I've just been filling out some thrilling paperwork for HMRC, with the help of a very nice man on the phone.

Having taken stock of the project plan we now know that we've got another 2 months of artwork to go. This is a lot longer than we originally anticipated, and is causing a few financial issues. Nothing's insurmountable and there's no way we're backing out now. Music and sound effect specs have been written and sent off to those responsible for heping me out, and next week comes the PR shots.

As time goes on I end up doing more business management, which is nice as it's getting back to what I do professionally. As soon as the game's out on XBLCG, I'll be off to tap up Nintendo and Sony to see if we can't get a publishing arrangement for WiiWare and PSN. I'm not sure how well the artwork would translate to a handheld, but DSWare would also be an attractive option.

The good people at Novaleaf Games are hiring. If circumstances were different, I'd be tempted to go and join them - their Biology Battle title is a very professional product, and available right now on XBLCG...

After stigging out for Christmas, it's time to get going again and at a decent pace too.

We're certainly behind with the project plan, and tomorrow morning is going to be a complete audit to work out where exactly we are with everything, and how long it's going to take to finish. Money is slowly trickling away, so we need to make sure the plan's accurate and that we can depend on it.

After the plan audit, I'm refining sound effect specs and music specs, and then organising PR shots of yours truly. Hopefully the likes of Kotaku will be taken by the moustache.

In other exciting news I've been shopping for stationery, swooping into Woolworths as it spasms in the throws of death. I've also got a heap of paperwork from Her Majesty's Customs, so I really should take a look at that soon...

Jeanette, Thornton and I have been having a multi-direction, multi-media discussion about art direction this evening.

We've added in some background artwork, in a very watercolour stylee. All the artwork we're doing is originally hand-drawn, but foreground interactive elements are outlined and tidied up in Photoshop. The background artwork has just been painted, scanned, and plonked into the game.

The result is two distinct styles. From a gameplay point of view this was a deliberate choice in order to make interactive elements stand out. This does mean that the two styles are very obvious, and it draws attention to the fact that such a choice has been made.

Trying to synergise (can you tell I was a middle-manager?) the two styles would be the route to go if we were putting emphasis on creating a coherent and cohesive 'reality', such as in a big-budget game like Halo 3. That doesn't try to be realistic (very far from it, especially when compared to something like the original Gears Of War) but instead aims for one universal art direction and style that pervades all visual assets.

Using a variety of effects and styles, we've already started down the route of highlighting the art direction as a means unto itself. "It's drawn on paper! We use pencils and paints!" This is reflected in the menus, UI elements and title screen. Hopefully by turning our budgetary limitations into overt declarations of style, we can be more true to our status and also deliver a game that oozes charm.

Programming is a cruel mistress.

I've always been especially fond of the way that you can leave a project alone for two days, run a build, and then discover that 15 things that previously worked fine have gone completely tits up. This was my quandry today when I found that doors stopped you jumping, and that out of hundreds of objects being loaded, one identical object with no interesting features caused a crash.

Coding real-time applications is a lot more tricky than transactional or request/response applications, especially when logging brings with it a large performance hit. Compared to enterprise-grade content management, games programming has fewer distinct systems and thus interfaces to deal with, but is a lot more difficult to make transparent.

One day I'll get around to writing a paper on visualised IDEs, that represent objects and datatypes as 3D shapes, and invocations as lines between the shapes.

In other news, I've got a right earache.

Well, there you go. That's the logo we decided upon, and this is the palette to go with it. I think we'll be adding a nice patterned background at some point.

I'd be doing Phillip Joyce's stirling work a disservice if I didn't talk about the logo a little, especially as I spent a long time asking for revisions. As with the strap line I'm trying to reinforce that we're taking old things and putting a new spin on them, hence the traditional vibe going on, and the almost Victorian palette. The shield holds three houndstooth devices that are the kind of stitching that make up a tweed jacket, tessellate and also look like space invaders. As a matter of pure coincidence, the winged sword is strikingly similar to a tattoo I've been meaning to get on the back of my scalp - 40k nerds will know what I'm thinking of.

Rather than saying "we're really close to announcing something!" like I do most days, I'm going to tell you what we have left to do before debuting our first title:

• Background artwork integration;
• Lead character artwork;
• Press release.

