Exclusive to the Comics Blog
I spent all afternoon and much of the evening updating software and doing a huge backup and whilst I was waiting I did a few bits of cartoon silliness that I've posted on Comics from the Crescent.

Juniper Choice is the new name for the feature I had previously called Web Comic of the Week. I hope to post a new entry at some point over the weekend, but as is the case with these things, I'm having some problems with my computer.

You can see all the old entries grouped on this page here.

June will kill me for this
After going out with her work colleagues for a meal last night, June returned to her car to find it had been locked in the car park. She was forced to return home in a taxi. So this morning she had to get the bus back to where the car was parked and asked me if I knew what time the bus was. I pulled the timetable from my bag, gave a quick look at it and told her there was one at 7:45.

At 7:30 she sets off for the bus stop (a ten minute walk) and then stands in the cold until 8 o'clock wondering where the bus had got to. More than a little annoyed by this point she phones the bus people and asks what's happened to the 7:45 bus. They informed her that she'd have to wait until tomorrow for that one. What I'd failed to take in when reading the timetable was that it was a Saturdays only bus.

Oops! Sorry June...

What a difference a link makes
This week has seen a pleasant jump in the visitor numbers to my site following the link that appeared in the Guardian as I mentioned below. So, a big thank you to all those people who popped by to take a look. I hope that you found enough of interest to return.

Power Cuts and Short Cuts

We had a power cut at work today. I was in the middle of the best paragraph I’d ever written and now it’s gone forever...

OK, it might have only been second best.

Most people weren’t too badly affected by it and I’d only just saved my work a couple of minutes earlier. This is a habit I got into quite early in my days at Revolution. We were still in our old offices in Hull and Windows 3.1 was still relatively new. We had a copy of Photoshop 2.5 LE that would crash about every five minutes or so, which meant that saving regularly was a must. It was also when I first started to learn how valuable keyboard shortcuts were.

One of the best things about Windows applications is the standardisation of keyboard shortcuts for most common features (save, copy, paste, etc). It means that you can happily switch from one application to another and not have to worry about remembering lots of different sets of shortcuts. I remember in the early days of Painter and Photoshop, they had subtle variations from each other and as I switched from one to another I had to switch my mind into a different mode. Because I would move back and forth between the two pieces of software many times in a day, it got so I’d do this without thinking and only when I look back now do I realise how odd it must have seemed.

It’s funny how the power cut makes you think back and consider what you now take for granted. For instance, when I first joined Revolution I worked in DOS on a machine that wasn’t connected to a network and had to give my work to one of the others to put onto the network and get into the game (Beneath a Steel Sky). To me, all that DOS malarkey wasn’t what computers should have been about. I read science fiction, I knew the score. When we moved to Windows 3.1 it was like a breath of fresh air and Windows 95 was a major step forward again. No more command line nonsense.

Now, if we could only have a power supply that didn’t get interrupted...

What on Earth was I writing before the power cut?

Lowbright
The site that was formerly Small Stories is now called Lowbright. If any of you had saved the URL in your favourites or bookmarks, you will need to update.

Publishers

My youngest son is 17 and is in the very fortunate position of having played a great variety of games, including Sam and Max a few years ago. When he told his friends at college that a sequel was being made they had no idea what he was talking about.

There has been a great reaction on the various forums that focus on adventure games, to the news that Sam and Max 2 has been cancelled. If you frequent those forums it’s easy to get the impression that the whole world is up in arms about the cancellation of this great game. But as the small tale above shows, not much of stir is being created outside of the adventure genre. When some people begin to question the intelligence of the decision makers at LucasArts, I must admit to having a certain amount of sympathy for the publisher in this case. How can they sell a game to a public that either doesn’t care or has never heard of the original?

To get the momentum built up on a sequel to a game many people haven't heard of or played, on a platform (PC) that's in decline, would be a major marketing task in itself. So I guess that LucasArts simply decided to cut their losses and move on.

This did make me think about the wider role of publishers and how they have changed over the last ten years.

If we look at the film industry (a parallel often drawn) then we see that the method of showing films in a darkened theatre, projected onto a screen, hasn’t changed, fundamentally, since they first introduced talking pictures well before my parents were even born. Yet in the games industry, in the last ten years alone, we have seen games move from being distributed on floppy to CD to DVD. We’ve seen the rise (and sometimes fall) of various consoles, each with their own formats. We’ve seen technology gallop at a pace that’s faster than the development time of a single top game. We’ve seen development teams rise from a handful to hundreds. We’ve seen a huge increase in the amount of specialisation within the industry. We’ve seen the rise of licenses and the decline of originality.

Sometimes I wonder that publishers manage to make any right decisions at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not out to create this image of the publisher as a poor soul we should all feel sorry for – that’s not the case at all. I just wanted to create a little perspective.

In my time with Revolution, I have had dealings with a number of publishers, through their producers, assistant producers, testers, marketing people, and so forth. Some were good people, genuinely wanting us to create well-crafted games; others were less good, only driven by the need to hit a specific date and wanting to cut out anything that got in the way of this. Most were just people doing a job under a lot of pressure.
That’s not to say publishers couldn’t do an awful lot more to help themselves and the developers. And probably vice-versa.

It’s becoming clear that very few of us have a clear indication of what will be a success or failure and games that may have made it a year earlier are suddenly out of vogue or old-fashioned. Marketing strategies constantly need to change and adapt and be much more forward-thinking in order to stand a chance of succeeding. And developers need more support and cohesion as they strive to create the best possible games they can.

And while developers can often feel they don’t get the attention and support they deserve, they must do their part in order to ensure that the publisher has no reason to pull the plug on their particular project.

Love them or hate them, we need publishers to publish games. Hopefully they won’t deliver too many bad ones. Or cancel too many of our favourites.

A little notice
Thanks to The Guardian's Jane Perrone for putting up a link to Life in the Crescent on her Weblog page. In the "Top blog" spot, too. Pretty cool.

Comics from the Crescent
I have just started up a new Comics Blog. All I will post in there will be links to my comics as I publish them. A handier place to view them, perhaps?

Smiley Street
Until I get the time to write a load more scripts, Smiley Street is going onto a once-a-week schedule. Although I'll be looking at updating on Tuesdays, this week's strip has already gone up, here.

Juniper Crescent
I'm particularly pleased with the latest Juniper Crescent strip.

A new Dane & Joe
Mondays isn't the normal update day, but over the weekend I was inspired to create a strip by the furore surrounding the cancellation of Sam and Max 2. You can see the strip here.

One of the things I lost when my forum went kablooie was the "column" I started writing based on my thoughts as a games designer and writer. After that I lost the impetus to continue with it. Then I recently remembered that one of the Broken Sword fans had asked my permission to publish them on his own site. So, thanks to Peter at Sharpened Sword I have the pieces back and can now continue the series. If I can find anything more to write of course.

The original three pieces I wrote last year can be found on this page.

Influencing Lennon
I read this piece with great interest.

The impression is so often given that the Beatles influenced so many musicians and it's easy forget that they in turn must have had their own influences. The fact that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr refused to take part in the TV programme mentioned might suggest that they want to believe this hype themselves.