But there is something bloody spectacular going on behind the scenes at Mainly About Games towers.

(That’s not the actual name of where I live, it’s just something that magazines and websites often call their offices. I don’t know why. Maybe to try and kid themselves into believing that their place of work is somehow exciting or romantic. And not somewhere that smells of stale men and desperation.)

Anyway, more news of this big shiny and exciting thing in a couple of weeks. Until then I will try and get around to putting my crushing disappointment at Enslaved: Odyssey to the West in to words. Or maybe finish up the drafted article I have titled “The Numerous and Grievous Game Design Crimes of de Blob 2″.

But I’m terribly busy, you see.

(Incidentally, have you ever done a Google image search for “something bloody spectacular”? There is an amazing psychedelic picture of a cat. Consider that my gift to you.)

This is the sequence of pages you get when you try and download Skype using Google Chrome.

On the main Skype landing page select which platform you want to download for. In this case I was going for Windows.

I don’t want or need an upgraded account, so I click on the “get Skype” link.

This forces me to sign in or create an account before giving me the download. Oh well, I’d need to create an account anyway, may as well do it now. The form’s not very long either, and most of it is optional.

Slightly odd spam-filter verification, but whatever. I fill in the text from the box and click “create account”.

Oh bums, there’s been an error create the account on the web site. Still, Skype handily suggests that I can download the program and then create a new account from within it. Great! They even provide the download link. Let’s click that…

…and we get to – hey hang on, we’ve been here before! Yes, it turns out you are in a loop here. You can’t download Skype without an account, but the web page isn’t letting me create an account. Brilliant web page design, Skype.

(So, did you spot what the problem was? It’s that verification system of course. You can’t see their captcha in Google Chrome. Or Firefox. In desperation I eventually tried Internet Explorer. And on that page IE popped up saying that the security certificate for some page elements was out of date, and would I like to display them anyway? And on saying that yes I would like to view these dodgy elements, it turns out that it is the captcha. So the bit of the website designed to stop spam bots from creating dummy accounts is so insecure that at least two browsers won’t show it by default. Double brilliant web page design, Skype.)

This was something I really picked up on a couple of weeks ago when I had to take a couple of flights as I was coming back from holiday.

I’m assuming you all know what baggage carousels are. Certainly if you’ve ever checked luggage for a flight you will presumably have stood at one at the other end of your trip (unless you weren’t really that bothered about your luggage anyway).

For the benefit of those who’ve never had the sheer joy of experiencing the safest way to travel (and most tiresome way to spend the last hours of a vacation), here’s a picture that neatly includes the key elements.

The key thing about the baggage carousel is visibility. Passengers need to be able to see their luggage, so they can take it away, and gradually empty the thing. And what’s the best place for you to both see and pick up your baggage? Why, right next to the carousel of course.

Except, if everybody stands right next to it, suddenly your visibility goes isn’t so good, because there are now people to your sides blocking your view down the length of the carousel. And anybody standing back from the carousel at this point won’t be able to see anything at all, for the mass of bodies.

It struck me that it’s sort of a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Overall the best results for me are going to be if I stand next to the carousel – then I will either have great visibility and be close to the luggage (if everybody else stands back), or poor visibility and be close to the luggage (if everybody else stands close).

The worst result of all for me occurs if I stand back (no visibility, and having to walk to the luggage, if everybody else stands close), and even the “best case” for me there is just great visibility, though having to walk forward to grab my luggage.

So my self interest says I should stand as close to the carousel as I can, even though if everybody agreed to stand back behind the yellow line (like it bloody tells you to do anyway) we would all get the second best possible results and everyone would have a better and more pleasant experience.

Incidentally yes, I did think all of this while I was stood back from the carousel. Having already been awake for over twenty hours and having had a nine hour flight followed by another hour flight, I was in no mood to jostle my way forward and fight for a position amongst the annoying self-serving idiots that I had already be forced to endure at close proximity in a flying metal tube.

I hate flying.

Yes, I know it was only a couple of months ago that I last messed around with the look of Mainly About Games, but this time I’ve done a fair bit more.

For a while I’ve not been entirely happy with how it looked, and though the odd tweak here and there worked for a little while, I started asking myself questions. Like “why is it this shade of blue”, “why are there space invaders on it”, and “why are the columns random widths”. The answers were all pretty much “because it’s been like that for ages”.

So I decided to have a proper change around, and remake the theme using more actual good design process. Things like using a grid so that the columns are proper widths. Or counting the average number of words per line and making sure it’s an amount that doesn’t hurt your brain to read. Or picking a colour scheme that uses complimentary colours. Or having more deliberate use of space and dead space.

Possibly the hardest thing was deciding on a new logo. I’d already set my mind on getting rid of the old one, I thought it was a bit cliched. Pixels and Space Invaders. Taking a quick look through some other game related sites, these themes are used a lot. I bet none of those guys even worked on Space Invaders (I didn’t!)

The problem was finding another icon that says “video games”. There are a few that are instantly recognisable, but most (like the invaders) are specific to one game or series, and I didn’t really want to keep along those lines. Even a company like Apple has a hell of a time finding a simple icon that says “games” to people – just have a look at the mess of an icon they have created for the Game Center. In the end I settled on the idea of an arcade cabinet (also not entirely representative of what I do, but oh well!).

