Sunday 30 September 2007

Yossarian lives?

Pete's uploaded the photos he took of our work-sponsored paintballing day yesterday. They're pretty good, although I didn't quite respond properly to the instruction "look aggressive"...

Still, the aggression started early when our bus driver pulled away from the train station and cut up a taxi. At the next set of lights there was a great deal of "you think you're f***ing 'aard like?", "come over 'ere an' say tha'" and other scouse cliches. So we knew we were in for fun!

It was a really cool day - there were over 70 people playing, of which we made up 17. QA demanded to be in their own team, fighting the programmers.. which made for some entertaining trashtalk :)

I'm amazed today by the effect adrenaline must've had to keep me going all day - when I got home yesterday I discovered a 10cm purple bruise on my shoulder that I hadn't noticed, and today I woke up to find my legs didn't work. That's gonna make biking to work fun tomorrow...

Thursday 27 September 2007

Why does this always happen to J2ME?

Telling people you make computer games for a living is a little like telling them you own a sweet shop: some look panicked while they remember where they left the kids, but most smile and say things like "Cool! What have you done that I might've heard of?". Then you say "Well actually my sweet shop only sells Pontefract cakes and horrible flying saucers filled with poisonous dust.", or "I make mobile games".

At this point things can go one of three ways:

  1. "oh right" followed by me mumbling how mobile games are a lot more advanced than "snake" actually and oh, you're not listening anyway
  2. "oh right, yeah - like snake?", followed by the same mumbling explanation
  3. "oh cool! I play a lot of mobile games - I got this zip off the web with 1000 games in it.."

Its a shame mobile games are held in a relative disregard (especially by the rest of the games industry) because a lot of hard work goes into them. The designers have the decidedly unenviable task of thinking how to get the same "experience" as a next-gen console game on a device with a 2" screen and a control system designed for a single thumb. The artists have a hilarious time satisfying license-holders demands about getting the personality of their beloved cartoon character across in a sprite that's only 12 pixels high. At the same time the programmers alternate between writing code (more on this later) and reminding producers that their latest suggestion, while clearly born of genius, might not be feasible as the target device has the processing ability of a Daily Mail reader, and only slightly more memory.