I really should try and project a slightly more professional image on this here blog, but I'm afraid I must report another massive hangover. The London Jitsu Christmas Party, combined with an award I won, led to 24 hours of vomiting. Nice.

As mentioned previously, there's a good team forming. Jeanette's working 12 hour days at the moment to try and get everything drawn on time, and Thornton will be doing another shift at Chez Deejay tomorrow. We've now got about a third of the game world created and playable. The new shiny Blogger template hasn't materialised however, so that's the press plans delayed.

I'm trying to work out whether debuting over Christmas would be a good idea or not. On the one hand, no professionals are going to be scouring the inforweb for new press releases. On t'other we have a lot of consumers sat around reading video games sites whilst there's sod all to do in the office.

I really should get around to this mountain of paperwork from Companies House and NatWest...

Today was quite gratifying. Paul 'Alex' Thornton came over to do his first bit of artwork, and it was a relief to see we can double the speed of progress by getting more hands to the pump. Later this afternoon Owen Price visited, en-route to see The Prodigy at Brixton tonight, and we had a good chance to discuss sound effects requirements and give him a good feel for the environment and atmosphere we're trying to create.

It's great having a whole group of creative talented people working together and bouncing ideas off each other. The dream is to be employing these people in two year's time. I realised a while back my management aspirations were to facilitate talented people doing something groundbreaking. Now I'm running my own company, that hasn't changed one bit.

There was no update yesterday mainly because there's nowt exciting to report. I was doing some user interface stuff, and Jeanette was doing some castle-related artwork that's continuing today.

I received a call from a rather nice chap from the bank regarding the business account. As it happens he was a bit of a gamer, so it was quite fun explaining exactly how the business will work and what we're up to. Just a simple little chat like that made me look forward to (hopefully) eliciting some press attention.

We've finally decided on a direction for the branding, courtesy of lots of hard work and patience from Phil Joyce.

Here's one we didn't go for:
Whilst I quite like the large houndstooth device in the background, it's all a bit modern and fashionable for my liking.

With the logo decided it's now down to Daniel Young to knock me up a more spiffy page template. Once we've got a respectable web presence, it's time to start hassling certain journo's for coverage!

In other news I've been writing artwork specifications as we're still struggling on that front, and will need to hire additional help. Jeanette's been working on a gaol. Yep, that is Olde English.

Red Ring Of Death.

Thankfully it waited until after I was done testing my latest build, and was getting set for an evening of Fallout 3. Still, two in three years isn't bad by some people's accounts.

Apologies, this update will be written completely in nerd. Any English-speakers may wish to return again tomorrow.

I discovered today that setting the value of XNA 3.0's MediaPlayer's Volume property on every tick is a bad idea. My game went from running at 60fps to between thirty and four fps in the space of a single build.

I only discovered the above issue after a lot of comparisons with backups, and commenting out changes one by one. I'd lazily decided to update the MediaPlayer's volume once per game update using the latest settings from user preferences, rather than using something sensible like an EventHandler or tracking changes manually.

Quite why setting a float 60 times a second should bring the 360 to its knees is beyond me, especially as it runs Gears Of War 2 fine. I can only assume it's some kind of threading/blocking issue, with the OS thread getting updated a lot less frequently and my program having to wait for it.

Later on, I had more issues with 360 deployment. Pad vibration code that works fine on my laptop refused to work on the 360. I eventually found a workaround, but never sussed the original issue. I'm beginning to wonder how much multi-threadedness is going on with the 360 OS that I'm not aware of; it would seem controller vibration is handled by a separate thread to the program execution.

On the plus side, I was forced into discovering a much quicker way of deploying builds, and the rather useful performance monitor that tells me all sorts of lovely goodness about XNA's garbage collection.

I can nary believe I'm saying it, but I almost wish I was using ClearCase again. Any developer who's worked with it (especially if they're in the CMC Sydney office *cough*) will know it as the work of Satan, but I nearly had a heart attack when I had to track changes the old-fashioned way. Thank goodness for Beyond Compare!

Now, Fallout 3...

