blog
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
When I was a lad…
I found myself this morning on a train hurtling towards Nottingham at a steady 120mph playing FS on-line through the train’s wifi network alongside players from America, Argentina, Australia and the fellow early risers from Europe. Then I cast my mind back 10 years ago to playing Quake on my 28.8k modem with a ping of 320 on a good day, and heavens forbid you even tried to play alongside anybody outside of the UK.
Oh how times have changed.
Of board rooms, free lunches and the essence of awesomeness
True Sacrifice
I remember when I first started working in an office. I would see my managers swanning off to sit in meetings all day long and be jealous of them bunking off from work. Then I joined the despicable ranks of management myself and I realised the truth. Nothing has the ability to be so ridiculously spirit crushing, so soul sappingly tedious as endless long meetings.
Therefore my heart goes out to the heads of the development team who, recently spent pretty much spent the whole of week in an ongoing series of gruelling meetings. Do they do this for fun? No, they don’t. Do they do this because of the charming view from the board
Previously on Football Superstars
All events take place in real time…
Following my last entry, there were a few comments along the lines of “we don’t care about sandwiches, we want to know what is happening behind the scenes!” Well today is your lucky day. You want behind the scenes? You’ve got it. As I write this our office manager is currently running around fixing the net connection to our building. Which just goes to show that you can be a nice and shiny internet company with the best technology available, but there are times when you are still at the mercy of third party net providers.
Anyway, it gives me some time to catch you up on what has been happening here in the la
Stop! Blogger time!
Greetings, superstars! With the departure of Plectrum and various people being pulled left right and centre on high priority projects the blog has fallen by the wayside of late. So I’m here to spill my guts to you all. You lucky people.
It’s been something of a hectic couple of weeks. For those of you who haven’t seen the forums (and why not? What’s wrong with you?) I’m new to Cybersports, having just started two weeks ago. I picked a rather spectacular time to join as we are, at the time of writing, about to launch PMCs as well as a fairly mammoth patch which will address a lot of the issues which have been picked up in game over the last few months.
Yule love this...
Highlights
There’s been all sorts going on lately, so rather than the typical long-winded blogs focused on one particular topic I’m going to mix things up with a few little snippets of information, or highlights if you’ll humour my need to relate everything to football. Help me! I can’t make it stop!!!
First 1190
A couple of weeks ago we completed our first 11-a-side 90 minute match, with Design facing off against QA/Community to test our match engine’s stability to its limits.
It's Hard For Me To Say I'm Sorry
I would like to issue an apology to Darth John Smedley at SOE, Julio Torres at Lucasarts, Tiggs the former community lead at SWG, Brad McQuaid formerly Sigil and Vanguard and every other developer or community rep who’s life I have made a nightmare with my “WTH are you playing at?” moments I have had in my 11 years of online gaming.
I have given guys and gals like those above one heck of a rough ride over the years; never foul mouthed or abusive but always pressuring and putting those awkward questions across on behalf of the various communityies I have been a part of, almost always doing so via every means possible email, official forums, fansite forums and gaming community forums to stir up as much community unrest and support over the issue as possible.
Warez The Sense In That?
As well as our love of Arsenal, Captain420 and I share an insatiable desire for statistics. Google Analytics is always in our web histories and we frequently discuss changes in “the numbers.”
This weekend the numbers went absolutely mental.
Our daily hit count has been steadily increasing for months now as interest in Football Superstars has broadened, and more often than not each day shows an increase over the one that preceded it. Saturday continued this trend and unremarkably became our biggest day for hits so far.
Beta Late Than Never
It’s an old joke, and one I shamelessly used on our old ‘starter’ forums, much to Plectrum’s chagrin.
I was chatting with a colleague the other day about how different things are now.
At the start of a project, you don’t feel as though you’re really working per se. You go into work, sure, talk lots, come up with ideas, write it all down and go home buzzing. This is the fun ‘making stuff up’ part of design I really love. The bit that’s mistaken as the entirety of what a designer does by non-designers.
Patience Is A Virtue (and so is revolutionary game design)
1)Spore, like Football Superstars, is in a league of its own and breaks ground where few have dared to tread.
2)Spore was created by legendary designer Will Wright and Maxis, now under the EA banner.
3)Spore was released in the UK at 1am this morning.
