Introducing Morning Pages

Blogging again after a long hiatus

It has been a long time since I wrote on this blog. Roughly 10% of the world’s population wasn’t even alive yet when I last posted - that’s sobering!

How to lead your life

Some of us might say that we aren’t leaders. However, we are all leaders of at least one thing: our own lives. We determine the way that we should go, what we spend today doing. If we allow our life to happen to us, then the our lives will be determined by the whim of others and not ourselves.

It’s quite possible for us to lead our lives without actually leading our lives, so in 2017 I’ve decided to try to do better at living a life that counts.

As a first step, I spent the first part of the week trying to simplify my life down to the core essence of what I want to focus on. Here’s my list today:

• Build relationship with Ellie and the kids.
• Continue my current fitness training regime.
• Try to live according to the teaching of Jesus in my community. This is separate from what people might think of as “being a Christian”, but that’s a topic for another time.
• Work to create systems that make people’s lives better. I’m currently doing this for money for various organisations, and by creating fun video games.
• Teach and train people how to lead others and be amazing - that’s why I’m writing this post.
• Improve my writing skills and range.

If something I’m doing doesn’t fit into this list, then I’ve decided to work towards removing it from my life.

More than ever in this present age of mass distraction, our headspace is the key limiting factor to productivity and achievement. It’s a resource to be managed and conserved. I’m only a week in, but have benefited hugely from the reduced focus already, and my job satisfaction is much improved.

If you made a list such as the one above, what would be on it? What should we remove in order to conserve headspace, and to focus on what counts?

Introducing Sol Trader

Happy new year, everybody! It’s been a little while in coming, but I’ve finally got to the point where I want to announce the project I’ve been working on privately for the last few months. I’m heading after a dream, and I want to share it with you.

But first some background.

I love designing games

I started my career in software development working on PC games back at the turn of the millennium. I worked for a fantastic little company called Elixir Studios, which sadly closed in 2005. I’ll never forget them: they gave me my first break into software development and I studied my craft under some fantastic mentors, notably Achim Stremplat and Jamie Doornbos. These guys taught me a love of good code, and a love of doing things right.

On leaving Elixir, I moved away from the games industry and into web programming, leaving C++ and Microsoft Visual Studio far behind me. I spent a few years shifting through a number of languages (Perl, PHP, Java, Python) before settling on Ruby as my interpreted language of choice. I’ve never lost that love for building and designing games, though, and I’ve kept my hand in over the years. I’ve always been more interested in designing games, rather than playing them: as a kid I was always the Dungeon Master, or the guy designing the adventure. As an 11 year old I used to write games in BASIC on BBC Micros and sell them to my friends for 10p each. I guess you could say it’s built in to my psyche.

Sol Trader

Another realisation: one of the things that I’ve learnt in the last year is that I’d love to spend more time working on my own products. I have done this in a half-hearted fashion over the years, but my motivation tends to die off when the initial rush of enthusiasm fades. To help myself see it through to the end, I’ve decided to try to realise a long held dream. Alongside working with clients this year, I’m going to spend some of my remaining time building and releasing my first commercial game.

I’m therefore very pleased to announce Sol Trader - an open-ended space trading and exploration game set in our solar system in the near future.

The game itself has been in development since the end of October last year: it started as a side project with my kids (we originally named it Spacestuff) but has blossomed and grown into something much more. There’s some info on the website I’ve been putting together, but more will be forthcoming shortly. I’m aware that I’ve not got any screenshots yet, but once the first artwork goes in I’ll put some up. It’s already playable: my kids are already having great fun travelling between Earth and Venus via jump gates and landing on the planets.

When I’m ready for beta testers, I’ll put an announcement out on the mailing list: sign up at soltrader.net.

Motivate me!

One of the things I need to work on is the ability to complete my own projects. Working on a game is a great motivator, but I need help to keep my motivation up! I’d be very grateful if you’d drop me a note asking me how I’m getting on if you don’t hear from me for a while. Write a comment on a blog post, retweet something, sign up to get emails, ping me on twitter: every little bit of feedback I get (even if critical) helps to motivate me to work on it.

More on the game in future posts, including some thoughts on architecture, language choice and whether or how to release the source code. Crafting this codebase has already proved a treasure trove of interesting thoughts on code quality and testing, which I plan to share on this blog over time. I’m also aware that I’m breaking a few “indy game developer” rules: I’ll share my opinions about that, too.

Will I finish? Will it be a success? I’ve no idea, but I plan to learn as much as possible from doing it. At the very least, I’m shooting after a dream, and I’ll be pleased to finish 2012 having attempted it, whatever the outcome.

Have you got a half-baked dream you’re going to turn into reality this year? If not, why not?

Work with me

I’ve been taking a break from my work and blogging for the summer: but now I’m looking for work again from next week.

To this end I’ve put up a new page on this site which has all the details of what I can offer, and my availability. If you’d like to work with me this autumn, do get in touch.

I also plan to start blogging again soon, with my first topic being how we handled the massive site traffic we experienced on e-petitions a couple of weeks ago.

Don't miss your greatest achievement

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

– Donald Rumsfeld

My ten month old daughter started crawling this week.

It’s been quite a struggle for her, to be honest. First she was quite content with sitting and have toys passed to her by her over-eager brother and sister. After a little while she tired of this, and was determined to reach That Toy Over There that she hadn’t been passed yet.

First she reached out her arms towards it, and bent over double trying to get there whilst still sitting. As her arms are only tiny, she found this most frustrating. Then she found that she could flip her body over and land sideways, lying on her front. She already knew how to get back to sitting from that position, and when she did, she was about ten inches closer to the toy she wanted.

This procedure reigned for several weeks, until finally after much clapping and encouragement she managed to get onto her hands and knees and shuffle over to whatever it was she wanted. She suddenly realised that this was much more efficient than the sideflip-sit-up method of travel and ended up crawling around the whole playroom. We were very proud of her, and eventually picked her up and took her in the other room to give her some lunch.

When we returned however, we sat her back on the floor and expected her to pick up where she left off. Only she’d forgotten the whole thing: she was back to to the sideflip and couldn’t remember how to shuffle along. It was only after much coaxing that we got her to remember how to do it, and this time it stuck.

My daughter had made a great achievement: a landmark of child development. Yet she had no idea she’d done it.

How often do we discover something good, great even, and let it pass us by, or give up before time? Frankly, I’ve no idea what the end result would have been of those ideas that I gave up for the wrong reasons. It’s back to those unknown unknowns: for all we might laugh at the way he said it, Rumsfeld had a point. We could have stumbled into shuffling when all we know is sideflip-sit-up, yet we don’t have the wisdom to see it yet. Then we give up because it’s too hard, or we need to practice, or we don’t have the right funding, or we’re just too scared.