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I am prone to ranting at people in their twenties, or younger about how they need to panic big time about job prospects. As I have a nice job, that pays ok, and I love, people never take me seriously. Here is why you should:

1) I’m naturally a workaholic, and highly motivated. I already have that as an advantage, and it’s a big one. If you can’t make yourself leap out of bed at 8AM on a Sunday to go do some work, you are at a disadvantage. I just got lucky here.

2) I’m just over 40, meaning I was 11-12ish when the first home computers hit the UK. As a result, I am a first generation programming geek. A few years older, and I’d be old enough to not have found them cool, a few years younger, and I’d have missed it. The ZX81 and its ilk forced me to learn programming from the ground up, with no help. This is another advantage.

3) I started an online business before steam, stardock, gamersgate etc. As a result, I sold direct because I didn’t have any other option. Thus I now have a very long-established site, business contacts, history, experience of selling online. If I’d started a few years later, I would have been tempted to just rely on portals, and I’d not be truly independent.

4) I got a free university education. Sorry to the kids now who are paying for theirs, I can’t help being the right age. Exactly the right age. A bit older, and there wouldn’t have been the push to go to uni, later and I may have skipped it due to cost. This is not going to change, except for the worse.

5) I started my business before china and india really went bananas with economic growth. I never had to worry about someone from china or india taking my job. Right now, I’d be VERY worried about that. Unlike people in the rich west, Indian and Chinese kids have parents who were in real poverty, and grandparents in extreme poverty. You bet your ass they will get pestered to get better grades than you.

6) I started work before robots got good. Robots now are very good. There is going to be NO work in warehouses or doing assembly line stuff soon. All those factory workers will HAVE to reskill to do something, and that may include doing what you do. I’ve got lucky yet again! I’m the right age for robots to help me in retirement, but not young enough that they take my job. Unless your job is creative, or involves direct people skills, are you really sure it will exist when you retire. If you are 20 now, will your job exist in 2061? because don’t pretend you can retire at 65 if you are 20 now. Don’t forget to factor in all those ex-warehouse guys working as robot technicians to make them even better each year… Say goodbye to warehouse, security patrol  domestic and many military jobs.

7) Complexity. Things were simpler for my working life. I commanded serious money because I had an MCSE qualification as a network / IT engineer. That isn’t so rare now, and the tech is more complex. You need to know more stuff now, much much more.

8) The interweb. People everywhere on the planet can take your job now. Telepresecence, video conferencing, skype etc… I employ people all over the world. You don’t compete with other locals, but 7 billion people.

9) Property boom. I thought UK house prices were insane when we bought, but that was 10 years ago, and they have tripled since then. How young people can afford a house now is beyond me.

TL,DR: Study hard, and work your ass off. You need to. More than I needed to. Sorry!

I haven’t blogged for a week because I’ve been away. Unlike many geeks, when I go away I *REALLY* go away. I take a phone, for emergencies, but it has no email access. No computer, no tech. Just a digital camera. Here was one nights accomodation (a mongolian yurt in the alps) and a panoramic picture of the surrounding area..

Back in civilisation now, with much to do, and much to arrange. Plus, battlefield 3 to try…

I’m on holiday for a week. Don’t bother trying to burgle my house, it’s protected by an ex-commando, and my two cats.

SEE YOU SOON

I guess the younger you are, the less this post may resonate.

Computers and computing gadgets and software is staggeringly cheap. Yes, games, but practially everything. I recently bought Sony Vegas HD 11 video editing software. It does EVERYTHING, and it cost under £100, as I recall. I’ve spent more than that on getting my boiler serviced. This is software that I could use to run an entire video editing business. It’s mad.

I also bought an external 1 terrabyte back up drive yesterday for £45.

FOURTY FIVE POUNDS for a TERRABYTE.

I need not remind you that a terrabyte is over 1,000,000 megabytes, which is a million zipped copies of war and peace. And I got a device that can store all that for less than the price of a tank of petrol. This is staggering.

Meanwhile, to compensate, the rest of the world gets stupidlty expensive. I just bought a 990mm by 395mm piece of 2mm thick polycarbonate (plastic) and it cost me £27 including tax and delivery. Madness. Getting a drain unblocked cost me over £100.

We live in strange times indeed. Everything is so expensive its a wonder people can afford to live, and yet anything encoded digitally is so cheap as to be laughable, and the technology that would have been dismissed a decade ago as a pipe-dream is now practically disposable. As an IT engineer I worked on 30MB hard drives you could practically crush a car with. You now wouldn’t bother buying a hard drive below a terrabyte, and you could put that in a large pocket.

If only all this crazy advances in computing tech co0uld be applied to making this stuff cheaper. Insulation FTW.

About 8 years ago I was chatting to the receptionist at a games company I worked for, and she was telling me about a conversation she had recently with the lead coder (and general all round engine god) of the company. He had been working late (as usual) and looked up at her, a bit vacant and said “I can’t handle this any more”. By which he meant the long long hours of coding, coding, staring at a screen (he had 3) and pouring over complex algorithms to get the code to be faster, faster… He wasn’t an 18 year old student any more, and it hit him really suddenly.

That’s kind of the whole lifestyle trying to keep up in the world of game production.

It’s not just games. I remember a quote by Glenn Tipton, guitarist for Judas Priest, where he said he loved the new wave of neo-classical heavy metal guitarists, because even in his forties, it meant he couldn’t put his feet up and know he was good. They were always pushing him every year to be faster, flashier, better.

I’m sure it’s true in every field, weight lifting, (any kind of sport really), comedy, writing… the pressure goes up and up each year. In order to suceed, you need to be better than the people who came before, and every year, the cumulative pile of stuff that came before gets bigger and better.

I am VERY aware of the fact that you can go to steam right now and buy a lot of once-big-budget games for the same price as buying one of mine. I’m not trying to play AAA games at their own game, but I’m trying to keep my games as fresh and modern and polished as I can. The harsh fact is, I can’t expect to make a game that’s just *as good* as Gratuitous Space Battles, and expect it to sell as well, three years later. That’s planning to fail. I need to address every single thing I know was wrong with GSB, and if I achieve that, I expect to maybe match that games sales, nothing more.

So in comes better online integration, achievements, better unlocks, hopefully better user customisation. Better artwork, better all-over-polish, better play testing and bug testing. And that means hiring more artists,  spending more time, being more obsessive with detail. This is not an easy gig. This is anything but an easy gig. And yet I love it. When I tried the battlefield 3 beta, I was noting everything that impressed me about it, knowing I need to get that sort of detail into GTB. When GTB comes out, BF3 will be old news. It will be yet another rung on the ladder of what gamers expect.

Note: I’m not just talking about graphics. I couldn’t begin to compete with the shaders and the pixel-pushing power of the frostbite engine. I’m talking about polish, all those little things that make games more playable, approachable, long-lasting and easy to use. Stuff like animated menus, text that nicely fades in and out, and is pin-sharp. intuitive GUI’s that are in just the right place, taking up just the right amount of space. Really well thought-out color palettes, sounds that all seem to fit together, flawless execution of UI stuff, great tutorials etc.

Back to work…