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12th August 2008 - Iain 12th August

One of the problems if becoming a publisher is the amount of documentation. It's a nightmare! Every game we do on a Sony or Microsoft Platform has to get concept approval. This means preparing a design documents, mockups, button layouts etc. You have to get concept approval before you can even announce a title is in development. Then for Sony you get to stage 2, proof of concept, which requires more documentation and a playable version of the game. We've just submitted one of our unannounced games on Monday this week. We think the game is looking great so don't expect any issues but you can never tell with these things! Then, when you've finished the games you have to do all sorts of documents for the final approval process. You also need to submit the manuals and packaging in all languages for approval and every game we make is in at least 5 languages. If a game is coming out on 3 platforms, that 15 manuals you need to create, and 15 box designs. Lets say you want to release 4 games a year, thats more than 1 manual a week. How I hate writing manuals....

In addition to all the material for approvals there are all the internal design docs, because all of the projects we're working on now require at least some level of out sourced work, be it music, sounds, scenario design, art, code or the whole shebang. Then add in the management time to coordinate all these sub contractors and you don't end up with much time left to put in to internal development. As things gear up my direct involvement in each game is reducing and Richard is leading the design on the next project. It's a shame as I really like being involved in detail on the games, but there are just not enough hours in the day so I'm having to hand over a lot of this work to other people. I guess it's just growing pains and things will calm down once we get the publishing system in place. 

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8th August 2008 - 08 August 2008

Well, the end of another week.  Been working mainly on clearing out a wide variety of bugs and requests on the buglist.  Some were model issues, making artillery a little less indiscriminately murdersome for example!  Others were tweaks and additions to the UI to try and make everything as polished and welcoming as possible.  Some of the most useful was on the UI for multiplayer and skirmish modes.  Some back and forth between Richard and I got a much cleaner UI experience.  You should hopefully be able to play skirmish or multiplayer with just a few clicks - we'll be providing some default example armies to play with, but you can always construct and use your own.

I'm also hoping to embed into the launcher a little online display, which will mean there need never be a missed patch, cool mod, or other useful info about the game.  I don't think we'll go with an autopatching solution, mainly because we would still need to allow for those people playing on machines with no/poor connections anyway, but it should certainly make it a lot simpler to grab a patch.

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7th August 2008 - Change is good

"To improve is to change" - Winston Churchill

And here's my first entry into the blog. It's Merlin here and I'm charge of Marketing and Sales here at Slitherine.

As Iain said, we've got a lot happening at the moment. The really cool thing in all this is change.
We've changed basically everything on how we run our business in the last 18 months and we've also changed the way we see the company competing in the videogames industry. We've changed our way of approaching development and we've now changed to publishing as well, which represents the ultimate level of being totally responsible of what we do and how we do it. Which is challenging, but exciting.

We've also changed, or realligned our corporate mission. Which is basically a nice 'marketing' way to say that we have set our goals and encapsulated them in phrase or in an idea. And this is 'create entertainment through history'. This might sound easy and simple, but I swear it's not. With every single game we've made in the past we've always tried to take the interesting bits of history and transform them in entertaining elements for our games. Of course we've done this creating strategy games for strategy gamers and we've learned how to do it quite well over the years.

Now the next step is to bring that same level of thrill and excitement to other genres and other platforms as well, which is the real challenge for us. There's a lot to do and a lot to learn, but the good thing is that, although we changed a lot, we still have the same great people to work with and we start from a fantastic community of fans from which we like to hear positive AND negative comments so that we're able to improve every day.
Look forward to seeing your comments and suggestions.

+M.

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31st July 2008 - Iain 31st July

Now that the first piece of news is out you can see why things here have been so busy for the last few months. We've raised a significant amount of funding and are moving from developing and publishing games online to become a full PC & console publisher.

Publishers have a different role to developers. The developer designs and creates the game, while the publisher funds, markets and sells it. The publisher also localises, tests and create packaging. We're already used to doing many of these jobs ourselves on one project or another but from now on we'll be doing it on all projects. Packaging and layout is the main area we've got limited experience in but our new Marketing Manager, Marco Minoli, is very used to dealing with these types of issues so we're confident we have all the skills needed to make this a success. 

