Just another WordPress weblog

I had to renew my blockcopycoders.com domain so thought it was only good and proper I get some value for my money and make a blog post.

Since last posting there’s been an excellent development in my professional life; the game we’ve been working on since last year is no longer a secret. We’re working on a great title called Crackdown 2 with Microsoft no less. You can read more about that on our company blog right here. Everyone is super chipper about the enormously good hearted reception we have received and it’s great to finally be out of stealth mode. All that needs doing is stupid amount of work to make an excellent game. Piece of piss

Another significant milestone we’ve passed recently is our son’s first birthday. He’s such a happy little chap and had a brilliant time opening the presents sent by his many admirers from around the country He’s growing up quick and getting the hang of a jet set lifestyle. In the last few weeks he’s flown down south twice; once for a little birthday party and also to my cousins wedding. He’s adapting well and weekends away seem to be becoming less disruptive to his routine.

Also recently we had a really excellent long weekend in Blairmore, near the west coast of Scotland. We rented a cottage and used that as a base for trips around Lochs Lommond, Fyne and Long. We were stuck out on a peninsula and it was a bit of a long drive visiting anywhere outside of it so our next excursion will have to be a bit better planned. I’m thinking we could stay somewhere near Inverness and take a few days to visit the ludicrously large amount of castles they have up there. Some pics from Blairmore and its surrounds can be found here.

Back in England this weekend just gone for my cousin Rachel’s wedding to Ryan. I’d been asked to do photos which was a tad daunting to be honest and also pretty tiring. In my head I had the idea of gadding about taking the odd snap but it turns out to be a pretty hard job involving a lot of running around and shouting at people I got a load of shots and I think some are pretty good. I’m about half way through the selecting and editing process them right. Once that’s complete I’ll need to find somewhere to turn the final shots into a nice album.

My mum was great as she lent us her Rav4 to get around while we were down south. Really nice to see her and George again as well and they were delighted to get some time with Charlie too

6 months now in Dundee. To be honest when me and Suzey moved here we both felt that the business opportunity was almost one in a lifetime and couldn’t be ignored but the downside would likely be moving to Dundee. We thought give it around 5 years here to do what we needed to and put up with living in a place we hadn’t chosen. And as it turns out living in Dundee has been absolutely excellent. We’ve settled quickly in a quality of life that suits us much more than the south coast. It’s a lot less crowded up here and the people are very friendly, on top of that you’re 20 minutes max from some of the UK’s most beautiful countryside. Some of the appeal is age related, I don’t think this would have suited us so well in our 20’s but right now we couldn’t be happier. Which is great

Well that was a nice relaxing weekend and to be honest one we really needed The last few weeks have been fun but a tad hectic, we had a very enjoyable visit from the bro-in-law and family, a quick jaunt down to London for the parents 25th Wedding anniversary topped off with visit to my Nan, Aunty and Uncle to parade Charlie around in front of them.

All great but left us both feeling we hadn’t had much weekend relaxing for a while. So we made up for that this weekend with a bit of a lazy Saturday and a nice trip out to Tentsmuir Point on the Sunday.

Here’s a very short film of Charlie encountering the sea:

Managed to get a few pics as well which you can find here

Sorry for the rather course way of starting this blog but to be honest it’s completely warranted.

Last week saw my Sky HD box go pop, it just wouldn’t turn on and refused to respond to the many different of resetting it a quick googling threw up. All of the sky boxes I’ve had have been a bit flakey but things do break so I called Sky and booked in an engineer to come and sort things out. I was told he’d be there between 8am and 11am on Friday, Nice!

Now I have a fairly old plasma panel, it’s a pretty nice bit of kit but because of its age doesn’t have a HDMI connector but does have component ports for HD. The Sky HD box I had has component outputs but I know that the latest versions don’t. I explained this when booking the call and made it clear I’d need an older style box with component outputs to see HD. “That’s fine” they said.

What could possibly go wrong?

