What I'm Into: Friends' Kickstarters

Crowd-funding waxes and wanes in public mythology. The drama around Double Fine's first Kickstarter run with the $1M raised in 24 hours seems like so long ago now. I remember everyone crying from the rooftops how crowd-funding would democratize development and change the world. Then a few years later, the moaning - handfuls of high-profile failures and a myriad of slipped dates, with Double Fine like the cherry on top coming in tremendously over-budget and over-deadline just like any other AAA project.

There was a period of saturation, with everyone and their dog asking for money, and then a period of ambivalence as indie creators and punters alike realized crowd campaigns were not a universal salve or automatic ticket to funding.

I don't have any data to support this feeling (there's your first bullshit flag) but it seems to me that crowd-funding is only now reaching a period of maturity - fewer copycat or on-the-fly campaigns, more infrastructure for manufacturing and delivery - and that's pretty cool.

I've backed 2 campaigns in the last month that I want to share, both games, both by friends/acquaintances, and both fully funded within the first few days:

Dreaming Spires

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/949153718/dreaming-spires

Jeremy's Oxford-themed board game is rich in history, characters and a gorgeously scholastic aesthetic. They say "write what you know" and as Jez is an Oxford alum and consummate board game geek, Dreaming Spires most certainly comes from an authentic (and well-researched!) place. It also looks fun to play - strategically building a college up from the medieval era, attracting scholars and competing in historical Oxford events? I can get into that!

Everyone who knows me as game developer also knows "I hate games" - especially board games, which I perceive as a hindrance of social gatherings. I'm decidedly a single-player gamer. At parties I prefer to, you know, talk about shit and drink alcohol.

Jez has often assured me you can do both while playing board games, as has Gracie, but I've never quite been sold. However, Dreaming Spires appeals to me in a way other games haven't due to the solid biographical emphasis on characters. I can get attached to characters. They are the heart of storytelling for me. I may not be interested in leading a faceless army or civilization but I want to attract Oscar Wilde to my college, damn it!

Also interesting about this project is that it's being run in partnership with board game publisher Game Salute, veterans of the Kickstarter business. To me this is a fascinating signal of the maturity of the crowd-funding platform - indies working with publisher support for logistics, especially in a physical goods space like board games, just makes sense.

Night In The Woods

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1307515311/night-in-the-woods

From Alec Holowka of the venerable Indie House back home in Vancouver comes an adventure game that I actually want to play. Plus, it is beautiful.

Everyone seems to be into adventure games nostalgia. For many years I thought I was too - until I realized most people's nostalgia, adventures and fantasies didn't match mine. I crave new game worlds where I can explore aimlessly, with deep characterization to immerse myself in. I don't give a shit about puzzles or normal "game stuff" which is perhaps why I enjoyed Sworcery so profoundly while none of my gamer mates rated it. I love it when the mundane aspects of life are reflected in alternate universes. I am one of those people who relished every moment of waiting for the bus to my forklift job in the original Shenmue for Dreamcast.

So Night In The Woods looks well up my alley. In some ways it reminds me of Cheap Thrills the webcomic - except with mystery. I'm really drawn to all of the character concepts and designs, the world aesthetic, and the fact that the main character is female and that her femaleness seems to be of absolutely zero consequence. (That she looks like a punk cat and is therefore totally unsexualized may help on this front.) Also, I love things that are darkly, hopelessly sarcastic and I love to play bass and break stuff.

There is a lot for me to potentially love about Night In The Woods. But even if the game doesn't turn out precisely how I'm envisioning it, I'm happy I can do my small part to support some artists I respect to create work of their own imagining. And maybe that's the real point of crowd-funding in the end.

Have you backed anything recently?

Cert, Then and Now

 
This Friday my team hits code freeze - which, in case you don't work in software (looking at you, Mum & Dad) is kind of a big deal. It means we've only a day or two left to make any fixes or changes to our app before we branch - or "freeze" - a Release Candidate build.

This "RC0" build then gets tossed over the fence to the certification and regression testing processes required to sign it off for launch. If all goes well (pro tip: things never go well) this build will be the final 1.0 software that gets released to users when the new Xbox launches on Nov 22.

