Category: Uncategorized

I’ve blogged this sort of thing before in some ways:

https://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/?p=1118

But I was interested to read this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13508807

“Pupils in the UK were better behaved than the international average.

But Asian countries and regions dominated the top places in this good-behaviour league.”

I am so un-surprised by this. People in rich western countries don’t instill any sort of urgency or panic in their kids to make them study hard. The kids see the parents with cushy jobs and think that homework isn’t a big deal. They leave school with very poor skills and are totally outclassed by foreign competitors. Remember, you aren’t competing against your parents generation, but against kids your age is Japan, China and Kazakhstan. The Kazakhstan kids are paying attention whilst British and American kids text each other and kid around. I have a horrible feeling that we have an entire lazy, ill-educated generation who expect a lifetime of ipods, flat screen TVs, new cars and a luxury house and decent pension, but who have no way to finance any of this.

If you are 15 now, do you really not expect to live to 90? or 100? given modern medical science. How much will that require in terms of a pension? And this is the generation that has student debt from the start, and a huge national debt to pay off one day, not to mention massively increased job competition from the developing world, and increased automation and robotics meaning there won’t be so many menial jobs even if you wanted one. There are already thousands of people with relatively poor qualifications working in call-centers that will be replaced by voice-recog/synthesis AI within 20 years. What will they do? Wash cars? (nope, robots do that already).

I don’t have kids, but if I did, I’d be making damned sure they were top of the class, knowing who they are up against. The near-future economy isn’t defined by mining and construction, but bybiotech, nanotech, computer science and maths. I can’t see any reason why the next big technological boom can’t happen in China or Kazakhstan.

Now do your homework. :D

I’m 41, and I have never voted. Nope, thats nonsense, let me re-phrase it. I have never cast a vote that ever influenced anything, ever. That’s because I’ve always lived in a ‘safe seat’ meaning the local MP had nothing to fear, knowing he (and it was always a he) had a job for life, huge salary and expenses to boot.

Today I will be voting in the UK referendum on changing the voting system. I’ll be voting yes, but regardless of my personal views on that, my vote will actually be counted, because it’s not being done on some patronising non-proportional system like constituency voting. I know that AV isn’t PR, but it’s better than FPTP. I have grown incensed by the total lies put out by the No2AV campaign. I’m strongly pro-AV, and I could make a much better argument for FPTP than they did, but they chose to pretend it would cost more (what price democracy eh?) and that the money would be taken from intensive care wards to pay for it. They literally tried to claim that if you vote YesToAV, children would die.

Pathetic.

I hear that the No camp will be annoyed if yes wins on a low turnout, which is ironic, because the whole problem of first past the post is that there is no actual post. You can win with 1% of the vote, if every other candidate only gets 0.99%. So if there is a 1% turnout and yes wins, it will be a victory on the terms of FPTP. Bwahahahahaha. I got 3 No2AV leaflets through my door, with the postman, meaning it’s not being done by political activists for free, but being paid for, no doubt by some wealthy people with a vested interest in the current system.

So anyway, back to the voting system cost issue, to prove to them that the cost of Democracy should not be an issue, Democracy 2 is 50% off today with a special code. Check it out:

50% off Democracy2.

Happy voting,

So who else has played this? it’s a pretty cool little game. If you enjoyed RTS games before they went 3D, you might like it.

I mention it because someone on the blog commented on it, so I checked it out and today added it to showmethegames here:

http://www.showmethegames.com/strategy.php

It’s one of those ‘build a metric crapload of units’ style RTS games, and surprisingly moreish. The developers site is here:

http://www.isotope244.com

My current news is very technical. A lot of waffling away on vertex buffer batching code to make my engine much, much, much smoother and faster. If I ever write GSB 2, it will run much better on older machines. Not that it’s a slouch now, but it could mean bigger fleets :D

Still a while before I begin hinting at the next game…

Ok, so today I went along to Kingston university to be their guest at a games production course. It was pretty interesting, and fantastic that they thought to invite not one, but two indie devs (I was the second one) to go talk to students. I LOVE the idea that students on games courses aren’t automatically told ‘now go get a junior tester job at EA’ at the end. It seems that being an indie developer is considered a pretty reasonable career move now, which is awesome.

The students games were a mixed bag. Some had some really cool ideas. One of them had a really marketable, really clever, really original (I thought anyway…) character as the hero. Some of teams had obviously thought quite hard about business strategy for their game. Some had not…

What I tried to get across to them, and in retrospect I was *really* easy on them, with this point, is that the competition for game development jobs, sales, and success is HUGE.  Assuming that people doing this course see themselves, eventually as being a lead programmer/artist/designer on some big budget cool game in a few years time, they massively need to up their game by a scary amount.

If you are doing a game design or production course right now, you need to not only be top of your class, you need to be sailing past that goalpost so it’s a distant memory. You need to be clearly, unambigously, demonstrably the very very best at what you are doing. Think of it like this:

• You have no experience.
• You have no reputation.
• You have no contacts in the industry.

So you need to absolutely flipping blow people away with your skills and your portfolio. If you are a coder, that means having straight A’s in everything, and knock-out demos that prove you have serious mastery of your language(s). If you are an artist you need a BIG portfolio showing stuff that makes people go *wow*.  If you are a designer, you need a large number of diverse, fully designed, fully described, game designs in different styles. You need to be able to critique a game design idea read out to you, on the spot. Can you do this?

If you don’t have that, the job will go to one of the 99 other applicants who have all of those. If you think I’m kidding, I’m not. I’m a humble one-man studio and I regularly get sent CV’s from people wanting a job. I suspect Bioware and Valve get quite a few more :D

And that is to get a job at an existing studio. Running your own studio has a whole set of extra challenges and demands. This is an awesome job, and a great industry. It is, not surprisingly very difficult to get to do this.

ShowMeTheGames has an interview with Chris from muzzy lane software here:

http://www.showmethegames.com/makinghistory_interview.php

They make the strategy game ‘Making History’, which is used, a bit like Democracy 2 is, to teach kids history in schools.

I’m not really sure how to promote ShowMeTheGames. Hopefully, the RSS feed works now, but getting news sites to link to it is naturally problematic, because some will see it as a competitor to them. Hopefully the site can grow organically over time anyway. Feel free to quote the site or link to it when appropriate. I really want it to be the #1 site for showcasing indie PC games that you can buy direct from the developers. My heart sinks every time I see a cool new indie game and realise that the developers have an exclusive deal that you can only buy it from a third party. That just seems so lazy, and short-term. I’m sure everyone thinks they can always rely on their third party partners, and everything will be fine, but then, who predicted last week that impulse would get sold?