Hello Ruffian Chums!

A little late in posting this to the blog but much better late than never in this case. If you cast you BRAINS back to last November you’ll hopefully remember The Grand Ruffian Crackdown 2 Graffiti competition in which we asked you to scribble us something fancy for inclusion into our new game.

Well fast forward to last Friday and the winners were decided and revealed. And a very lovely bunch of piccies they are. Thank you to everyone who entered and congrats to the chosen few. I’ve attached a few of the 42 winners below and you can see the full set of triumphant images right here,

Cheers

gaz

Everyone else is doing it and so are we! So Merry Christmas all, let’s celebrate by looking back at what the year gave us in games.

It’s been a really busy year for Ruffian. We were born, we grew up, and we worked ourselves to (near) death. Somewhere in-between all of that we managed to squeeze in some time to play a few games. I don’t know how we’ve managed the time, the year has zipped by in a blink and flurry of Crackdown 2. So I’m sure I’m not the only person looking forward to picking up some of these soon, I’m shamefully hanging my head as some of the best games ever made sit waiting for me.

Our criteria for the “Games of 2009″ is fairly loose, we’ve included new releases and pretty much anything we played a lot of this year. The only rule we had was that we could only nominate 3 games each and that’s actually been really tricky considering the staggering quality of titles in our minds.

Enough waffle though, let’s start at the bottom of the list and work our way up to the top, all traditional like.

(more…)

Wow! Bowled over is probably the best way to describe our feeling on the Crackdown 2 Awesome Graffiti competition.

We asked you to use your collective creative genius to draw us some kick arse graffiti that we could despoil Pacific City with. As well as getting their work in the game the lucky winners will get a credit in the game. And the response has been fantastico. We’ve had around 500 entries in all and the standard has mostly been extremely high. Even the terrible ones have had the team guffawing away so all in all this has been a great experience.

Now we’ve the slightly harder work on slimming down the enormous slew of submissions into a final set that will make the game. It’s going to be hard but as soon as we’re done you’ll be the first know.

Pardon my French but Fuck me it’s been cold in here

It’s pretty depressing, we’ve a room full of people doing the near impossible and it’s something as prosaic as BUSTED HEATING that’s presented a problem that is seemingly unsolveable.

Here’s Lead Coder Mike from last week. It honestly has been that cold:

He’s not dressing like that for a laugh you know. Well he is. But it’s a serious laugh. Like satire or something.

We’ve moaned, whined, cajoled and are on the verge of threatening our landlords but apparently PIPES IS COMPLICATED. The end result is we’ve all been sitting here freezing the proverbials off for the last 4 weeks. Things took a slight turn for the better today as we’ve had some temporary heaters dotted about the place. They’re a tad distracting to look at as they blaze a fairly intense and headache inducing light. It’s like a continuous nuclear test where the shockwave never arrives. I swear I can see the bones in my hand when I hold them in front of these beasts.

Still when life deals you lemons you make lemonade. Or indeed toast. Here’s what Jim’s been up to:

That’s Ruffian Games agent, game developing juggernauts reduced to making snacks like our nan used to.

Hello chums! Long time no post but we’re back with some details of an awesome opportunity for you to get some of yourself into Crackdown 2!

What we’re doing is running a graffiti competition and those of you that submit scribblings that are up to snuff have a chance of getting plastered all over the highways and byways of Pacific City.

Honestly, we’re not all that fussy. If you can barely draw getting then you’re in with a chance. And as well as being in the game you’ll also get a spot in the credits. Your mum would be really impressed

Details are to be found here:

http://www.ruffiangames.com/competition

Thought I’d share an email I just sent out to the team, hope you enjoy it.

Konbanwa! Japan is crazily amazing but doesn’t appear to have
discovered wifi, with that and our jam packed schedule I couldn’t get
an update out to you as quickly or easily as I’d like.

Huuuuuuuge thanks to you all for making the successful outcomes
possible. Crackdown2 was received in an overwhelmingly positive way,
all the press were incredibly upbeat and impressed with what we’ve all
done. Steve and I woke up this morning to the “cock on the table”
quote and I think that’s one of the best things written about
Crackdown ever. There was a great buzz being generated by the press
yesterday, the demo schedule got even more packed in the afternoon as
more & more people heard about how fantastic the game was looking.

Great to see the videos appearing all over the place but Sod’s law
that the first ones to appear were a bit rough. That first demo
session didn’t go entirely as rehearsed and I somehow managed to turn
infinite ammo off which then led me down a path of needing to
reboot… I’m a pleb. There was a very obvious rush to be the
first to post footage of the game but despite a few rough edges it’s
making the huge impact we all wanted it to.

I completely lost count of how many demo sessions we did but they were
all busy. The hands-on with deathmatch was incredibly well received
and came as a welcome surprise to almost everyone. They pretty much
universally loved it but the actual game experience did differ between
sessions. The Japan press session was probably the best, they were
unbelievably ninja at it within seconds. There were a couple of
sessions where people struggled a little and the game felt a lot less
hectic but it still got widely praised.

There’s still plenty more to come out from follow-on interviews and
the like. We’ve managed to get a great impact, generate a massive buzz
and got the naysayers and skeptics proved wrong. So all in all it’s
been a great success, fantastic job all round.

We were out having celebratory drinks with MS, Edelman, Turn 10 and Remedy last
night. Remedy turn out to be huge fans of ours and wanted us to pass
on their regards and good luck to the team which was really good of
them I thought. However, I have absolutely no memory between this moment and waking up today… The hangover is
so bad that I almost feinted in the street earlier today but Steve
saved me like the gent he is.

Banzai!

