Runestone – Game Development

Ã…rhus-based game developer [Runestone](http://www.runestone.dk/index.php?page=2) is an interesting case of *our guys* using their resources and aiming for the sky. [Greg Costikyan](http://costik.com/)’s latest call to action in [Escapist](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/): [Death to the Games Industry, Long Live Games](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/8/3) might have an answer in the courage of these Danish souls. A game on a smaller budget, with a different gameplay and a message of its own.

OK, let’s get the basic facts out of the way:

[Runestone](http://www.runestone.dk/) is a game developer in Århus, north Jutland, Denmark. 15 employees. Established in 2003 by Lars Kroll, Anne Ratzer, Alex Uth, Jan Roed, René Kragh Pedersen, Søren Maagaard and Nis Haller Baggesen. Game in development: **Seed**.

## Our guys #1: Role-players banding together

Role-players using their story-telling power/knowledge to reform CRPG design. By making a CRPG. From the ground up. They have a different perspective on RPGs and a different take on a CRPG product.

For instance:

* No battle in the game

## Our guys #2: Agile programming believers banding together

The CEO Lars Kroll is a firm Agile believer, and very active in implementing core XP practices in the company’s development process. There are parts of the whole “make a CRPG” activity that by their very nature preclude certain practices. For instance, code ownership needs to be non-collective, as the different problem domains are highly specialized. AI programming differs a lot from doing 3D graphics engine programming which differs a lot from network programming. The people are not interchangeable.

Runestone uses Bugzilla for a bug-tracking system, and Lars Kroll filed the first bug:

> “There is no game.”

“I had to do that. It was on principle.” A powerful message. Go fix what’s broken. Let’s get going.

The team is also using continuous integration: “We use CVS for version control and commit every day. We have a day-old release ready at all times.”

Whole Earth Catalog: A dear dead friend

> We *are* as gods and might as well get good at it.

Quote from the introduction of the [Whole Earth Catalog](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_earth_catalog).

Today I learnt how to use my wok better: **”hot wok, cold oil”** was the book’s credo. That is, they excerpted a book on sale and I learnt from that. If the heat in the wok is great when the oil is dumped in, the vegetables don’t stick when they are dumped in (moments later).

Live and learn.

Theatre success: Christofer Bocker

My old friend Christofer – a fellow web application programmer geek – has written a great play, won an award for it. This dramatic success came out of almost nowhere. He has written great prose before, I have read some (is that still unpublished?), but his theatrical experience is limited.

[SVD](http://www.svd.se/dynamiskt/kultur/did_10438665.asp), [Nummer](http://nummer.se/), and [Dramaten](http://www.dramaten.se/default.asp?id=9936) go wild.

Dramaten describes it thusly:

> Eight addicts meet at a fountain to hang out, talkm about their lives and addictions. The play is about how a person’s life through change, large or small, can turn out completely different.
>
> Christofer himself describes the driving force of the play as the difficulty in the individual to find their place in the world.

Congratulations, Christofer. (Or Gobbler.)

Call for Papers: Seminar on Playing Roles

Hey, role-playing writing is hot these days.

Now also: Call for Papers: Seminar on Playing Roles, held *for free*, people, in Tampere, Finland, March 23-24 in 2006. It is the fine folks from the [Hypermedia Lab](http://www.uta.fi/hyper/) at the U of Tampere who organize it.

So, if you have a thought for a paper, and want it ground to dust by people like:

* Frans Mäyrä (Hypermedia Laboratory, University of Tampere)
* Greg Costikyan (Nokia Research Center)
* Craig Lindley (Gotland University)

…you should go there. Or at least see the CFP.

Also, [Markus Montola](http://www.hut.fi/~mmontola/), of Nordic role-playing fame, is one of the organizers. Our buddy.

Just started a file for time-tracking

Using text files is a killer thing.

See Hobix—a Ruby-driven, text-file oriented blog system.

Or 43folders.com—a lot of the stuff on its wiki is just file-fiddling stuff. No binary formats.

Tip for geeks: If you install the GNU coreutils for Windows you can do things like:

pear list|grep XML

PEAR is a PHP programming library of ready-to-use code. pear is the command to use to remote-control your PEAR modules. list gives you a list of all your installed modules to “standard output”. With the pipe character (|) you can “redirect standard output” to be “standard input” to what comes after the pipe. In this case, the grep command. grep has “XML” as an argument here, and it will then print all lines that have a match on “XML”. This lets you filter stuff easily.

Back to my timetracking file.

Using grep and it should not be rocket-science, really.

  • I could start using tagging (“updates”, “maintenance”, “bugfix”, “new_development”), and easily find the things I have done for clients “by type”.
  • Files are easy to back up.

That was a lousy list. Can you come up with more funky things to do with a textfile-based time-tracking system? (Date, hours worked, description of job; that’s what I’m talking about here.)

Well, I hope this makes me organize better. And be more sure of myself for it.

See more progress on: be more organized