Black Company Studios

I have to admit, back when I founded the company, I don’t think I imagined that it would make it to being fifteen years old. Back then, I was happy to make it from month to month. I’d only ha...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/1042

tl;dr: We don’t take them. Thanks, but no. Best of luck making your game. Why is a little more complicated. Even when I was still actively looking at our own development projects, our ...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/876

It’s often suggested by front-line staff in development studies that their management is aiming for crunch deliberately. As in, they know how bad it is for their team, but because they think it...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/872

It might be hard to accept, but there are no guarantees that the business you love is a profitable one.

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/867

I've tackled localisation on a bunch of projects in my time, and the thing that takes the time is not content wrangling, or getting the right unicode fonts in. It's dealing with the assumptions t...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/864

The funny thing about working as a consultant and selling your services is that you have very little predictability in your business. No matter how useful your skills are, no matter how in-demand...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/859

I confess, I just wanted to use that in a post title. But I’ve been using 3DMark to get a sense of which of the three main machines I use is the best performer. The answer, depressingly, is th...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/852

So, despite my best efforts, my spare time available for experimenting with the Rift SDK has been fairly limited. I’m more convinced than ever though that there is lots of amazing potential the...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/817

Starting the new year afresh and reinvigorated, I am looking forward to 2015 and the changes it will bring. In an effort to get out from the hole I’ve made for myself to quietly work away on cl...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/845

Enough said.

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/836

After the kerfuffle with Heartbleed earlier in the year, and finding out our server installation was way out of date, I resolved to keep it more current. That meant upgrading from 12.04 to ...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/832

One of the most interesting things about the field in which I work is the sheer range of topics I get to work on. Not just on different platforms or in different languages, but the actual subject...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/822

What I didn’t take the time to blog about last month was my attendance at the Scottish Games Network launch event held in Edinburgh. I’ve been broadly supportive of the idea of making SGN off...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/809

You can tell when the November cold snap comes around to Edinburgh. Here in the office, it means that the winter charcoal hand-warmer comes out…

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/801

So, it seems in a staggering degree of competence, the three lengthy rants on crunch I wrote and queued for posting didn’t in fact get posted, and just sat around in WordPress till now. So much...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/794

Management shouldn't be burying their heads in the sand. They should be honest about their teams situation and performance, and they need to know that the very real costs of crunch on the staff a...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/792

When the fundamentals issue is that it costs that particular developer more to make that particular game than they thought, that's a business doomed to extinction. Crunch is a side issue, one of ...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/790

Hiding the real development cost of a title by burying it in crunch is effectively passing off some of the cost of development onto the staff, and that is fundamentally bad for all concerned. But...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/787

Finally! The fruits of our labour since November last year have made it to the app store, and soon enough the Android marketplace. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:- NASCAR: Redline I’ve shown ...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/780

A post, or possibly series of posts, on reasons behind crunch in the works now I have a bit more slack, but until then, I thought I’d share something that made me smile this morning.   Dean Vi...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/776

Written in response to musing about whether or not Valve’s ‘cabal’ structures were useful, or just a quirk of the company. Management isn’t generally the problem, the problem is that afte...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/766

It seems to me that games developers aren't doing themselves any favours, by relying on implausible and unchallenging narrative techniques to tell the story behind their games. Where regular fict...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/737

Oh my, it has been a while, hasn’t it? In my defence, it’s been a crazy summer, and I have been juggling many different balls. Thankfully, all the work we’ve been doing has finally come to ...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/725

Another mini-rant on coding this week, originally composed as a response to someone who didn’t see why conforming to coding standards was such a big deal. In this case (roughly sorting header #...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/715

This post is one of those “I couldn’t find it when I was Googling, so here’s a succinct description of the problem / solution so other people can avoid the same round-about research.” Sym...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/704

I usually recommend that students looking to get into the games industry as coders stick with traditional, academic courses like Software Engineering or Computer Science. Not because those course...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/706

This mini-rant sprang from a discussion on The Chaos Engine about middleware, in answer to the question: “even if it’s the best engine available is it really worth being locked in to anything...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/701

