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.

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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.

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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):

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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.

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I made some slight changes to the navigation in that I reversed the swipe gestures for left and right rotation and sped up the rotate to make it more responsive.

One problem I encountered early on is the need for scene culling. The map is cell based. Each square you see in the video is one cell so all I needed to do do a sphere check for each square to see if its in the Frustum or not and of course cull it if it isn’t. I will have to go one further than this though since it can still draw a lot of redundant data. My sphere test returns the distance from the cell to the camera so I am going to make use of that data to produce a list of near to far objects and then do a sort of ray cast to work out occlusion so that if a wall is nearer then there is no point processing anything behind that wall. This may seem like overkill but the iPhone has not got a massively powerful CPU and GPU to be able to process the entire world.

Before the ray casting goes in I am putting in environment collision detection so that you can’t walk through walls or objects

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• Buttons on the edges of the screen that you press to move forward, backwards and rotate left and right.
• Tilt the iPhone to rotate left and right and also to move forward and Backwards.

The controls are:

• Swipe down the screen to move forwards.
• Swipe up the screen to move backwards.
• Swipe left to rotate left.
• Swipe right to rotate right.

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How different is a Vector3 class I write now going to be from a version I wrote for somebody else? Code style will change and perhaps I have learned a few more optimization tricks but in the whole it won’t be that much different and when it comes down to it how can I prove that it is different? This is the major problem with IP protection and coding. I know that I have repeated pretty much the same code for the different companies I have worked for because I have a pattern of coding that is my ‘comfort zone’ and I don’t tend to move away from it often. I have had a few ’senior’ coders attempt to get me to adopt a coding style more akin to what their view of code is but I usually just say sorry and I will remember to follow the coding style bible from now on - but I don’t of course. I have the view that as long as code is readable by other coders then that is okay. Attempts to mould a coder into another working practice is likely to reduce their productivity. Why should this be so? A lot of people will try to convince you that coding is a science and there are rigid rules and forms that must be followed and sure - there are but I would call those people Software Engineers and perhaps they are more suited to a very regimented way of working. However I view ‘coding’ as a creative art rather than science and as a result every artist has a way that works for them and if they try to alter that way to conform to others then they tend to lose that creative spark that allows them to perform the magic that they do. Unfortunately this way of thinking has led me to trouble in the past. I was described in one interview as being ‘Cavalier’ in my coding and the rationale behind this was that I don’t plan what I do. This of course was nonsense and I do in-fact plan everything I do in the same way that a great artist plans a painting or a sculpture. My form of planning is a notebook I carry around with me all the time. This notebook contains lots of drawings of code flow and game designs. I don’t do anything without planning it first but that is not a constraint but more of a single part of the jigsaw that is coding as an art-form.

This would of course horrify the technical director of Introversion - he is more what I would call a Software Engineer and a damn good one at that.

Perhaps this is the real reason I re-write a lot of code rather than re-use it. The pleasure comes from the craft of creation rather than the end result itself?

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NSURL *url =[NSURL URLWithString: @"http://www.xiotexstudios.com"];
NSString *webpage = [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:url];

And that’s it. Obviously this is the most basic usage and to be useful I am going to have to thread this access in order to keep the OpenGL update responsive but I just can’t get past the fact that it’s just 2 lines of code to do it!

As I have already said - I was resisting learning Objective-C mainly because the language looks ugly to me. Most languages have a certain visual elegance to them but Objective-C to me looks like an over-reliance of brackets to enforce a kind of hierarchical messaging system then is just plain ugly to read. I will have to read up on the history of the language but from what I can gather it was an attempt to add object-oriented features to place C (hence ‘Objective-C’) and perhaps with that context the brackets may be forgiven. However, given all of the research I am having to do into Objective-C and the Cocoa framework I am now giving into the necessity and reading a book on Objective-C.

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