
Archive for the ‘Realtime Worlds’ Category
My love for plugins, reaffirmed
Posted in Realtime Worlds, Software development on September 1, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Choosing a business model for a game
Posted in Business, Realtime Worlds on June 25, 2009 | 5 Comments »
I just came across this post by Nicholas Lovell in response to Dave’s talk at the GameHorizon conference. I don’t want to get into debating all of it (obviously I disagree on the “epic fail” bit!!), but item #2 really got me thinking:
My view: different business models require different gameplay. A subscription business needs a [...]
Just making a boot
Posted in Realtime Worlds on June 8, 2009 | 1 Comment »
I’ve been working on APB for a little while now. It didn’t seem worth posting about at first as there wasn’t much to see of the game publicly, but after E3, there’s plenty:
I still feel like a total newbie. Much like Timothy at the end of the (excellent) first podcast, just [...]
Overtime, done right
Posted in Realtime Worlds, Software development on May 6, 2009 | 2 Comments »
We’ve all heard the games industry overtime horror stories. ea_spouse is still the most famous example but if you work in games, you’ll know more. I’ve heard of people that were forced to stay late every night because of a “nobody leaves until everybody’s finished” policy – with people challenging the policy losing their bonuses. [...]
Asteroid action!
Posted in Realtime Worlds on March 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
A few people have asked for video of the asteroids game from the RTW programming contest. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to organise capturing the actual run in the final, but I re-ran the entries just now and captured the output. Interestingly, I’ve run the entries a few times now and the winners on the [...]
Organising a programming contest
Posted in Realtime Worlds on March 16, 2009 | 2 Comments »
A couple of weekends back, we held a team programming contest for students of Scottish Universities. I had a great time taking part in contests like this back at school, and it was no less fun being on the organising side! This was an unusually light-hearted event, with each team of 5 sharing a single [...]
A game in a week!
Posted in Game development, Realtime Worlds on January 13, 2009 | 6 Comments »
It may not quite be Google 20% time, but a number of us at RTW were given last week off “normal” work, assigned randomly to small teams of 5 or 6 and set the challenge of making a complete game of our design. Without a 3D artist, my team went for “Nanotube”, a tunnel shooter [...]
How to get a job at Realtime Worlds (3)
Posted in Game development, Realtime Worlds on October 15, 2008 | 1 Comment »
I hadn’t really anticipated adding a part 3, but I gave a talk at Abertay last Friday on the topic, and need to make the slides available for anyone who missed out, or who wants to follow up on some links etc. So, here they are. It’s similar material to my previous two entries on [...]
How to get a job at Realtime Worlds (2)
Posted in Game development, Realtime Worlds on June 18, 2008 | 7 Comments »
Part 1 looked at what qualities you need to get in, while in this second half I’m going to be looking at the application process – from CVs through to interview. You need to get both parts right: obviously polishing your CV and preparing for an interview isn’t going to make up for missing skills [...]
How to get a job at Realtime Worlds (1)
Posted in Education, Game development, Realtime Worlds on June 15, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Before I get going, you might wonder why I’d want to help you with this, particularly as I have no clue who you are. Perhaps I’m incredibly altruistic. Well, maybe sometimes, but today I’m just feeling selfish. Here’s why: I hire people for RTW, and being a hiring manager really, really sucks [...]
