Some interest was shown in the source code to my flash game Arena so for all that asked:
What you get is the full source code to this game to do what you like with - no restrictions. The code actually contains the engine that I built and used to create Arena so you could use it to write your own games if you want - using Arena as the example on how to use it. The only thing I may remove is the sponsors code since I don’t own that.
There were 2 things in my life I always wanted to be. The first was a Director of a company and the second was a producer. Be careful what you wish for.
Being a Director mostly means paperwork and worrying about laws - paperwork I am useless at and I have no ideas about laws… I really need to brush up on running a business. Mind you at this stage the business is actually making a loss not a profit so I am giving it till next year before I either suspend it or close it down completely.
I accidentally made a comment over a curry at Develop 08 that you will not often find a producer that has emerged from the ranks of coders and that most producers arose from the ranks of QA and Art. My first mistake was to say this in front of my current Boss at Introversion Mark Morris. Fast forward a couple of months and now I am the producer of Darwinia+ which is introversions Darwinia and Multiwinia combined on XBox360. It’s not a massive team, just me and two other devs.
Now production turns out to be dealing with everthing from project management to staff management. I am making it all as I go along but I must be doing something right because Mark keeps saying he is impressed with my efforts so far. There are moments where I seek outside help though in order to solve an issue that I would normally have gone to a producer to solve - but now I am the producer so I have to solve them. What I found really ironic though was a meeting with devs where they used the same kind of tactics that I used to use on a producer to get what I wanted.
I am giving away the last of the free copies of Multiwinia tomorrow so if you want to be in with a chance of a free copy send your screenshots in now!
** Update 31/10/08 - The last of the copies has been handed out - well done to the 10 below! **
As I have mentioned before on this blog, during the day I work for Introversion and on Friday the 19th of September we finally released Multiwinia. Now, it’s tradition when working in games that you get a copy of the game you worked on and depending on the size of the team you usually get more than one copy to give away to familly/friends. I got 10 copies of Multiwinia to give away which is great except for one thing:
Billy-no-mates me 
So, I have decided to give away all 10 copies to random people and all you have to do to get one of those 10 copies is:
1, Download the demo copy of Multiwinia, either from here or the Multiwinia website: www.multiwinia.co.uk
2, Play the demo and take a screenshot of the game over screen showing you winning the game. Change the gamer tag to show your name and you have to have won the game to qualify.
3, Send the screenshot of you winning the game to dev@xiotexstudios.com. Make sure you put ‘The great Multiwinia give-away’ as the subject of the email otherwise I might miss it from all the spam this will generate.
I will then choose 10 people from all of the emails over the coming weeks to get a copy of the game. I will be showing the screenshots of the winners here so make them good ones!
That’s it - nothing more. No scam. Just play the demo, send me a screenshot of you winning the game and you are in the pool of people to win one of the 10 copies of the game. Once you are selected I will email you with the unlock code that turns the demo into the full game. I also restricting one copy per person.
Just to be clear - the game is a set of mini battles. You only have to show me a screenshot of you winning one of those battles not the entire game
Update:
Just to prove this is real I decided to give a copy of the game away to the first person to send in a screenshot and that was Paul Marshall (well done!) and this is his screenshot:
Further update:
Seven given out three to go. I will be handing these out over the next week to conclude this!
The second winner is Bruno A Pires (Nice screenshot!):
The next person to get a free copy is Alex Rea:
The fourth winner is Samuel:
Edward Kirby is the next:
And next is ‘Industry Fuckwit’ (nice name!)
And next is Dominic:
And next is Rikki Prince:
And next is blademasterbobo:
And the last is Ole Pedersen (Errod):
Early on in Containments development I wrote a very basic exporter for Cinema 4D. All it exported was polygon outlines and triangle data but I needed to extend it to export texture UV coordinates and normals. This is when the pain started. The documentation to Cinema 4D’s scripting language is terse to say the least and there appears to be very little in the way of support so getting at this most basic of data was not easy. At one point I was on the phone to Newtek to see how much it would cost me to upgrade my old version of Lightwave instead. As per usual though the solution to this little problem came to me at about 3am and it took a lot of will power to remain in bed and not get up immediately to code the solution.
It’s always the way with me. If I get hung up on a solution to a problem I have to walk away from it and let it stir away at the back of my mind and eventually a solution will pop out all gift wrapped and waiting under the tree. At the discovery of a problem though it is difficult to remember this process and not just hammer away at the issue until you get at the same solution which usually takes longer and not as elegant. It has been a while since I had an issue that I couldn’t solve this way and just like California and it’s Earth-quakes I am due the big one.
Containment is coming along quite well now. Since it is a 3D world on the iPhone I struggled long and hard on finding the best way to navigate through it. I considered lots of options among them were:
The controls are:
Xiotex Studios is my own business but during the day (and most of the night for the last few weeks) I work for a company called Introversion on a game called Multiwinia. I am described as senior coder for this company but I think that’s because I am older than all of them rather than some description of ability
A while back the marketing department asked me to make a small Flash game in my spare time to help promote Multiwinia and I agreed to it. You can take a look at this work in progress here. So in all this means that I am working on 4 games at the same time. The other 2 are another iPhone game and a small competition game for a friend of mine - all this while pulling crunch on Multiwinia.
I must be mad.
One of the games I was going to make for the WiiWare platform before the whole ‘rejection’ by Nintendo thing happened (in case you missed it) was a gravity based game that was going to make use of accelerometers on the Wii. However, Nintendo don’t want me and having just just released a small game on the iPhone I am now familiar with the development and publishing process so I can get on and start to make the ‘proper’ games I always intended to do so the next title is the game that was originally intended for WiiWare. At the same time I am developing my iPhone game engine further and I may just be giving away copies of that here in the attempt to help other new iPhone developers.
More details about the project and screenshots to come.
I don’t usually go in for ‘life coaches’ of self help stuff because I generally find that most of what they preach is common sense. However a couple of years ago (wow - has it really been that long?) a colleague of mine at Lionhead Studios put me onto Steve Pavlina. Now, while I find some of his work a little too far out for my tastes a lot of what he says is genuinely helpful and gels with my viewpoint of life in general. So when he announced his book I pre-ordered it on Amazon. Then he posted a blog entry calling for potential reviewers of his book and I jumped at it again. Today I got an email from him which said:
“Suffice it to say that you’ve qualified to receive a review copy, and I
forwarded your info to Hay House.”
So - YAY I get to read his book early and post a review which you will find here as soon as it arrives and I have read it.
You can get more info about it here:
The whole concept of life coaching and self help systems is a fascinating one and I wonder why it is so popular and so lucrative. My personal theory is that in some ways having somebody telling you how to live your life and giving you some answers about how to achieve something is a bit like removing part of the responsibility from yourself to achieve what you always could achieve. In a way almost going back to early childhood where your parent role models insulated you from the nastiness of the world and kept you in a safe cocoon of a sheltered life. So when we finally reach the stage where we have to fend for ourselves it leaves a hole that some replace with Religion, others with socializing and yet more with Life coaches. But then again I may just be spouting crap.