Because of points one and two, I’ve been awake since point three.
There is an almost infinite variety of hobbies that we can choose to take an interest in, but I’d argue that no other arouses quite the same mix of passion and impatience as gaming.
Great Expectations
Georgenius: “All good – but do you ‘like’ it?”
Callice: “Like it ? pfft… who could possibly like this ? Im sure you meant do you love it ? Im sorry i still have to say no… I totally adore it, and will marry it if i get the option to!”
Georgenius: “Dude, this makes me incredibly happy. You’ve been so excited for so long, I honestly, personally, did not want to let you, Callice, down.”
This is part of a PM conversation I had with one of our earliest players, Callice, when we first let some of you lovely, lovely people into our little game via the Beta.
On your marks...
So, Darth Vader got a shock when I turned up in his bathroom, eh? Luckily, it wasn’t enough to damage him (or me for that matter!) and we were able to press on with the real business. :-)
The servers are getting whipped up into quite a frenzy now. We’ve deployed the game to some of them and have been busily testing away making sure that things are going to hold up well to the first swathe of Closed Beta testers. We’ve been running tests since the 4th July (yeee hahhhh! – sorry our Americano friends) and it’s all looking good.
The Happiest Bloke On The Tram
About 8:30 this morning I got on the tram, as I do every morning, but today I made the heinous error of leaving my iPod at home attached to the charger.
It dawned on me that I would have to endure the horror of the mobile sardine can without the luxury of being able to zone out with a bit of Delays.
So, as you do on public transport, I spent the next ten minutes trying to avoid eye contact with anyone, lest they think I’m some sort of mugger, murderer or heaven forbid looking to make conversation.
Darth Vader's Bathroom
Things are pretty exciting right now. We’re preparing for Beta and that means getting a load of new servers set up and ready for testing. Why is this so exciting? Well, it’s a case of Darth Vader’s Bathroom.
I first heard the term a couple of years ago whilst attending a conference. Intrigued, I asked what it was. It was a term used to describe the set up of the servers within a Data Centre – all dark, sleek and with little flashing lights on them.
They are arranged, with complete precision, in racks with all of the cabling carefully tidied away.
The Beautiful Game
Watching Romania versus France, one of the commentators made a fantastic remark. After one of the severely scarce chances he commented, “This could turn into a decent game if they’re not careful!”
I’ve watched every minute of Euro 2008 and so far I’ve been underwhelmed by the majority of them. This got me thinking; what are these games lacking? What could turn this dross into the beautiful game?
The involvement of your club:
This is obviously the first thing that comes to mind as an Englishman watching Euro 2008.
Chasing The Elusive Bug...
This isn’t the name of a Hollywood film or a popular Best Seller. This is what happens at least once if not several times in any project. You know the deal, everything looks fine and dandy and things are going well – almost too well – and then bang! It crashes.
Ah, no matter, all of that ultra-useful crash diagnosis we have built in will help us determine and fix the problem. Usually, 99 times out of 100 the error is easily spotted and the fix is trivial.
This is what happens on a good day.
ISE ISE Baby...
Ten years ago, back in secondary school, the deputy head often led assemblies. As I’m sure you’ll remember from your own experiences, these school assemblies usually consisted of getting shouted at for the behaviour of a few lads in 11C who you’d never met, followed by some sort of moral or ethical lecture. Without fail the deputy’s message would be about the importance of community, a word which he’d always accompany by dovetailing his fingers together like a self-satisfied Bond villain after aiming a laser at 007’s nether regions.
I remember when all this was just fields...
It’s a cliched saying, I know, but it certainly rings true when I think back to the origins of this game, or at least the first time I actually installed the client on my machine.
It was a few days after I’d first started working here that I’d got my first view of the lifestyle engine.
It was just a field. A huge field. A never-ending field. With trees in it. And grass. Lots and lots of grass…
The atmosphere was generally dark and oppressive, clouds hanging in grey clusters in the sky, threatening to unleash a torrent of rain from their bursting innards.
Feature Complete? Part 2
Football Superstars just reached “Feature Complete” which means that we now have a team of external testers working on the game full time.
Feature Complete is an exciting and extremely important period of the game development process where we continually test and fix the game getting it ready to open Football Superstars up for the first time to real players during our Beta testing phase. Beta testing will be starting over the next few months, so be sure to keep a look out for future information in our regular newsletter, website articles and blog postings.