The folks from Edinburgh University Computing Society, who run the student TechMeetup, have asked me to give a brief talk on the games industry to one of their gatherings. As anyone who knows me ...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/697

Is it bad to be compulsively checking the UPS tracking page for my new laptop? Or to be a little nervous because it’s currently in Kazakhstan, and all those Call of Duty games made me a little ...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/685

Happy New Year! Tim and I have actually been in the office since Monday, eschewing the traditional extra Scottish bank holiday in favour of getting cracking on our big stack o’ work. Today thou...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/677

Ooh: post 666! Spooky. 🙂 I’ve the office to myself for a couple of weeks, as Tim has taken the opportunity to use up the load of holidays he’s saved up before the end of the year, and Dan ...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/666

So, rather randomly, I was discussing with @PetMac about the merits of a particular engine being split up into multiple libraries. We’d suffered from the other extreme: one gigantic project tha...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/660

Lots of little things this month, keeping us all busy. I was ill for much of it, a fortnight of a racking cough that was driving everyone in the office crazy I’m sure, which put the kibosh on a...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/646

When I tell people my interest is in computer graphics, most people don’t really know how to react. Much like anything to do with computers, trying to explain it often leads to more confusion t...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/orangeduck/639

I’m putting off my blogging responsibility this week onto someone else: a great opinion piece from Charles Randall of Ubisoft, rebutting entirely the piece by that moron Michael Pachter w...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/632

Erin Hoffman’s comment on my previous IGDA post got me to thinking. If the IGDA are looking for a tangible way they can help things, what can they really do? So here’s my suggestion: My issue...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/622

Ah, summer is in Edinburgh at last. Thunder and lightning storms, and flooding so bad the water breaks out of the sewers and comes up through the road. I love this city. I don’t think the squir...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/613

There are two main areas where amateur game development happens. The first is the Indie scene, which encompasses most forms of game development done by a single developer. This can mean cheap act...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/orangeduck/608

So one of the most annoying things about the internet for computer fixing is that a) a lot of the people asking questions aren’t technical, so the problem reports are spotty at best, and b) a l...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/603

As of this morning, our second entirely internal app, Edinburgh – Parking, is up for sale on the iOS App Store! It’s a pretty niche app this time,  and combines the geo-location abil...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/591

I must confess, the iPad we bought for device testing has migrated home to the flat, and now only makes its way back to the office for specific needs. Not for purely selfish reasons I hasten to a...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/558

I thought I’d add my voice to the rest of the gaming community praising Portal 2, which I finished last week. A great story, which made me laugh out loud at least a dozen times, which is rare i...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/555

So I hinted last time about my continuing disappointment with the IGDA, and promised a more complete write-up of why. It seems though, just to take the sting from my tail, they’ve chosen this m...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/544

It looks like a well meaning group are attempting to restart interest in a Scottish chapter of the IGDA. While I’m all for more cooperation between Scottish developers (and engaging with other ...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/535

It’s been a busy winter for us, but this story (originally in the Daily Mail, unsurprisingly enough), made me grumpy enough to warrant a post. It concerns a mother who is indignant that Microso...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/526

And finally, the last part of our look at our Employee Terms and Conditions. Since the document itself is written in suitable legalese, I wrote up a more succinct (and decidedly less formal) vers...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/519

Maybe I’ve just been reading too many youtube comments, but as a game artist, you can’t quite help get the feeling that some people consider you partially responsible for the downturn in the ...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/orangeduck/511

This post is the last in the series (see parts 1 and 2) on the Employee Terms and Conditions we use here at Black Company. Here we cover the remaining clauses, which are not exactly games indu...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/478

This post continues on from the previous one on the Employee Terms and Conditions we use here at Black Company. The second part concerns Intellectual Property, an important facet of any game d...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/472

I agreed some time back to write a post for IndieVision, on the Employee Terms and Conditions we use.  Actually, although they will hopefully be useful to my peers in the indie game developer ...

https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/user/mrcranky/469