Author Archives: AJ

Self-development Window

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MJ recently blogged about identifying one’s own strengths. I thought it would be useful to share a tool that I’ve used over the last seven years as a herder of cats (read: software development manager). I call it the self-development window (or the career development window, as I often use it for that purpose). It looks a bit like this:

Self-development Window

(The astute among you will notice some similarities with SWOT Analysis).

To use the window, just fill in something in each of the first three boxes. Don’t worry about filling them in in order, just put them in whatever order occurs to you.

Strengths

This area includes the skills you use on a daily basis, or that people come to you ask questions about. Often (especially with software folks) we think in terms of technical skills – i.e. the skills where we actually do something or produce something, so don’t forget the so-called softer skills: communication, planning, leadership, etc.

Areas for Improvement

Things that you want to get better at. This might be particular skills that you want to learn, or some area of other knowledge you want to acquire. Many people find that they want to improve in many things, so sometimes this area gets crowded – don’t worry, that’s normal.

Goals

Goals differ from Areas for Improvement in that they are things that you can check off to say you’ve accomplished. For example “Learn to program in Objective-C” is an Area for Improvement, but “Write a commercial app in Objective-C and sell a copy to someone I don’t know” is a goal. Also, goals tend to include things that are much longer in time span than Areas for Improvement – e.g. “I want to become CEO of a company with more than 100 employees”. Make sure it’s easy to measure that you’ve accomplished them – ‘checkbox’ style items work best in my experience.

Tasks

Once you’ve finished with the first three sections, put a time frame on the Tasks section (I usually say three months) and then put specific tasks in there that you can accomplish in the next three months. These tasks must help you improve in one of your Areas or help you achieve one of your goals (or both!). Often you use your Strengths to help accomplish these tasks.

OK, so now what?

I get each of my team members to do this every three months. Then every two weeks we have a chat about how things are going (those chats are not solely about this Window, but it does come up – my job is to help them achieve all their tasks) just to make sure there aren’t any roadblocks and that all the tasks still make sense. If you’re doing this for self-development, it’s probably worth looking at this every week to see if you can accomplish any Task in the week, or work on it. Make sure you:

  • check off any Task or Goal that gets accomplished
  • do the exercise again after your allotted Task time elapses (i.e. every 3 months in my case)
  • move Areas for Improvement into Strengths once you’ve learned what you set to learn
  • look back over your Windows for the year to see what you’ve accomplished and to help motivate for the next year

I’m not sure if the form-factor of a Window actually makes any difference: it evolved from my need to write it all on a whiteboard. I do think it’s useful to have all four areas up on the board at once because sometimes your mind goes blank and writing other things helps jog your memory.

IT industry questions

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mj writes:

  • are university degrees worth the bother?
  • are universities correctly servicing the IT industry (and specifically the games dev market) with skills, knowledge, toolsets?
  • why have IT graduates decreased from 1900 in 2004 to 600 in 2007?
  • are we seeing a knock on effect from technology failures in the province, e.g. Nortel, Seagate
  • with the improvement of toolsets, a lone hobbyist can create ‘flickr’ or ‘facebook’. Is this relevant?
  • will we see an upsurge again with demand from Citigroup, Aepona, ATG etc?

Degrees are only useful to get you your first job. If you’ve got your first IT job without a degree, then you don’t need one. After that, it should be possible to achieve what you want with a bit of hard work. At least that’s what I’ve found.

I don’t think universities can be blamed (too much) for not servicing the industry, just given the nature of each. A degree takes 3-4 years to complete, and the content of it is usually created before the degree starts. 3-4 years is a long time in computer terms: 2-3 generations of processor speeds, anywhere from 1-4 major releases of software/language/OS. Really, the best a degree can hope to do is teach good guiding principles and a reasonably relevant language (and yes, I do think Java is probably the best language to learn at Uni).

As a recruiting manager, I’ve found that IT graduates are decreasing for two reasons: the pay is not what it used to be, and you can’t become a millionaire overnight any more. Ironic, given that starting pay has now gone up and some 2.0 companies *are* becoming overnight millionaires. This same trend in hiring is across the world, not just Northern Ireland.

Technology failures: maybe – however, both of those companies are large multi-nationals who opened an outsourced hardware plant in the province. To jump ahead to your last bullet point, these new companies are doing the same but for software/services, which (arguably) has a lower capital investment and, given the more dynamic nature of it, a higher chance of success. I think Northern Ireland really needs some more home-grown successes, and preferably ones that aren’t as staid as Lagan.

Toolsets: it’s semi-relevant. See my earlier post.

D&D 4th Edition … now with more!

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I had a poke through a friend’s copy of 4th Edition D&D. It seems it has been genericised to the nth degree, and everything has been made more powerful from the word go. On top of that, alignments have been simplified and there is even the concept of “unaligned” (maybe they read my previous article). More races, more abilities, more, more, more! I remain unconvinced that the gameplay has improved any since the first edition. Can’t be arsed with any more words on the topic.

Originally written for lategaming.com.

My MacBook Pro is devalued

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I’ve had my MBP since November. Thanks to Moore’s Law, there is now a faster and shinier version available, which means that the price for a used 2.4Ghz MacBook Pro with the same specs as mine has dropped to about $2000 (according to eBay).

