Automated Testing: Building A Flexible Game Solver »
Interesting article on using an AI script to ‘solve’ complete a game and be used for automated testing. I have been looking into this type of thing myself and researching if it would be possible to write one for the games I am working on at Playfish using something like Sikuli as the player.
However, for it to be useful as an automated tester, it would need to be able to pick up on crashes and where the player would be stuck and report to a server/email the developers on where and how it happened.
EA proposes Harry Potter dev closure »
This is a really big shame. There are a lot of good people and is where I learned my craft when I started out in the industry. Hope everyone comes out of this okay.
Getting back into the Game
As some of you know, I recently changed jobs from WMS Gaming to Playfish UK and as I wrote about my reasons for leaving the games industry, I thought it be interesting to write about why and how I came back.
Indie co-working space and Tech City UK
As I was at the Develop Conference (Indie Day track) the other work and there was a general case of independent developers being really independent and missing the ability to talk shop with peers and bouncing ideas off one another.
Therefore, I was recently looking at setting up a co-working office space primarily aimed at Indies and creatives and started to do research in the co-working spaces currently available and see if it was viable.
(You can find the research document here: Google Docs).
It turns out it isn’t. Profit margins are very tight and ideally needed to be supported in some way and have constant events going on. Examples being TechHub and The Trampery which are supported by the Tech City UK government initiative.
For those interested in co-working, this wiki was very useful as it had links to spaces all over the world.
WTF? Unpaid crunch deserves no sympathy - Pachter
I came across the article earlier today regarding Pachter saying that unpaid overtime should be the norm and besides the fact he is an analyst and not a software developer, he is missing the point.
Dr. Mike Reddy comments on the article and raises the fact that research has shown money isn’t much of an incentive for people to do more work. Dan Pink’s Science of Motivation at a TED conference explains this further by showing people are more motivated when they feel like they matter and more importantly, trusted to do the work they have themselves set out to do.
As mentioned in an earlier post on Why I left my Games Job, I left primarily because the company made decisions that would force the developers on the team needed to work a massive amount of overtime in order to meet the deadline, not because the overtime was unpaid.
It made me feel like I didn’t matter and was just a company resource to be used. By doing so, this is a surefire way to have staff starting to look elsewhere. Compare this to companies like Fog Creak and 37signals where is clear that they treat their employees with a large amount of respect and trust (which is shown by their high staff retention), it is comparing night with day.
Lead Programmer's defense of Team Bondi »
This is an open letter defending the work and decisions made during the development of Team Bondi’s latest title, LA Noire.
L.A. Noire: The Team Bondi Emails - Article »
More ex-employees from Team Bondi pitch in with copies of internal emails that support information from the original article.
Why Did L.A. Noire Take Seven Years to Make? »
This article pretty sums up the reasons why I left the games industry not too long ago to see what other similar industries are like. It sounded like Team Bondi went into Death March early in the project and rather then try to fix the problem, management perpetuated it and made it worse.
All fingers seem to point at Brendan McNamara’s mismanagement.
Split/Second dev Black Rock to close »
After making ~100 people redundant in January, Disney have made the decision to close down the whole studio.
I had an interview there back in 2006 when I graduated from University of Hull and they seemed to be a great bunch of talented developers.
Good luck to all those affected.
This is a presentation by David Braben from Frontier in Learning Without Frontiers 2011 on his thoughts regarding ICT being taught in the classroom and how games can be used to encourage children to engage in the subject.
More interesting is his showcasing of the £15 computer, the Raspberry Pi which comes with everything needed to program it on the computer itself much like how the Commandore 64 came with BASIC built in. David is aiming to distribute this to children through schools via a charity he is in the process of setting up.