First of all the engineer hadn’t turned up by 11. I called Sky and was told he’d be there by 1pm. He wasn’t. So I called again and was told he’d be there by 2pm. I was a bit annoyed by this point even saying “I really hope when he eventually turns up he’ll have the right type of box because if he doesn’t that would the absolute worst thing that could happen”

He arrives at 2:30pm, new box in hand but completely bereft of any apology and the first thing he does is kick over a cup of coffee onto the carpet. Not a great start. “Does that have component outputs?” I ask as he brings in the replacement box. “What’s component? I dinnae nae what that is?”. We look at the box. It doesn’t. He asks me again what component outputs are. We phone Sky.

Now they tell me this (paraphrased) “We don’t make Sky HD boxes with component outputs any more. We do have many of the old boxes that have been refurbished. We do not know where any of these boxes are. If the engineer has an old style box on his van when he turns up then you can have that. We can not guarantee that he will. We are fucking idiots so we didn’t tell you this when you booked the service call. Do you want to book another service call? The engineer might have the sort of box you want?”

Fuck Sky!

I cancelled my account and went and bought a Freesat box. You can read all about Freesat here. The box I wanted didn’t have component outputs either so in a fit of anger I bought another telly too. GNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGHGGGGGGGGGGG

Freesat seems pretty good, it gives us some HD channels and most of the channels we watch and the HUMAX receiver is an alright dual tuner PVR. The software is a little clunky but it works okay and doesn’t cost £40 a month or shorten my life expectancy through the raging fury induced by Sky customer service. The only loss is (chortle) Lost on Sky. I don’t like it much but Suzey does so we’ll be either buying that from iTunes or downloading it like a filthy pirate terrorist.

Again.

Fuck Sky!

Mum popped us this week for a visit. I’m under no illusion why she was here, babies are grandma crack. Great to have her visit and Suzie took a few nice iPhone piccies which you can see if you click through to my wordpress site

All going pretty well up here in the wilds of Scotland. It’s been a busy month dominated by work, in particular visits to and from our publisher. These are always pretty intense experiences when a project is starting and set the tone for the how things will progress. Luckily and despite any trepidation everything went swimmingly. I knew we had an exceptional team here at Stalag Ruffian but it’s been great to see the people we’re working with fully understand the vision of the game we’re making and also top drawer individuals. Aces!

Not much else to report to be honest. Our house in Southampton is still in the process of being dried out prior to the all the walls and ceilings being put back on. Hoping for it to be in a condition fit for renting sometime in April.

Had some fun with itinerant rubbish music project Telescöper recently after coming home one night and having a burning urge to make some music. It was really odd feeling that I’d never experienced before, very similar to when your body is strongly urging you to eat a particular type a food. Or want have a crap. You decide.

It’s called Telestoner and you can here it here -> http://www.myspace.com/telescper

It came out pretty nicely and owes a lot to the to an excellent production pass on it by Gareth

PHEW!

A lot has gone in since last posting here. First and foremost we’re living Scotland! Following the demands of work (as CEO of Ruffian Games) we now live in Monifieth on the outskirts of Dundee. We ended up in the house we thought we’d be beaten to (as detailed in the Full Infuriate post in December). Which is great except it took paying a good few months in advance and a bit of gazumping. Not nice but to be honest I’m glad it all worked out and we’re living where we are.

What hasn’t worked out so well in what happened to our house on Southampton. It was sitting empty about to be rented out when the header tank in the roof burst during the recent cold spell. The end results weren’t nice at all; Charlie’s room bore the brunt of it and there’s considerable water damage throughout the rest of the house. And the double whammy is we didn’t have buildings insurance.

My assumption that it’d auto-renew as part of our insurance was a stupid one. We had contents insurance but that will only help with replacing the carpets. Everything else we’re going to have to pay for ourselves and that’s going to be hard.

It’s put a bit of strain on us to be honest and that’s compounded by having to try and deal with everything by remote control from the other end of the country. Here’s what the ceiling of Charlie’s room currently looks like:

Oof.