That's not a bug, it's a feature!
Bugs, bugs, bugs. What is a bug? Yes, there’s the creepy-crawly variety but there’s not much we can do about those!
As far as Computer Games (and Software in general) are concerned, a bug is simply a defect or glitch in how the program that is supposed to work. Bugs exist in many different forms – some are simple and easy to spot. Others are not so simple, so where does the name come from?
Way, way back in the very early days of computing, computers used to be made from mechanical contacts (switches) that opened and closed as they did their job.
Under the influence
Any game designer should be influenced by absolutely everything and anything. It’s as simple as that. Films, books, television, plays, even other games, you name it, there’s something that can inspire you in almost anything.
So here, for a bit of fun, is a list of some of my influences and how they relate to Football Superstars.
Games:
Like most people, I can’t escape the fact that I’m getting older (except for my cousin Jimmy, who gets younger every year. I’m sure there’s a horribly disfigured painting of him in an attic somewhere that needs stabbing).
Is anyone else feeling the pain as much as Southampton fans?
Sunday April 13th 2003:
Southampton win FA Cup semi-final against Watford
Saturday 17th May 2003:
FA Cup final appearance against Arsenal
Sunday 21st December 2003
Southampton 3 Portsmouth 0 (leaving Southampton in 4th place in the Premiership for Christmas; Portsmouth, the bottom 3)
Sunday 23rd April 2005
Portsmouth 4 Southampton 1 (first time since 1960 that Portsmouth ensure they finish higher than Southampton in league standings)
Sunday 15th May 2005
Southampton 1 Manchester United 2 (Southampton relegated from the top flight for the first time in 28 years)
West Brom 2 Portsmouth 0
Monday 31st March 2008
Portsmouth-FA Cup semi-finalists and 6th in The Premiership.
Feature Complete? Part 1
Football Superstars has just reached a major point in the development process. This “milestone” is what game developers call “Feature Complete”. Feature Complete is the period of a video game project where the features that will make it into the final build of the game have been finalised and agreed upon.
The development team at Monumental have been working on Football Superstars at the Nottingham, UK office since September 2005. The team of designers, programmers, artists, service and administrative personal have generated a huge amount of great ideas on how to make Football Superstars the most innovative, exciting and entertaining Massively Multi-player Online Football game possible.
'You do what? Write computer games?'
Yes, it’s true. I, and others like me, write computer games – but what does this actually mean?
Contrary to what my brother thinks, it’s not being paid to sit in an office all day long and play Pac Man. Alas, that bit is just not true. Writing or developing computer games just has to be one of the most challenging, stressful but also rewarding areas of Software Development there is. Yes, it involves working on stuff that’s cool. Sure, it also sometimes involves playing other games to see what makes them tick.
'It's a football MMO.'
These four words, uttered by my interviewer, and future boss Luke Smith, made my eyes widen.
I’d taken the train up from London to Nottingham for a job interview at Monumental Games. The company was looking for a designer on a new MMO under development.
I was nervous, obviously, and worried that I’d be working on yet another wannabe World of Warcraft clone that was more than likely doomed to failure.
Let’s get something straight here. I love MMOs. I’ve spent countless hours playing them, with Ultima Online offering me a first taste of this huge genre and Pirates of the Burning Sea being the most recent played.
'It's 2012, do you know where your national team is?'
Certainly not at the London Olympics as FIFA supremo Sepp Blatter has decreed that there isn’t going to be a Great Britain national team. The four home nations, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland hold special status within FIFA, voting their own VP for example and over the years there have been various rumblings that the home nations should be treated as one rather than the current set up.
England and Northern Ireland were willing to create a Great Britain team but Scotland and Wales have resisted.
What are emotes?
/welcome
Emotes are a standard feature in most MMOs these days yet they serve no real ‘game’ purpose. They have no real ‘function’ and are an entirely social feature of massively multiplayer games.
Essentially, emotes are used as a communication tool, a shortcut if you will. They can be used to portray a feeling, or emotion, or mood, or as a response to something someone has said or done. Rather than type ‘Don’t do that, it’s silly’, for example, users can type /silly into the chat window and an automated response appears to people around the user, or to whoever the user has targeted, sometimes with an associated animation attached to the emote.
