Norway…

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Norway… I have a really weird relationship with this country. Well, I imagine that I have a minimal relationship with the country as a whole, I get to experience an isolated sliver of it, just the game development part and then only for a few days a year for the past year. But… Norway. This year’s trip was especially epic.

So it all started Tuesday with a 5am alarm call for a flight to Norway, followed by a 20 minute dash across AMS trying to make a connecting flight. I’m not a sprinter. I’m not a jogger for fucks sake, but I did it.

Wednesday I was booked to speak at the Høgskollen I Bergen which seems to be roughly analogous to community college. It was a new set discussing advances in Game AI from the last month, contrasting Destiny with LotR: Shadows or Mordor and digging into me ideas about how SoM might work under the hood. Standing room only! It was a fairly small room, maybe a 40 seater, but there were people sat on the steps. Great times.

That evening I saw Ste Curran present his session “Killing the Games Industry” which is… something. It’s stayed with me and I don’t know. I’d never considered what games culture would look like as it invade performance arts, but now I think I know. I think Ste’s session was almost Beat Poetry about games? Or… something? Decide for yourself in the same session from another event. Well worth a watch!

Thursday I had a slow start to the day, dealt with emails and then headed out to get lunch as part of the Konsoll conference which was the reason I was in Norway to begin with. They’d moved where the lunch was being held, so I was fumbling around a bit til I ran into James Portnow (of Extra Credits and Games4Good fame). He waved me over despite being in a deep conversation – thankfully we’d had chance to catch up a couple of nights before when I’d first arrived in town. “You’re at the thing tonight?” I asked. “Which thing? I’m at my thing.” I had no idea that there were going to be multiple things. “hey I know,” he said “why don’t you join me?”

But first I headed into the conference with the intention of working on my slides. No sooner had I sat down, got my laptop out and connected to the wireless than a message popped up “Hi Luke I don’t know if you remember me I’m with the BBC….”. An interview request. I swear I thought I was being punked. They wanted to arrange an on-camera discussion of all the ongoing harassment within the industry, which since I was abroad I wasn’t able to do. They also asked me to appear on a BBC World Service program with a short interview clip (starting from 20:30). I was nervous – as a rule directors of the IGDA aren’t really supposed to make statements on behalf of the organisation or do press, but the timing was such that I couldn’t get clearance in time, but I decided that it was too good an opportunity for us to pas up.

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So back to Thursday night, where I gate crashed a fireside chat James was having with a local journalist and teacher to discuss the games medium. I was a bit uncomfortable and felt like I was going to be intruding but the whole night turned into a really surreal adventure as things got progressively stranger. I think everyone had a good time, I think we made some good points. I know James did, I hope I did. It certainly generated some great discussion afterwards especially around the concepts of adaptive difficulty, which James and I have very different takes on.

Then on to the conference party where many of the speakers had offered their time as part of a charity auction. The bidding for me didn’t go as high as I had hoped (in large part due to very poor self-promotion on my part), but the winner wanted to turn my offer of mentoring and tutoring in AI into something his whole class could benefit from, so this past Wednesday I sat down and did a marathon session of over 4 hours dropping as much knowledge as I could on a group of students in Oslo. Much fun was had!

Friday morning, and my last day at the conference. I was second up to give a lecture, following the absolutely wonderful Emmy Jonassen a Boston-based marketing consultant. Bit of a tough spot – Emmy does great talks and I was working out some new material for the first time. I got some laughs and there was an engaging Q&A afterwards that ran the gamut from the leadership content I had discussed in the talk to the IGDA Scholars program and the IGDA Foundation. I wasn’t happy with the material – honestly I think that set needs four or five more trials before its going to be really worked out, but it seemed well received so it goes in the “win” column.

I just had time to come out of my lecture, grab a quick bite at the conference-provided lunch and check out of my hotel before I went into my workshop. I’d agreed to do a long session deep-diving on all things Game AI. In part this was because I wasn’t doing a lecture on Game AI this year so as compensation I’d said I’d do a long “Ask Me Anything” style session so that I could give meaningful advice and insight rather than just trying to package up some of my brain for them into an hour that may or may not have had relevance. Some great questions came up.

And then to the airport. I shared a taxi out with Anna Marsh of Lady Shotgun / Tckty Boom Games, a friend from my time at Chartboost University. I’d missed her session at the conference due to my workshop so it was great to catch up on how things were going for her team. It was rare to be at Bergen airport both sober and not hungover, but I guess that’s what a Friday afternoon flight does to you.

Then back to the real world, having spent time with old friends and made a bunch of new ones. Konsoll has been very good to me over the years.

