At the end of last year, a girl asked me how much C++ she would have to know to be able to confidently apply for a programming job in the games industry. It’s not an easy question.

Most of the people we hire have worked with games before. Either at other companies, or making games in their free time. These people know that they’ve got enough experience, they often have specialized knowledge (like 3D graphics), and the question doesn’t really arise for them. For someone who isn’t coming from the games sector, but has maybe done consulting or some other programming job before, I didn’t have a ready answer, but I found one anyway that I’m pretty comfortable with:

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I’m currently working on some updates to AOs graphics, nothing I am going to really discuss here, as I can’t say when or if it’s getting into the game. But I thought you might get a kick out of the screenshots from some of my more interesting failures today:

Of course, much like the LSD graphics I posted earlier, balloon heads and giant cardboard guns won’t get into the final game 🙂

Anarchy Online, in case you are wondering, is still going strong. Advertising in the game was a brilliant thing to do (I was really sceptical to that one, I admit).

You know you’re working in a job you really love when you never look at the watch because you’re waiting for 4 o’clock so you can leave.

Actually, in the almost 5 years of my current job, it’s happened to me once that I can remember of. It was fairly recently, and that day I stayed until after 5 anyway because I found something cool to do.

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s always just fun and games, and I’m not the kind of person that says “Thank god it’s monday”. Some mornings, staying in bed seems more inviting than going to work. And occasionally, I find myself having to do things that are boring. Looking for someone else’s bug in a piece of convoluteed, hard to track code. Most of the time though, the reason I don’t like doing what I do at that moment is that I’ve got half a dozen ideas for what I’d rather be working on.

There was a time when I couldn’t wait to get to work, and couldn’t make myself leave in the evenings. And more often than not, I’d be working on weekends. It’s definitely healthy that I got over that, but sometimes I miss those days. But today I can actually have several good things, and work is still one of them. Geocaching, working out, firends, movies and climbing are others.

Last night, Microsoft invited us to preview the XBOX 360. The whole thing was arranged in a big appartment, with couch space for everyone and 4 consoles with 2 controllers each. There was free pizza, chips, beer & soda, and we got to test a few of the launch titles. This sounded like a lot of fun.

I think the whole thing was mostly a demonstration of how to throw good money after bad in PR. The MS head office probably had the (good!) idea behind this event. “Let’s invite potential early adopters, let them play in a fun atmosphere, and they’ll tell their friends to buy a 360”. The idea is that we and all the other people they’ve invited over the past weeks are the kind of people that our friends look towards when making buying decisions, and that’s probably correct. So, good idea!

But: If you do that, you should follow it through all the way. The two guys that oversaw the event were not really trying to steer our experience there in any way, which, from a PR standpoint, is bad. For the same reason we do PR tours in AO instead of letting the press figure out the clunky interface and grind through a backyard, these people should have made sure we see the good bits, and gloss over the bad stuff. I mean, this is basic stuff: We were obviously all a bit disappointed with the oversaturation, and the excessive use of effects that try to show off the hardware, but end up making the games worth. They should have addressed that, said something about this being launch titles, whatever – and made sure we talked about something else. Focus on the good hthings instead: DoA 4 was extremely popular, they must have noticed that, so they should have focused on it, told us what the 360 did for that game, what new stuff we could expect, etc. that make us want to ditch the old one and buy a new 360.

Okay, so much for ranting about the PR work.

Kameo: I liked Kameo, becasue I’ve been looking forward to playing another Rare game, but I also found it more
confusing than their previous titles. That mayy just be because I got ditched right into the game with no level
in which to learn the controls.

Mutant Storm: This was the best title I played, although it was only a demo version, and they had not unlocked the full title through XBOX Arcade (why? the “buy this game!” nag screen was annoying as hell, and really didn’t
help in selling the console). Great game, though. If the XBOX arcade stuff takes off and produces quality titles like this, that might be the reason for me to buy the console.

Project Gotham Racing: There are bviously a couple of effects here (motion blur, car paint) that the 360 does better, but the game itself is lame. If this is the quality of the launch titles, in terms of gameplay, then it pays to wait half a year until the second wave of games comes out. I can kind of see why it’ necessary to artificially create the impression that they’ll sell out on launch day.

DoA 4: INot my type of game. I can report that button-mashing gets you nowhere, which is probably good news for the fans of the genre. Judging from the popularity of it, this seemed to be good, but I guess you need to judge for yourself whether a new console is justified when you compare it with DoA 3.

Perfect Dark: My initial impression was that in terms of photo-realism, this game is a step backwards. The graphic effects make the game look worse. Mickael said something like “good effects are like makeup: you shouldn’t notice them”. This game is a cheap 40-year old hooker trying to look 20 by putting on a bucket of makeup.

Conclusion: We can safely wait to see what the PS3 and Revolution looks like, there’s no rush to buy the 360. Which is the opposite of what this event was supposed to tell us, and I’d say in Microsoft’s book, the whole
should be considererd a complete waste of money.

The Good: Free food and beer, and a nice atmosphere to play games in.

The Bad: No vegetarian pizza (how hard is this?), bad PR, the free sweaters were all L or XL.

It’s 27 degrees C in our office, and it’s hard doing anything. It’s been lke this for days now, and apparently, noone can do anything about it. I think I should work from home for a few days and see if they eventually miss me enough to figure out what can be done.

Somebody somewhere has to be actively heating the building. If it’s 12 degrees outside, how can it be 27 degrees on the inside? that can’t just be our computers and bodies (especisally since it’s already 26 degrees when I come in at 8 in the morning).

The game is six years old, but I still felt updating the demo would be a good way to spend my time. The old demo for The longest Journey, like the older releases, wasn’t running all that flawless on Windows XP, but the new version should work a charm.

I still get feedback about this title, there are people replaying it or discovering it for the first time. Some even buy it instead of pirating the game, which makes me even happier, because it means I can justify working on a patch every now and then.

It’s nice when something pretty like this is still appreciated after this much time. Everyone likes to watch old movies, but if you say you like playing old games those same people look at you as if you’re from another planet. *sigh* I really want to make another old-school adventure game.

I started geocaching last winter with my sister Alke. We had a little competition going for a while to see who could find the most caches, but it was quickl obvious that Oslo is much better terrain for it than Heidelberg. There are hundreds of caches hidden around here!

Anyway, I pulled ahead and then stopped for a bit to let her catch up, while pondering over what GPS to buy (I had been borrowing Frank’s). Somehow the whole thing slipped my mind and was forgotten, until two weeks ago I got an SMS from Alke saying she had pulled ahead by 5, totalling 16! Highscore lists are pretty important, and we’re competitive about them in our family, so I starteed again and somehow Yngvild also caught the bug. We went on two pretty good weeks of hunting, and I’m now up to 35 finds. Alke has a long way to catch up, I just hope I’m not demoralizing her.

I’ve also ordered my GPB, a Garmin GPSMap 60CS.

Some time back, I created a quiz of 40 obscure games that peolpe had a pretty tough time figuring out. I decided 40 was a bit much, so I broke them up into two quizzes. And because that alone wouldn’t qualify for news, I added 20 new questions.

How many do you remember? Again, please use ROT13 if you have to post anything that might be considerered a spoiler.