The advantage of going in to publishing is that we move up the food chain and there are less people to split the revenue with. Obviously there are a lot more costs and risk as well but we haven't released a game yet that didn't make money for the publisher and we don't intend to start now! In a normal publishing deal the developer will get 20-30% of revenue, leaving the publisher with 70-80%. This means acting as a publisher we'll get 3-5 times as much revenue as a developer. Ths big risks as a publisher are funding the game development (which we've always done ourselves anyway) and paying to manufacture the games. If you are making console games you have to teh cost of goods at the time of manufacture, which can be up to €1m, so you can see why we need all that funding! As a publisher we're at risk if we can't sell these games as you don't get a refund from Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft!

We've got a very exciting release schedule lined up for 2009 but that will be announced in the coming weeks. We're preparing for Leipzig Game Convention, on the 19th-21st August, which is going to be a big show for us this year!

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31st July 2008 - Pip 31 July 2008

Been working with Richard a fair amount this week on some aspects of the next project.  It is interesting to approach this with user content creation as part of the core game this time, and hopefully we will see some pretty cool stuff coming out of the community once the game launches.  As I have mentioned before, a very large amount of the game logic will be customisable using scripting - although I am not sure how or if we'll be able to allow users on consoles to edit script files, even for things like win logic for user scenarios.  But on the PC we should be able to see user campaigns which tweak unit behaviours or stats, and that could be pretty cool.

The next game is going to be targeting some consoles from day one, which is interesting.  We are also going to be aiming to support low end PCs (as we try to with all our games), but hopefully we'll still have a few bits of pazzaz for those with higher end graphics cards.

On GBotMA we are still in the final stages, with a lot of content going in.  I am expecting the last minute rush to close off bugs and add in polish to happen any time now!

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22nd July 2008 - Iain 22nd July

Last week was a bit of a write off. There were so many meetings that it was hard to get anything done! We met with a number of our licensees and existing partners, but sadly can't say anything about those meetings for now, so the blog is probably going to be a bit dull!   

On the development side we started the Commander Napoleon at War beta and have had some great first pass feedback. It looks like the game is already great fun so it’s just a matter of cleaning out the bugs and getting the balance right. We've got a nasty performance issue that is killing the frame rate on some PC's and we're trying to track that down. Once we've sorted that out we'll open up the beta test to a wider test group.

Phil is working hard to finish up Great Battles and has sent me many version but I've not had a chance to really test them! Multiplayer is looking a lot more stable and once we have the missions finished off we'll be on the home straight.

Richard's PC died on him last week and so we're in the process of resurrecting it and getting a new one. It's a real pain as we're trying to prepare designs for the next game in time for a presentation. For now he's very limited in what he can do.

We finally received some test prints of the art canvases internally. They look absolutely awesome. We've printed up a couple of test images which are going to be shown at Historicon, the large wargames event in the US, next week. You can order at the show, so make sure to check them out. They'll be on the Casemate stand, which is located next to Osprey. If you get the chance head over and have a look - they really do need to be seen to be believed.

That’s about all for now, but hopefully the blog will get more interesting once we've announced our upcoming projects and can talk about them in more detail!

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18th July 2008 - Pip 18 July 2008

The end of another week.  Lots going on in both at the company level and with the code development.  Multiplayer is running as a first pass, with battles staying in sync pretty well.  A lot of that work got done earlier as we had versions which recorded user input to allow us to play back in realtime as a demo (which was quite cool - but needed a lot of work in terms of voiceovers and setting up).  And then some further bug chasing to get the battle replays for the movie creation tool (something that hopefully people will be able to make use of in the finished game, if they have the patience!).  As chasing those kind of sync bugs is usually the biggest problem, having a lot of them squared away already sped things up.  There is still plenty of work to be done, especially working out the logic to allow people to create interesting multiplayer campaigns (although we may end up having to simplify things a little - a lot of assumptions about how to string things together for good gameplay just break down when you have more than 1 player) but I feel the back of the problem has been broken.

I have also begun to set up the codebase for the next project, mainly so I can get the first pass art pipeline sorted out so that we can begin to make (or at least prototype) art.  It is starting off using the codebase from GBotMA which is good in some ways, but I always feel slightly guilty, as I know that it makes it less likely that I will redo those areas of the code that I have felt I could improve (not that there are many of those.   Obviously...).  But a running start helps prevent those dead periods between projects when assets can't be built because of a lack of pipeline or frameworks to validate them in.  The fact that we're going to expose a lot of the internal logic as scripting files (which should be fun for the modders!) means we can prototype even faster, and without needing a new build to allow people to see results.