Luckily Gareth’s put us in touch with an awesome builder who’s overseeing getting everything back up to spec. Will’s project managing it all and is doing a cracking job. It’s been a pretty rotten month on the personal front to be honest but at least the way through it is starting to come into view.

And last (and certainly not least) we’ve some extremely awesome friends; Michelle has helped far beyond what could reasonably be expected of anyone. She managed to rally a group of Soton friends to come round and help clear the worst of the initial prior to Will coming in. Special thanks to Michelle, Mich, Shelly, Mark, Sparky and Derek. How awesome is that?

So that’s the good and bad. And work. It’s awesome but unfortunately still in the domain of things that I can say very little about. What I can say is all out there on the web. Some info here:

• Our Website for stuff about the company
• Google for some of the press we’ve got recently
• Facebook for our cheesy fan page

After a bit of an arduous birth Space Giraffe for the PC is all done and out in the wild

Why am I writing about it here? I am sort of tangentially involved. I’ve always been a big fan of Jeff’s work and helped him get the deal with MS for doing the X360 visualizer and Space Giraffe’s release on XBLA.

I helped a little on the PC version though oddly it was more my rusty coding skills than biz ones that were called on. It’s been a nice learning experience. I got understand the whacky world of PC graphics and do quite a lot of optimisation work, a few changes managed to speed the game up considerably. Space Giraffe now runs really well on lowish level hardware. You can get a good game out of it on Radeon 9600, a six year old card I also got to learn a lot about rails and built an ecommerce site to sell the game and a very basic CRM allowing others to update the LS web site. Nice to do a bit of spare time dev and see the results out in the wild

Anyway it’s taken a while but he guys have now finished the game. You find out all about it, download a demo or even buy the game here:

• http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/

It’s $20 which seems to be the standard price for indy games right now and offers a complete graphical overhaul for the game’s 100 levels as well as containing the original look of the X360 version. I’m a massive fan of the game but then again I would be wouldn’t I?

Absolutely fizzing furious this morning. We’re currently in the position of trying to rent a place in Dundee. Work is taking us north of the border so me, Suzey and Charlie hauled it up to Scotland to look at some properties to let. We saw 5 in all and one was absolutely perfick.

Now before starting out on this course we were warned by a few friends that Dundee estate agents are notoriously awful. The market is pretty liquid up there, properties go quickly and you don’t have be the sharpest tool in the box to lease stuff out. We were warned it’s not unusual for the agents to uncommunicative and to find a property you’ve offered on has gone with no warning at all.

And that’s what’s happened to us. We saw a place we really liked, said we wanted and then spent since then trying to get any traction with the estate agents only to find out this morning from their front desk that the house has gone. This despite the point we’d got to was waiting for a call back from the agents last Friday.

So it means another trip to Scotland and another couple of days looking round for places to live and even less chance of getting there before Christmas. My rage-o-meter is on full infuriate.

Luckily this picture cheered me up a bit

Got a Canon 5D mk II today. It’s a great bit of kit with some nice increments from the old 5D. Best of all though is the addition of a HD video mode. You can see the results here:

And the you can see them in super duper extra ultra rez HD here:

http://www.blockcopycoders.com/temp/charlie_test2.mov

Being able to use your SLR lenses is a massive boon, everything looks so nice it’s amazing. It is trickier to use than a standard HD vide camera, there’s not autofocus once you start shooting and the huge control you have over the image also means you can get a little overwhelmed by the options available to you. Even so I’m sure a bit of time will get me used to it.

In other news we’re off to Scotland next week, should be good to visit there but this time taking Suzey and Charlie. Hopefully I’ll be able to post a bit more with some pics and vids

It’s all been so hectic there’s just not been a chance to blog. Wanted to mention this, it’s BallzUp Lite, a great little iPhone game by G that’s now available on the iTunes Store. You can get it right here if you’ve iTunes on your machine.

If you have a Mac then there’s a playable demo on the Touchy Toy Stuff site right here. Congrats to G for getting his first game out there