I have seen something fantastic things today. Some of them are in the build, Steve and Stu have worked some magic and I went “wow”. Unfortunately I can’t even begin to talk about that right now. GNNG

The other fantastic thing I’ve seen is our building’s lobby. It’s full of women in traditional eastern dress and they’re all gawping at an owl and a hawk. I have no idea what it’s all about at all. No one seems to have. This is what it looks like:

You get a lot of this here. The building we’re in is great and the offices absolutely superb but we’re the only tenant and fill around 10% of the space available. To help get some new tenants in the estate agents often hire the place out for special events and use that to get some press and a bit of money.

A month ago much of the available space was taken up by the university for their end of year art degree show which was really ace. Obviously it’d be great if the landlords managed to fill up the space available here but if they did I’m pretty sure we’d all miss random owls in the lobby

Well this is a surprise but a very genuinely pleasant one at that. Those chaps at UK magazine XBOX 360 Game are the first (hopefully of many) to feature CD#2 on their front cover As well as getting the front page slot there’s a really nice 8 page feature inside the mag too. In the shops now and well worth checking out

Our Exec Producer from MS is over today and surprised us on a number of accounts. First off he has an iPhone. Now it’d be pretty fair to describe some of the Ruffian peeps as Apple Whores (I’m actually typing this on a 15″ Macbook Pro RIGHT THIS VERY MOMENT NOW) but it was a bit of a surprise for our chief MS contact tp turn up with a Steve Jobs’ Jesus phone as opposed to something with Windows Mobile on.

The 2nd surprise was that he’d got the case modded rather nicely to have a Crackdown 2 logo on It looks very sweet indeed and despite just essentially being a sticker feels very professional indeed. Here it is:

I’m really tempted to get one myself with Ruff Ian, the company ned mascot, blazoned across the back

A quiet few weeks for us here in Ruffian Bunker Mk 2. A lot has been going on but it’s mostly manifested itself in a lot of studious work by the troops culminating in handing off our July 1st milestone. If you’ve any knowledge of gamedev you may as well go and read something else as this is pretty basic stuff

What’s a milestone I hear you ask, well A milestone is a pre-agreed chunk of work that needs to be completed in a certain amount of time. The whole of Crackdown 2 is split into a number of sequential milestones each of which is around 6 weeks long and at the end each 6 week period the latest build goes to MS to be signed off as complete.

How long a milestones is is pretty tricky to get right, if they’re too close together the work delivering the milestone materials ends up taking up time you could be working on the game. It’s like digging up some potatoes every 10 minutes to see if they’re grown yet. Too far apart and you run the risk of the game going too far off track to get back in line, sort of similar to what happened on the Titanic For CD2 our milestones are roughly 6 weeks apart and that’s working out pretty good for so far.

During milestone week we make a big archive of the latest build and clean up and any outstanding issues that would stop you playing the game. There’s a big pre-agreed list of things that need to have been done and we check everything carefully to make sure it’s all complete. We also flag any work we’ve done that’s outside of the milestone deliverable list.

As you can imagine pulling everything together for delivery is a bit of a slog and once we’ve handed it off the work only begins for the guys at MGS have a lot of work to do. There’s a fair few people involved, 45 of us Ruffians and nearly as much again at various outsourcers. On top of that there’s a pretty big team at Microsoft as well and it’s at milestone sign off we work the most closely with particularly on milestone week. Here they are:

John Noonan heads up MS’s test, he knows Crackdown really well having working on CD#1 and him and his team in Seattle go through pre-agreed checklist called a MAT test that his guys can work through with the build . The MAT test is the central document for signing off if the milestone is done or not from a functional point of view so it’s something all of our guys play close attention to while working towards dropping the milestone.

Tim Dean is our Art director at MS who we’ve worked closely with from the project’s outset to define the look and feel for CD #2. He’s fresh off the all conquering juggernaut of success that is Gears Of War. Working with Tim we’ve created a pretty solid plan for all visual aspects of the project and Tim gives an eye over the milestone deliverables to and provides feedback on how we’re tracking to those goals.

Kieran Connell heads up a tech team in MGS Europe. He’s ex-Rare and been in games yonks. Among other things he’s been helping us with our online plans, we’ve got some great features planned but it meant some close interaction on a technical level with many parts of the vast Microsoft Empire. Kieran’s been a great help on this front and as well as that has also got a few great coders onto the project to provide a helping hand. Kieran also signs off the milestone from a technical point of view.

Eric Simonich is our design contact. He’s new to CD and even getting to grips with the first game in it’s entirety is a mountain to climb in itself it’s one he’s scaled consummate ease. Our design is pretty set right now but as with the other disciplines progress in the build needs to be checked against out plan. Eric has been at MS for while and previously worked on the excellent Mass Effect.

Roger Carpenter: Rog is our Producer. All of the stuff detailed above doesn’t happen by accident, it’s the end product of a lot of planning and management and Rog is MS’s guy on the production management front. Rog works with our managers to make sure we’re delivering on time and to quality. Part of the delivery for the milestone are the latest set of plans for all subsequent milestones. Rog signs these off and the milestone overall.

And last but certainly not least is Toby Heap. He’s the biz dev guy and was a key part part of the effort to get the game up and running last year. When there’s something to do with the contract or general business relationship to be chatted about he’s the go to guy. And the reason he’s so important for milestone sign off is he tells MS accounts to send us some money. Which is always helpful.

If you’re involved in game dev this is all pretty basic stuff but for most people who aren’t it can often be a surprise just how many people are involved in making these games. It’s not immediately obvious when leaping through the rooftops of Pacific City that as well as being excellently entertained you’re actually playing with a pretty heavyweight piece of computer software that has as much in common with something like Excel as it does with being fun.