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10th July 2008 - Iain 10th July 08

As usual things are pretty busy. There doesn;t seem to be a time when they're not these days. Great Empires Rome is hopefully going in to submission today as we've built the final SRL file that is required by Nintendo. Getting all teh documentation ready is quite painful as you need to make sure it's exactly right or you can rejected and have to restart the submission process.

In addition I'm uploading the Commander Napoleon at War version for the initial beta tester group to look at. The plan is to introduce small groups at a time to the Beta test so we do not get overwhelmed with feedback and so we can always have a fresh pair of eyes looking at each version. I want to run one final test on it before I let the Beta testers know it's there and the feeding frenzy begins! :)

Yesterday we met with Osprey Publishing. We were talking to them about our plans for the future of Field of Glory. They are very keen to publish the next iteration and we think they are a good fit so will probably work with them again. Our main concerns are the amount of time and effort it took to create the first set as we have limited bandwidth and were stretched to the limit. We've got plans on how to delegate more of the work in the future to keep the workload manageable so hopefully this will make it all less painful next time round.

I've been working with Richard on the design of an upcoming game today. We're both pretty much finished with Great Battles of the Middle Ages and most of the remaining work is down to Phil in the multiplayer & skirmish mode and the scenario design team over at the Lordz for play balance. We can't really say much about the new project it other than it's very exciting and we can't wait to get started. One of the trickiest things is getting the balance of complexity and playability. We wan't features that will be realistic to the player, but not at the expense of over complicating the user interface. We think we've come up with some good options which Richrd is going to flesh out and hopefully we can move on from there. Phil is gagging to get started as he's been on GBotMA for a long time now and any other project seems very appealing!

We've also got two other Kameleon Project games from new developers in production which we're going to be announcing soon. We just need the games to progress a litle more so we have some in game shots to go with the announcements.

There's also some big news coming, which we are always on the verge of being able to talk about but these things just take so long to get finalised! Ah well, you'll find out soon enough.

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7th July 2008 - Pip 07July08

Still continuing with the multiplayer.  One of the worst things is the time it takes to run a simple test, with 2 machines and so double the clicks, then going from one to the other etc.  But the multi is one element that it is very hard to remove from the equation!

It's required a slightly different approach, as we don't use realtime order entry, but instead have restricted number of points where either player can pause the battle, and then both can enter orders.  It will certainly add another layer to MP gaming, as when you use your ordering ability will be as important as what you do with it.  I am sure the logic will need tweaking once we get the game out into wider testing than just me!

The rest of the game is looking fairly solid at the moment though, and we have gained some good components which will be well placed for our ongoing games.  The scripting system especially I want to use a lot more, exposing combat model equations and the like, as this will improve the ability of designers to iterate ideas without needing me to code things.  The scripting system is very lightweight, and runs quickly enough that we can use it for a lot more than just mission logic - which is its prime function now.  On the other hand, having a scripting language for missions should allow for some pretty varied user campaigns once the finished game ships.

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3rd July 2008 - Pip

Well, 1st blog entry.  Hopefully there might be some interest in the behind the scenes goings on at the code face as we mine the Slitherine games.

Just back from our latest company meeting.  These are always a good way to get everyone synced up with the details of the business, and also drill down into game design issues and features.

But it's back to multiplayer coding for me - jetlag and all.  GBotMA uses a slightly different approach which in theory makes multiplayer a little less tricky, but it compensates for this with a more complex lobby (to support our user campaigns, which hopefully people will enjoy creating!) and slightly more tricky logic when players go to enter their orders.

We are using UDP for all our networking, as this is both faster (as it avoids the overhead of TCP stacks and the like, especially as we mix guaranteed and non-guaranteed messages) and also is more easily ported to other systems.  We do have our own guaranteed system, but this is much more under our control than a TCP connection would be.

The biggest issue with multiplayer is making sure that you can allow both machines to run smoothly, but without running past the point where an order or system event should have been executed - the big problem here being that you need to make sure they know that they might have missed an order message if it failed to get through!  Basically we handle this by including in every tick message the last order message that should have been recieved.  If an order message has been missed, then you have no option but to ignore incoming tick messages until you get the order (ignoring incoming ticks will stall you - which in turn will stall the other player as they aren't seeing your tick count increasing.  Thus you will both stall until the guaranteed messaging system manages to get the message through and everything can then start up again).

Feel free to comment on the kind of stuff you would like to see in my blog - it will tend to be programming based, but there are always general rants available on request!