More likely, Cert and QE will find a shipstopping issue that we've somehow missed, and the team will frantically fix and spin up new RCs until one is deemed worthy of public release. (We've started an office pool on what RC number the Xbox final OS will ship with - but that's probably not something I ought to say on the Internet!)

Cert is always a weird time in the lifecycle of a product and it's one they rarely teach you about in school. Having a build in Cert means you are essentially on-call - it's limbo-like but you have to be on your toes ready to fix a shipstopper at any moment. I have fond memories of my first ever Cert on the Madden game back in 2008 - I was a lowly junior engineer so none of the really tough ship-blocking bugs came to me. So for me, life was pretty damn chill. Our entire dev team of 11 engineers piled onto one sofa together and spent 12 hour days playing Wario Ware and Boom Blox on a retail Wii kit while we waited for bugs to roll in.

Of course that was the old days - because this industry moves so quickly I'm basically a granny. Now the world has shifted from box products to digital delivery, there is usually a 1.1 release to start work on immediately. No time to take a big holiday or comp leave while the discs get manufactured. Users expect you to push them an updated version at least once a month! And that's not a bad thing.

The larger software industry's paradigm shift to Agile has also helped. Hopefully, if your team has been following Scrum methods they'll be working at a sustainable pace and won't be burned out in need of a rest come launch. They'll also have been releasing every sprint (even if just to soft launch or internal dogfooding) and have automated testing so the build quality should be high - meaning fewer issues to find in a certification pass.

In fact, it's possible to make the argument that Agile precludes the need for Cert and that it's a sad old relic of the console waterfall era. I'm not going to make that argument, as there are enough people discussing "bug sprints" and "stabilization" or "integration" sprints to indicate it's still a common enough problem at the end of a project. And certification continues to be required in one form or another on all closed platforms from game console TCRs to the Apple App Store's submission process.

So while I miss the weeks on weeks of Wario Ware, I think dev is generally changing for the better. Our Cert period beginning next week will be a interesting time, with attentions divided between 1.1 development and urgent fixes on the 1.0 RC. Cross fingers there aren't too many of the latter!

What I'm Into: Lash Extensions Lifehack

Bit of a girly post here. Let's talk eyelashes. 

I've got a complex about my natural lashes. They are short, mousy brown and generally unremarkable. It wouldn't bother me half as much if my partner, a big hairy Brummie, didn't have the same freaking genetic disorder as Elizabeth Taylor which gives him two rows of gorgeously long black lashes. What a waste.

So to make up for my lacklustre lashline, and generally being a lazy cow with no time to do makeup properly, I've been faking it since 2009. 

I started out with individual Duralash bunches:

Many women start with the temporary caterpillar strip falsies for special occasions, but those intimidated the fuck out of tomboy little me at first. Not to mention they defeat my whole purpose of extreme laziness - so inspired by this Kingdom of Style post I reached straight for the permanent glue.

I wore them on and off through my last two years of uni, although they are fussy to apply and while fine in the winter, seemed to just melt off my face in the summer months. I finally gave up the grudge when I realized they were taking so long to stick on each week it was hardly worth the time saved on mascara daily. That, and they look completely ridiculous up close:

I had my first real set of salon extensions done when I was working in Tokyo. Everybody gets everything done in Tokyo, and I was spending a lot of my free time enjoying the aircon and practising my Japanese with the gals at Nail Bee Roppongi, so it seemed the logical thing to do. Although describing what lash curve I wanted in Japanese not to mention explaining that one of the girls had glued my eye together was a bit of a challenge.

That first set worked out ok:

Unlike strips or bunches, real extensions sit 1:1 on your natural lashes, have no seams and last until the real lash grows out. I was hooked.

For the past year I've been getting mine done every 5-6 weeks at Lash Lab on Brick Lane and they fucking rule. It's £50 a pop and my eyes look like this without makeup:

A colleague of mine did some extensive market research on character designs for a fashion game last year, trying to find out what art style appealed most to girls and women and what type of aspirational images they identified with. She found that women reacted most favourably across the board to characters with thick black upper lash lines - we intuitively love that shit.

Nowadays I'll pop falsies on top of my extensions for a special do, inspired by HRH Nicki Minaj from who I learned you can wear multiple rows: 

Excessive? Perhaps. But I've got Gracie's fluttering genetic mutations to live up to.