And hey, I got to try out making some vector art as well. I tried out a few packages, trying to create the graphic I wanted with each demo version. The only one I got any real progress with was Sketch. If you’re looking for a cheap vector app, you can get a trial from their website.

A round of feedback from my chums later, some quick compatibility testing on our other laptop (so hopefully it works ok for you – it seems to be slightly more resolution than browser dependant) and here we are.

Hope you like it!

Today has brought some excellent news. Well I say news, but really it’s just confirmation of what I have known (and if you’re honest with yourselves, you have all suspected) for a long time.

Metacritic has started aggregating individual developers based on the scores of their credited titles. And as a result have said that I am awesome. Not just awesome, but officially awesome, with the cold hard numbers to back it up.

Look.

Let’s put this into a bit of context: I am better than Hideo Kojima; I am better than Will Wright; I am miles better than Shigeru Miyamoto.

Send your well-wishes, employment offers, cash monies, and virgins to the usual address.

(In case it isn’t clear, I am entirely joking here. I’m poking fun at Metacritic’s terrible idea of rating people based on the review scores of games that they worked on as part of a huge team of developers. I honestly don’t see the point in what they’ve done. It would be pointless even if their credits lists weren’t incomplete – no GTA: Stories games on my entry – or broken up – pity my alter ego. How can any system that says that I am a better developer than Shigeru Miyamoto be worth anything at all to anyone?

Though obviously I’m still going to put it on my CV.)

I have two main rules when I’m writing an email. The first isn’t important right now*. The second is not to use capital letters, bolding, or coloured text.

There are two uses I’ve seen for those things. The first is to be an angry, shouty dickhead. Obviously it’s worth not being that guy. The other is to highlight the important bits of the email.

If your mail has so much information in it that people might miss “the important bit”, you’ve written it wrong. Perhaps consider that people don’t need all of the other padding. If you think the extra background info might come in handy, think about sending it in a separate mail afterwards, so that people who are interested in the whys can read it, and those that aren’t can file it under b.

The benefits of this are pretty clear to me. You get your point across clearly. You aren’t wasting people’s time reading stuff they don’t need to know and won’t find useful. And you don’t run the risk of coming across as a dickhead.

* Write emails as if you aren’t going to send them, then send them anyway. You will be more honest in your communication, and I think that’s a good thing.

Just as the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference, the opposite of having something interesting to say is “meh”. I think it’s a strange type of person who bothers to spend some time, even a tiny amount of time, clicking on a “leave a comment” box, in order to leave the comment “I have nothing in particular I wish to say about this. I neither wish to state why it excites me, or why it does not.” condensed down in to three letters.

If you say “meh” on the internet – or in real life – you are a twat.

Maybe it’s a reflection of the web 2.0 culture where idiots feel that every little brainfart they have is of cosmic importance and must be bestowed upon the world (and by god, the world should pay attention to such wit and wisdom). But I don’t understand it.

And yes, the irony of writing that on my own personal blog does not escape me.

I have been struck recently by the realisation that a lot of game developers don’t like to use the stairs. This isn’t some whacky game design metaphor for increasing the breadth of feeling in your game by heightening the emotion in steps. I’m talking about walking up actual stairs instead of using the elevator.

I work on the fourth floor of an office block. That means eight flights of ten steps. Maybe four times a day, if you leave the building for lunch. It’s not much. But it is still good for you.

Your body probably needs it after all those days sat at a computer, and those evenings of staring into a monitor shovelling pizza and cola down your neck.

It’s been remarked before that you don’t really see many older game developers. Usually this is put down to people wising up and moving to other industries where they get some form of job stability, better pay, and a more favourable quality of life. I’m starting to wonder if it’s not also that a lot of them quit due to ill health.

Sorry, I’ll get off my high horse now (thankfully it has an elevator).

I spent a few hours over the weekend hammering some of the things that I didn’t like out of the Mainly About Games WordPress theme. I’d grown to find it too fussy – too many colours and vertical bars and borders and yuck.

So I have simplified it down a bit. Two main colours – white and that lovely baby blue that I sort of fell in to but actually ended up being quite fond of – and making things line up properly.

You probably can’t even remember what it used to look like just a few days ago. Let alone the fairly awful dark blue look it had before that.

Other than that there is nothing much going on at MAG Towers. I have just this evening worked out how to write and compile Action Script 3 in Xcode, which is exciting for me as it means I can develop using just my lovely MacBook Air, and don’t have to break out the 17″ Dell whenever I want to quickly try something out.

Yes, I think I will tag this update as “stuff”. That is definitely the most fitting category.

Almost every news story these days is of a big publisher closing down studios left & right, games with multi-million dollar budgets being cancelled all over the shop, or another safe sequel to a massive hit from last year.

How about you write an in-depth article championing the awesome free games being made on shoe-string budgets by individual developers, or micro-teams, in their spare time?

I know there are a lot of us out there who are trying hard to gain any kind of press at all for our games. We want exposure not because our titles have to sell millions just to break even, but because we love our games. Receiving comments from players who have enjoyed our labours of love makes us really happy and warm inside, and spurs us on to create more.

Everybody loves to cheer for the little guys. Everybody loves playing great free games. The developers will be incredibly stoked you care.

It would literally be an “everybody wins” situation.

If you’d like to read an article like the one I’m talking about here, please spread this post around. Tweet it. Facebook it. Mention it in your regular gaming forums. Send it to the guys who write for your favourite gaming website.