I'm seriously beginning to run out of code to write. All of the cool, interesting challenges have been dealt with, and I'm left with stuff like making sure the game doesn't b0rk when you remove the storage device you're saving to. Yep, exciting work indeed.

Jeanette's been working on cliffs, and I've assembled a list of sound effects that we'll be needing and hopefully Owen will be able to help us with. The plan is to record a lot of the voicework ourselves in Chilly's studio, but it's pretty hard to sample tropical birds in the back of a detached house in Hastings. Joyce has been beavering away on the branding, and is getting on to the tricky business of colour and palettes. I'm as much use as a 360 d-pad here - if it's not primary colours, then I can't do it.

I've been inundated by literally two emails asking to keep the zebras. Tempting as they and their comedy stylings are, I'm afraid it's going to have to be a no. For a start, they're from the Botswana coat of arms.

I finally got around to coding up the thrilling options screen. You can now set effects and music volume, rumble on-and-offness, and have it all saved along with your progress. It really isn't terribly exciting, is it?

I started talking to Owen Price about sourcing some sound effects. I'd like to get a lot of ambient sounds in the game to help create a memorable and absorbing atmosphere.

Talking of Owen, it's quite handy having so many talented mates with different skillsets. The dream is to one day build Binary Tweed to be a mid-sized software house and then employ them all.

On a random note, I was watching an old TV appearance of mine from 2003. Funny to think that back then I was still in Uni, and had only just started a martial art which I've now been teaching for a year. Hopefully in five year's time I'll be doing interviews on our first commercial release...

Today has been a mixed bag. It started well, with some scripting stuff getting done (basically putting the game world together) and some nice progress on the artwork. About halfway through the day it looked like we'd have to re-do half the artwork, but thankfully that turned out to not be the case.

We're inching ever closer to something demoable. I do realise I say this in almost every post, but there's only some background artwork and animation left to do before we can start showing people the first area of the game. The dialogue is starting to get fleshed out too, and in terms of UI we've only got the help, title and options screens left to go.

As I still can't show you any in-game assets, in order to maximise my chances of coverage, I instead bring you a branding concept. This may or may not resemble what we finally go with, but these zebras are just so damned funny I had to share it with you all.

Apologies for the late post - I had to teach some kids how to stop people stabbing them with only an hour's notice.

You know you're at a nice stage in a game's development cycle when you're writing joypad rumble code. I mean, really important stuff *cough*. I've got an architecturally nice solution, which of course yanks the crank of the OO developer in me, but it's not really that exciting for normal human beings.

Artwork is still chugging along, and I need to spend some time writing specs for the rest of the assets we need to create so I can get external workers on the case. Even at our slower-than-estimated pace, we're still on target for early February.

I've been thinking about ports. Whilst it's early days, it would be stupid to not try and maximise my return on the investment we've already made. The chances of us making a profit on this project are slim-to-none, so making the product available on as many platforms as possible would make sense. I'm going to look at PlayStation Network and WiiWare, and maybe even a cut-down Flash port. The main features and investments in this game are plot and artwork: attributes that translate to any platform.

In branding-related progress I spent a full 3 minutes laughing my arse off at a proposal from Joyce that looked more like some kind of Savannah Gay Pride emblem than anything else.

Updates on here have been a little thin-on-the-ground of late. That's not because we're not making progress; rather that I racked up a whopping 26 hours on the mat in seven days.

Phil Joyce has been making progress with branding, and if he's cool with the idea than I might share some of the in-progress designs he's come up with so far. Artwork is chugging along, more recently focusing on characters.

I've been looking at a couple of bits and bobs, but mostly tension. Without digressing into a full essay on the meaningfulness of games, it's important to note that a game is nothing without conflict. Without conflict there is no drama, and without drama there is no meaning.

Punishing players for expermenting or not getting things exactly right is very old-fashioned idea that gave rise to the much more narrow gaming demographic of yesteryear. Typically only young males with plenty of free time thrive on such self-challenge.

We're not going to implement such a system in our first game. There will be no 'death', no lives and no health meter. There will be a mechanism for generating tension, and there will be negative repercussions for certain actions. Without this, it's hard to make a game compelling.

The biggest design challenge I face at present is how to make sure my replacement for 'death' isn't actually more infuriating than having to start again from scratch after losing three lives.