Hello cruel world

Phew...what an eventful few weeks. I "think" the freelance project is out the door now, at least its gone to submission and hopefully will pass. Its not been a fun final month or so I have to say. I won't be doing that again any time soon.
I don't have an NDA or anything in place, but its normally bad form to discuss a projects title before its released so I'll wait till its on the store before I give details. Its a nice game though...a basic idea taken to an extreme that gives a good playing experience...with cute graphics, was pushing the limits a bit though, I hope it doesn't suffer on any older shitty machines.

But on the plus side I got paid (or at least I'm waiting for my invoices to be paid) to learn a new system. Thats always cool.

Playstation Mobile http://www.playstation.com/psm/index_e.html has just been launched and my title will be one of the 1st mainstream titles on the PSM store.  Sadly no royalties but it'll still be cool to see it there.

I had to work out my project list the other week for a new CV for work...this is my 72nd coding project....wow...crazy! I wonder if I can get up to 80 or 100 before I kick the bucket? Its harder to do projects now though, in the old days I chucked games out in 6-8 weeks, these days its much more involved, and I find my need to make money is not so great these days so the project needs to interest me in  some way, (like learning something new)... So maybe 1 or 2 PSM's before learning excitment dies.

There's a lot wrong with the development of PSM, but it is a new system so we must make allowances and hope the SDK developers take note of all the issues the beta users of which I was one have raised.

But there is a lot right with it too, were it not for the stress of trying to hit deadlines, theres a lot to explore in the PSM SDK that makes it fun and relatively easy to code on, bugs aside. The excellent simulator include with the development tools is super. The IDE is a custom version of Mono which is quite usable if you don't need to go too deep into it.

C# was not as painful as expected either, though in truth I really avoided most C# coding style in an effort to keep the project moving forward. I hate OOP at the best of times but in this case with a new SDK and new devices it might be been very hard to follow.

Getting things up and running is mostly pretty easy, though like many "cover all" systems the attempt to support multiple different devices is problematic, with both CPU/GPU performances to cope with and the dreaded differences in screen sizes...annoying when you spend an hour formatting a screen of credits only to be told it does not work on machine X which you don't have to test on.

But I liked it, even though I cursed it many times due to stupid and time consuming bugs,  I might have a go at doing a couple of game ideas myself in the new year once I've recovered...this time no deadlines!

Of course someone at Sony cocked it up..and it seems that Dutch developers have been excluded from the needed publisher status to sell their wares on the stores, and by extension to get licenses to run their games on devices...shocking considering so many of them contributed to the beta. I've stayed on the 0.992 release of the SDK to avoid problems, for now..but I do think someone needs to accept that such an excluson is shameful for the very large Dutch indie community who worked hard on the beta. My game thankfully is being published by a UK company, working with Sony so no problems there.

Anyway....the projects over, I don't really need to worry about publisher status just now, I hope they will fix it by the time I get round to having something worth publishing. In the meantime I can get my evenings and weekends back to myself, my bands and my school work and...my love life...yes..love life!
Amazingly despite the work and other hassles,  my love life is starting to look up...Have to say any new g/f that can tolorate me working all hours and squeezing her in when I can,  is probably a keeper....so we'll have to see what can be done about that.
Now that there's going to be more time available I'll have to try and practice that squeezing a bit more :D







Ahthankyeww