Norway… I love that place.

So Much Stuff!

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So what’s new in Luke-land? Well right now, I’m sat in California getting some much needed R&R and visiting an old friend. I’ve actually been out here for most of March already working, which has been a really interesting experience.

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For the first 2 weeks, I was at Chartboost University, a program run by the ad platform company Chartboost. We had submitted our application in January and were really excited when we heard that we had been accepted! So myself and Verena (who is now working with me on projects at Robot Overlord Games) packed our bags, polished up Easy Money and headed to San Francisco.

The CBU program is effectively a 7 day bootcamp where some of the sharpest games industry folks from the Bay Area dropped as much wisdom on us as they could. We learnt a lot about the business of games and especially free to play. It also allowed us a really great opportunity to work together in person. Verena is based in Austria, so we rarely see each other, and for two weeks we tried to make the most of it. The game has progressed a lot in that time, Verena’s new art assets are going in and we tweaked a lot of other stuff. More importantly, we agreed a lot about what we are going to do going forwards.


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After CBU wrapped up, onwards to GDC! It was my first year attending the conference as an IGDA Board member, my second year as the Scholars Coordinator and my second year as a speaker. There’s way too much to remember and try to process about this past week. I went to some amazing parties, met some excellent people and had some great meetings. I’m feeling super energised and enthusiastic. That said, I can’t wait for sessions to go online as I was way too busy to make it to many – in fact aside from sessions I was speaking at or running, I made it to just one, which was the Microtalks session. I was walk/talking with someone headed to it, and since I was at the door and so many of my friends were taking part in it, I decided to sit in.

The past few weeks have been incredible. I’ve learnt a lot, met so many awesome people and I’m feeling really positive about the projects I’m working on. Hopefully I’ll have some great stuff to show you all soon!

A Return to Productivity?

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One of the reasons that you won’t have seen much from me lately is that I have been suffering pretty badly from hand/wrist/arm problems. That is obviously a pretty severe issue for someone like me who pretty much lives with his hands attached to a keyboard. I work on my computer, I socialise on my computer and I relax on my computer, so as this has gotten progressively worse I’ve had to make a lot of lifestyle changes.

First to go were strategy games – if it meant extra mouse and keyboard time, it got cut and almost exclusively I have been playing controller-enabled games. You may also have noticed that my blog promiscuity has gone way down – this is part of it too, especially when you consider that I have a lot of ‘Real Work’ to do and only so many keystrokes a day before the pain sets in. Lately, even my posts to social media have been dropping and I’ve been spending more and more time watching TV – I’ve almost exhausted the list of what I’m prepared to watch on Netflix

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been looking hard into what I can do to overcome this. Various options have been considered, and I’m still reasonably serious (or at least thinking seriously) about a Kinesis Advantage keyboard (which puts return, backspace etc as buttons to be used by your thumb) as well as an electric sit/stand desk to give complete flexibility to control my sitting posture.

The first step however has been to pick up a Livescribe 3 smart pen. This means that right now I am writing this in a notebook, and my pen strokes are being sent by Bluetooth to my iPad. From there, the software does text recognition to extract actual words as digital text and all I need to do then is some minor corrections to get what I want out of it.

7BF1486E-867E-4C37-BF90-933DF7002A83I’ve been using it for about 2 hours now, which in the scheme of things is not much but this is the second post I’ve written and because I am using a totally different grip and set of motions, I could (and maybe will) do a whole lot more today – very different from if I had tried to type this out.

That said, there’s already a few bugbears coming to light The most notable of which is the ability to export data out of the app. It is quite happy to perform the hand writing recognition to get your writing into text, but when it is exported out of the app, it does so as a PDF – there doesn’t seem to be a way to get the text out directly (short of editing each piece of text and copying it by hand, for each piece of text it thinks you have written). This feels like a serious weakness – but one I can no doubt work around though I shouldn’t have to. The second problem is that the way it records text isn’t configurable, so it decides what constitutes a paragraph break. This is an issue for me because I like to write double spaced whichthe software can’t follow. There also doesn’t seem to be good provision for grouping pages of writing together, so this post will be stored as four consecutive pages rather than grouped together as a single entity, which will probably get awkward as the number of things written grows.

Ultimately though, I’m being sort of nitpicky. The fact that I can write words on a notepad and have them appear on a screen is pretty much magic and it’s hopefully going to see my productivity go back up as a result.

Cliques, Conferences and Bithell

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Over the last couple of months I’ve really enjoyed listening to / talking on the Internet with Mike Bithell. He’s an insightful bloke, and there’s a legitimate reason Thomas Was Alone got the praise it did – it’s fantastic.

