It’s been a long time.
Since a lot of things. Like blogging. Like knowing what is going on with my web presence. Like caring about it all.
What galvanised me was that my sites, all of them hosted in one place, started getting Google offside.
“Huh? What buffoonery is this?” I would ask myself as the emails flooded in.
Continue reading “Rebirth, Starting My Websites Over”
Blizzard is still towering over the rest of the world, like a benevolent Colossus, laughing at the puny attempts of others to stand across the globe.
Blizzard reach 10 million subscribers
Don’t ask me what the hat is about. Or the picture as a whole .. really dropped the ball on that one. Kids flurrying about, asking a zillion questions at once .. mind not even remotely on the job. That’ll learn me for trying to pretend to draw.
Okay.
Activision Blizzard? Is this for real? What kind of world are we living in?
We’re living in a world where the guys who make the companies great move on and start their own companies that turn out to not deliver the exact game millions of slavering fans were putting together in their own minds for the past six or so years.
And in other gaming news, some guy (Jeff Gerstmann) got axed from Gamespot. Huge. I know. Stop being so shocked. It just so happens that he did a video review of Kane and Lynch, giving the game a 6.0.
Burn.
Seems the Eidos gods (the money behind the game) were angered and caused fierce wrath to fall down from their cloud palaces.
Ahem.
Moving on, Jaymoe had some progress since last post.
Context Menus are in!
A beginning only, but it’s cool. Right-Click, or indeed "Any"-Click Context Menus can be overused. But for us Desktop guys, they can be underused. Or just used in one place and nowhere else. It’s time to break down those glass castles and storm the English!
What more you say? I’ll tell you .. Login!
That’s right. The Jaymoe Management System can now be logged into. Wunderbar!
So now, I’m off to get the Images and Forums done for the Management System. Then, once they’re done, the plan is to use the Feeds to populate the actual website pages. Public first, then Private.
Along the way, I’ll have to get User Registration underway.
Looking forward to cracking open the File Uploads for the Images. Shouldn’t be too hard, although I say that a lot. And get stumped a lot.
In this article detailing Rob Pardo’s Keynote at the Austin Game Conference, we get a pretty awesome look into the minds of Blizzard.
They run their company the way I’d like to do Development.
A couple of quotes will say it better than I can.
Easy to Learn, difficult to master is the first Law. Design in the depth first, the accessibility later. A lot of folks seem to approach this the other way; when we first develop our games, we first try to come up with the really cool things that add years of replayability. Then we start talking about accessibility afterwards.
Concentrated coolness. What this means is, rather than make variety and lots of things to do, make fewer things really cool. The best example in woW is the class system. Lots of games have more classes, multiclassing, etc. We consciously avoided that in order to make each class as cool and different from the others as possible. This allowed us to have unique spells, abilities and mechanics. No red fireball, white fireball, blue fireball, etc. Even the two pet classes, hunters and warlocks, use their pets completely differently. We consciously avoided sharing mechanics across classes. We recently announced that the paladins and the shamans are switching sides. One of the primary reasons why we undid that rule was that we found ourselves merging them into each other for PvP balance. So we decided that it was less important for each side to have its own class than it was to have concentrated coolness for each class.
Don’t ship until it’s ready. This matters even more with MMOs. You might hear that it’s improved later, but no one actually goes back to try it. You will really cripple yourself, you put at risk the next five years of your product. So hopefully all you publishers will give the developers more time.
There’s a lot more of what Rob Pardo says in the article. It’s all gold. They are the most successful (in my mind) gaming company today. Their lessons in Development are global in scope. They don’t just apply to games.
So go have a read.
How are we to go about Software Development? That is, what mix of Innovation and Evolution should there be within our project? This is the stupidly high-browed question that is flicking away at my brain at the moment.
Blizzard make great games. They are game that Evolve the genre rather than Innovate. But they are so good, the little things done so well, that their practice almost becomes an innovation in and of itself. I mean seriously, in any area of software development, how many companies do the little things really well?
And then there is innovation, in the sense that most people mean, NEW NEW NEW. New functionality, new methodologies, new UI’s …
I’m not sure that this kind of innovation is necessarily needed for success in the marketplace. Especially in business, it’s how well the little things are done in a program that count. Once you have these right, you can build from there. But if you don’t have these right (Bill has to pound this into me every other day) then you got nothin. That’s right … Nothin’.
So this is a babble post. A half-formulated idea rambling into not much more :).
The new project is consuming any free time I have. It’s getting very exciting. My classes are working well, simple, but well. Have cheated a little using Global Variables for a few things, but plan to iron those out with the Options functionality. Although that’s extra, around the sides stuff. The main goal must stay pure. Nothing extra until it’s done.