This is actually good news for me. I was considering selling the laptop so I could help fund various other things I needed to do. By the time I’m able to sell, the price will be low enough that it won’t be worth my while :-)

It’s All About Relationships

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Software is not about code. It is about your company’s relationships. I have started seen companies with innovative products that use cutting edge technologies fail, simply because they didn’t understand their relationship with their customers, or didn’t understand it in time. Likewise, companies with demonstrably crap software (or even vaporware) thrive because they know who and what pays their bills.

This is both good news and bad news. Given how easy it is today to create any kind of app (and it’s getting easier, with Apple, Amazon, Google and Yahoo! all pushing open source frameworks and cheap services to lower the barrier of entry) the bad news is that your cash cow is easily copied by a Small Team with a tight focus. The good news is that if you are doing things right, it’s not about your software it’s about your relationships. So, once Small Team has created a faster, more scaleable, prettier version of your app but fails to get anywhere because you have your market sewn up, why not just buy them instead of spending money trying to compete on features? That works for Small Team too, because they get to continue to focus on what they do best (innovating) while someone else handles the money.

This approach seems to work well for non-software companies. I’ve seen software companies acquired by more “brick-and-mortar” enterprises, simply because said enterprise needed the technology to compete and didn’t want their competitors to be able to buy it.

Current games in development

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As mentioned a few posts ago, here is a list of the games that have gone through our idea filter and dropped down into the Book Development stage. If you’re a regular reader, the chances are none of these are of surprise to you, although I’m not sure we’ve blogged about all of them. So, in no particular order, here is the list.

  • Illusion (working title) – Set in the 19th Century, players are in some way involved with a magical stage act. A game of secrets and showmanship, where nothing is ever quite what you expected. Uses a thematic system based on playing cards (although dice-based rules are included).
  • Additional 23rd Letter Material (working title) – The game of psychics and conspiracies. Over the years, we’ve written (and rewritten) a bunch of source material that was never published. The Projects Sourcebook almost saw the light of day, but not quite. This body of work includes detailed information on playing Network and Project campaigns, revised psychic abilities, GM information on the Powers, Terata, and more.
  • War of the Worlds: Earth (working title) – Set after an invasion by Martians which has left physical and ecological devastation. Based on H. G. Well’s “The War of the Worlds”, characters pick up the pieces after that novel. See the War of the Worlds: Earth category for more info.
  • ERIS – The system used by The 23rd Letter, War of the Worlds: Earth and others. This book will be available for free PDF download.
  • 6 – A spy game, set in the height of the Cold War. For advanced role-players only, this game uses a very narrative system and Tiered Play to create intricate plots in an atmosphere of fear and mistrust.

There is no set publish date for any of these, but if there is any game that you’d especially like to see first, please let us know in the comments. War of the Worlds: Earth is likely to be the last of those games to be published, just looking at the amount of work still needing done.

Originally written for lategaming.com.

How we design a role-playing game

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I thought I’d share a bit about how our game design process works and (in a subsequent post) what we’re currently working on. This is not necessarily the best way to design a game, and we’re always looking at ways to get more stuff done, but at the same time we are only two people, geographically separated and both with full time jobs and families. This is what works for us.

Idea

We have lots of ideas. Any time we have an idea that might be game worthy, we put it on our (private) Wiki. Currently we have around 40 ideas that are worth making an entire game from. At this stage the idea is simply a 1-4 line premise. This could be as simple as “A spy game” or as in-depth as

Status: Refugee (working title) – Set today, the Solar System is destroyed by a nova. Luckily for us, the Interstellar government intervenes and transports all 6 billion of us off-world, in the very short space of time we have left before the Sun explodes. We all then become refugees spread across dozens of worlds, with no clue about laws, customs, aliens, technology, where our families are, etc. Many, many campaign and adventure possibilities.

Germination

We let the ideas sit on the ideas page for a while to germinate. Because we tend to read that page relatively frequently, we’ll see something that catches our eye and remember something to add it to the idea. Eventually, one of us will write a piece of fiction or a scrap of a system or background, often as a blog post. This gives the idea enough weight to drop into …

Development

At this point we give the idea it’s own wiki page and move any content to there. Usually we’ve had enough work done on this point to at least fill one page. Our wiki sends us updates via RSS any time someone makes a change to any page, so that’s usually what sparks things off. I’ll check out an update Matt has made, then I’ll add a bit to what he’s done, based on whatever goes click in my head when I read (and vice-versa). This tends to be bursty, so we get 4-5 “bits” done at a time, where a bit can be anything like a collection of relevant links, a piece of relevant fiction, some background notes, or even an entire system.

Our projects hang out in this stage for a while, until they gather enough of these bits that the wiki starts to become an unwieldy place for them to gather any more. We currently have 12 games in this stage, some of which we have blogged about (as seen under our Game Design category). This is one area where we are inconsistent on what happens next, but generally we go into …

Book Development

We create a book outline (with all four parts of course) that gives us some idea of how big the book is likely to be. Then we’ll slot whatever blog posts and wiki material we have into that book outline in a desktop publishing app.

From there we keep adding written material, look for artwork, rewrite things we don’t like and so forth. We currently have 5 ideas in this stage, at various stages of completion. We expect to see one of them drop out of this part of the funnel and into print Real Soon Now.

Originally written for lategaming.com.