Mike recently wrote a quick post about the nature of cliques and how as a conference attendee, he’d been at a party and had an experience (before his game came out) trying to interact with well known people. If you haven’t read it, go do that and come back because I’m not going to recap it for you here.

There are times at events where I just want to spend time with the people I love because we live on different sides of the planet and conferences are the only time we get together. I remember one incident in particular where I’d just finished a conversation up with a random, caught my friends eye and suggested we get some lunch. A voice behind me said “yeah let’s go find something to eat!” and suddenly my conversation in a hallway turned into a group lunch date, with my internal voice screaming for the next hour “FUCK OFF WHY ARE YOU INTRUDING ON THE ONLY OPPORTUNITY I HAVE TO HANG OUT WITH MY BEST FRIEND ALL YEAR”.

I get the situation Mike’s describing, and I get the desire to be reasonably brusque and give people short shrift when they do approach you. There’s a part of me that wishes I was more like that, but as many of you know, I’m fairly approachable and try to give people time, which is why my inbox looks like a game of Missile Command that’s just hit the tipping point of achievability, but that’s another story.

However, dismissing cliques as just old friends catching up is also not the full story. The problem (if you look at it this way) with cliques is that they give people on the inside advantages that are harder to get on the outside. I’m part of cliques, I’m not going to deny I’m not and I’ll go further out of my way for someone who’s part of the same group. A friend of a friend needs some AI advice? Chances are I’ll figure out how to work time free when I’m slammed. This is the way things have always worked – people are more likely to go out of their way for friends or as a favour for a mutual friend. I know I do, and I know that when I have a job needs doing, I’m more likely to ask someone I respect but also who I’ve worked with or for to do it – and that just becomes a cycle of reinforcement.

Which is all well and good until you start to factor things like press into the clique, because then access to coverage becomes something that is easier for the haves than it is for the have-nots. I don’t want to pick on Mike because he seems like a genuinely lovely bloke, but the level of coverage that his new game Volume got at just first announcement was disproportionate to what a no-name indie would have received, so there’s some X factor (remember when you could use that term and not be referencing a shit talent show?) at play.

Mike’s made derogatory reference to the idea that there’s some sort of indie illuminati before and in real “organised entity” terms I’m sure that he’s right. But there is a “clique” of successful indies for whom success will from now on be that much easier because they’re known, because they have 15,000 twitter followers, because they can reach out and ask a question and get an answer. In effect it’s a clique of people who for whatever reason got lucky that one time, whose game stood out and was noticed and achieved acclaim – and in some ways that’s a lovely meritocracy but in other ways it’s a hideously self-reinforcing thing that requires an incredible jackpot to break into.

We can’t deny that cliques exist, and I’m not going to tell you I have never benefitted from them because I have. I’m privileged enough to have associated with some of the smartest up-and-comers in the industry through the IGDA and particularly the Scholars program, and many of those have become lifelong friends and collaborators. There’s more to cliques than “old friends who want to hang out” and it’s important to recognise that.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that a lot of the indies, rallied by Zoe Quinn, are offering themselves up as approachable and willing to talk about projects and offer support to developers. I’m happy to add my name to that list, tho this is already something I do pretty extensively through the IGDA and GameMentorOnline. I’m always happy to talk about games though and many people take advantage of that, so feel free to contact me and I’ll always do my best to reply!

Finally, as a side note, Mike’s taking a lot of shit for his post it seems and people need to knock that off. I’ve said before, I’ll say again, he seems like a properly decent chap but putting a post like that based on a personal experience takes guts, and kudos to him for putting it out there, even if it is only one perspective. There’s no excuse for being a dick (and I say that as someone who in his younger years was a professional Angry Internet Dick).

Website Redesign

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As you may have noticed, the site has had a new lick of paint. Some of the old “branding” stuff like the header has been retained, other bits have fallen by the wayside, and there’s a bunch of stuff been polished or newly created to update the content of some areas from what was true two years ago – and more importantly what was relevant. For instance, I listed my social network links the last time I did a redesign, and neglected to include LinkedIn! There’s a few things not working great currently – images inline with text seems to be the big one, but it will get fixed over time!

I can’t take much/any of the credit for the new design. It’s the work of a guy called Alex Haslam. He previously did work for Verena and she highly recommended him when I was in the market for this work done, and now I have no problems doing the same. Seriously – if you need any web work doing, he’s cheaper than he should be, quicker than you think and far more diligent than I expected from someone doing a bit of web-work on the side. You can find Alex as @indiealexh on Twitter, or under Armoured Crow, which is the name of his development company.

If you have any comments on the new look, then please feel free to leave them below.