First six months at Quantum Soup

It’s funny that I thought I’d have MORE time to blog once I started Quantum Soup and was working for myself. Hah! Running a business is a continuous effort of working towards long-term goals while also grasping at short-term opportunities as they arise – funding, conferences, training. I’m doing a lot more biz dev than I expected and a lot less programming.

But it is also glorious. For the first time in my life, I’m working on a commercial project that is my own idea (well…just over 50% mine). But it’s certainly nowhere near 50% my work. After six months we have the core team together and everyone is bringing enthusiasm and ideas to the project, creating something I couldn’t hope to accomplish alone.

An enthusiastic team really raises your energy. We’ve built a bunch of stuff, some of which didn’t work and had to change, but the game’s better for it. We’ve bounced ideas around and made unexpected creative connections. We’re getting into what is – for me at least! – a really enjoyable working routine.

And soon we will be ready to show some of that work, which is both exciting and terrifying. It won’t be long now…

Moving on…

I’m leaving Traveller’s Tales to do a new thing which I’ll post about later. This piece is about saying goodbye to a studio I’ve worked at for over 15 years.

It’s a strange thought that I will no longer be working within the familiar (and sometimes orange) walls of TT Knutsford. But it’s only just sinking in that I will no longer be surrounded by a horde of supremely talented friends. When I started at TT, I had four or five years experience, but it feels like it was here that I really learned my craft – sometimes from my own mistakes, but chiefly from the wisdom of colleagues. It has been an absolute privilege to work with so many expert developers.

TT has been a huge part of my life, and I’ll never be able to look at LEGO again without a wistful smile. I wish the many teams at TT towers every success in the future – and I’ll be watching with interest to see what my old friends get up to…

Button Bash: The Witcher 3

There’s some cracking design choices in the Witcher. The casting of the player as a professional monster-hunter-for-hire makes all the usual quest tropes seem so much less contrived – plus the ability to haggle over the price of a job 🙂

In addition, it limits the player’s character development choices to a very specific set of skills – still plenty of options, but this is fundamentally and unashamedly a game about melee combat. The freedom of Skyrim allows the player to play how they want, but often that creates a very unbalanced experience (I played Skyrim as a full-on Mage, spells only, no armour. It involved a lot of running backwards shooting fireballs). The Witcher gives the player plenty of choices within a very specific field instead.

Finally, the depth of story in every side quest is brilliant – for example the haunted well in White Orchard, which sounds like a simple “go here, kill monster” but unfurls into an elaborate backstory that links with several NPC backgrounds and other side quests. That sense of consistency and rich detail makes for powerful worldbuilding.

The menu text is far too damn small on a console though 😉

Button Bash: Life is Strange

DontNod’s “Life is Strange” is a wonderful game with a refreshing setting and design. But what impresses me most is the mileage they get out of their primary gameplay verb. The time rewind is fantastic in the context of a branching narrative, allowing you to see all the ways any given encounter can play out in the short term, but without removing the mystery of what consequences will happen later on. But it’s also used to retrieve information from the future, unlocking new narrative choices. And it’s used as means of teleporting past obstructions because in some areas the rewind does not affect your position. The game is a masterclass in getting maximum value out of a single mechanic.

Button Bash: The Banner Saga

I’m particularly taken with The Banner Saga’s map, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, every feature on the map is clickable for a snippet of lore about that part of the world. It’s a lovely way to add depth to the gameworld and reward the player’s interest in notable landmarks.
But further play reveals something even better. An entire chapter of play covers a journey of two inches across a two-foot-square map. This world is HUGE, and difficult and dangerous to traverse. Much as I love Skyrim, the ability to fast travel to previous locations turns the explored regions of the world into a homogenous mass – the player is encouraged to teleport directly to quest locations like a globe-trotting NightCrawler. If you actually attempted to log your “journey” on the map it would look like a child’s scribble. This makes distance a trivial thing, and the epic landscape is reduced to background vistas for the towns you warp directly into. The amazing sense of place conjured by your first explorations is sacrificed on the altar of convenience. And yet there’s no attempt to mitigate the inconvenience of a cave full of dreugh. The Banner Saga makes the trials of travel one of the pillars of the gameplay, and the far-flung corners of it’s world are all the more intriguing for it.

Button Bash: Endless Legend

I am loving this game, apart from one minor niggle…don’t place all your buttons right at the edge of the screen if you’re using push-scrolling. I am constantly brushing the edge of screen with my pointer and moving the map away from what I was looking at. At least offer the *option* to turn it off since you already have the drag-to-scroll alternative.

On the positive side, I absolutely love the seamless zoom from close-in 3D models to strategic territory overview. Clearly a LOT of thought and effort went into getting that right, because it’s beautiful and shows me exactly what I need to see at every scale.

Gender Balance in the Games Industry

Very quick note – if you’re a woman working in games, please take this survey – Ella Romanos and the Next Gen Skills Academy need your input!

Button Bash: Thief UI

[Experiment: “Button Bash” is a series of micro-posts which will hopefully encourage me to write more frequently :)]

The recent(ish) Thief reboot is fun, but I have some UI niggles. The light gem, critical to gameplay, which used to be centred at the bottom of the screen, is now tucked into the left corner and easily ignored. Perhaps because the gem is now so obscure, crouching adds a dark vignette to the screen, reducing your field of view just when you want to pay most attention to your surroundings.

I would have done away with both the light gem and vignette. A far simpler gauge of your own visibility is Garrett’s own hands, which are always on screen and would provide a very natural indicator of how visible you are.

Games Dev North Wales

A recap, because I haven’t been blogging as often as I should…

Shortly before Christmas my colleague Ralph and I founded Games Dev North Wales – a social meetup for North Wales students and developers to discuss the art, science and industry of games. It’s growing steadily, and we were recently invited to visit Cardiff to speak at our more well-established partner group Games Dev South Wales. We talked about the differences between working in small teams and large “AAA” studios, and had a chat with some South Wales students about their projects.

We were also lucky enough to attend a meeting of the Games Wales Group, a think tank of many parties all keen to develop the Welsh digital media industry. We heard from BAFTA Cymru, the Film Agency, S4C, Creative Skillset, local universities, local government and others. There’s a lot going on!

It’s nice to lift my head from the keyboard now and then to see what’s going on in the outside world. It’s even nicer to find that over the years I’ve picked up some tips that are useful to the students who are going to drive the next era of games development.

And so, the plug: the next Games Dev North Wales event is on Tuesday the 11th Feb – always the 11th – and it’s a quiz this time, as a change from the debate format we’ve established so far. Do drop in if you work in or study games and can get to Wrexham that evening!

BAFTA voting excitement

Towards the end of last year I was lucky enough to be able to join BAFTA, as a result of all the work my colleagues at TT and I have done over the years. I’m pretty chuffed with that 🙂

One of the perks is that I get to vote in the Games Awards, so in the run-up to Christmas I had an awful lot of games I needed to play in order to make an informed decision. It was a very interesting experience – I played a whole lot of games I would normally have ignored, and most I enjoyed much more than I expected to.

Voting is still ongoing – the results of the first round have gone to the juries, who will spend another month or two playing the shortlisted titles in depth so that THEY can make an even more informed decision. I get one more vote for the Best Game, but the other awards are now up to those juries. It’s not going to be easy for them, as this has been an excellent year with a multitude of great titles.

Maybe next year I’ll volunteer for a jury. I’m really enjoying the opportunity to acknowledge the best work of the industry.