As a result, dev 10 still is not ready. However, I assure you that I remain very much committed to the game. It will just take a bit longer to finish than I planned.

Anyway, to divert you while you wait, I've done you a render of some Neman spaceships. The Nemans are set to play a rather more prominent role in dev 10...

Instead of going shopping, which is what I was planning to do today, I want to talk to you about my favourite album: Clint Mansell's soundtrack to The Fountain. Then I will proceed to meander wildly.

The Fountain, in case you haven't heard of it, is a film by Darren Aronofsky, who also directed Pi and Requiem for a Dream. I'm a bit ambivalent about the film itself, though I'm not sure why. Perhaps because the film is hard to digest emotionally. It's about death , and its inevitability, specifically your death and the death of your loved ones.

It's a film you need to accept fully, including the silly character names, to enjoy at all. If you do, it's extremely powerful and moving. If you don't, there's not much there: mostly some people talking and some pretty special effects. Or you may find the film entirely too powerful, and end up taking refuge in emotional distance and careful appraisal, at which point the film's little flaws do become apparent. This is what has happened to me, I think.

Anyway, the film's soundtrack was made by Clint Mansell, who also made the soundtracks for (some of) Pi and (all of) Requiem for a Dream. The piece you're most likely to have heard is Lux Aeterna, which was used in the trailers for The Two Towers, The Da Vinci Code, and Lost, among others.

While I like the other soundtracks, I'm truly in love with the one for The Fountain. It's haunting and timeless, suitable for the film's themes of death, loss, and the promise of eternal life.

Before I start talking about the music itself, I need to point out that I have no musical education or skill to speak of. I cannot read, write, or make music. I can play "Jelly on a Plate" on the piano. I can discern the flow and rhythm, the point and counterpoint, the movement of music well enough. But like a mini-Melkor, I couldn't create a piece of music, only imitate and repeat another. So I'm sure that many of the things I want to talk about have perfectly good names, but I don't know them, so bear with me as I grapple with anologies. Equally, I may fail to identify instruments. Please translate accordingly:

The CD contains ten tracks.

It starts with "The Last Man", a slow and rather melancholy piece that relies mostly on string instruments, underlain with a slow, deep rhythm of a single violin playing two alternating notes. Towards the end, a piano is introduced. After a few bars of accompanying the music, it turns to a repeated, echoing sound like a bell, leading into the next song.

"Holy Dread!" begins with drums beating out the rhythm that continues from the previous song, a simple alternating beat. The string instruments join in, as do some hints of chanting. The music turns ominous, reminiscent of some prehistoric time of monoliths and rituals. The string instruments and the drumming work well together, and give a taste of the album's signature sound. "Holy Dread!" rises to an early crescendo of chanting and frenzied strings towards the end, hinting at the main theme - the main chord progression or rhythm - of the album.

Then it abruptly launches into "Tree of Life", and we encounter the main theme: two beats, followed by another, more rapid pair. The first wave of sound soon calms down and the music is joined by the strings again, and the next wave begins. The track continues in this manner, waves of increasing intensity breaking to give way to calmer parts filled with drumming, chanting and faint, high-pitched string sounds, almost painful. Ultimately, it relents, and is replaced by

"Stay With Me", which is the first of the quieter, melancholy piano pieces that alternate with the more overwhelming string-and-drum ones. In the film, these correspond to the scenes set in the present time dealing with the struggle against cancer. While they are equally beautiful, I have to say that I tend to skip these songs sometimes, as I don't always feel like being reminded of my mortality!

"Work" is a subdued string piece, contrasting a slow rendition of the melody in "Tree of Life" with a repetitive, hurried alteration of two high-pitched notes that clearly represent the work (the cancer research) being done in the film. The track ends after two and a half minutes, dying away without ever reaching a climax or conclusion.

"Xibalba" sets out much as "Work", but replaces the hurried strings with a chanted melody, ending in softly echoing piano. A mood of desperation infects the piece.

"Finish It" continues the mood set out in "Xibalba". Slow, ethereal strings are eventually joined by a progression of beeps or perhaps piano chords that make me think of red lights seen blinking atop faraway buildings at night. Then, with a sigh, the music launches back into the main theme of the two double beats. The music begins to rise and intensify before pausing. It starts again, slowly and quietly, making a rhythm with plucked strings. But soon, there is a sense of something gathering, as if the music were backing away before breaking into a run and leap. Then it accelerates and becomes stronger, joined by drums. Early crests alternate with quieter periods, and then the music stops and is replaced by a series of screeching, whining, rushing sounds.

"Death is the road to awe" begins, reprising the now-familiar theme on the piano, which is soon joined again by the strings, and soft drumming. The melancholy of "Finish it" seems mellowed at first, but then the theme is picked out by the violin - and subtly shifts into a darker tone. This is the point where the shivers inevitably start running down my spine, as they do now as I write this. As the music goes on, the sense of gathering returns. It comes in waves, nearly coming to a halt before picking up again, more urgent. Each wave only lasts a few seconds before the next interlude, but each wave is stronger. Then the drums join again in force and the violins' sound becomes tortured. The next wave feels as if you were running towards a cliff with all your might, somehow expecting to lift off when you reach the edge. It's followed by a last silence before the music returns for the final time, everything at once, no longer quite music, a screeching, wailing, sublime blast of sound. It fades away, leaving the piano to play

"Together we will live forever", about grief and loss and the jarring flashes of remembered happiness within. At the end, it just fades into silence.

(What follows are thoughts about the record, not about the film. Don't try to fit them to the film, because they don't.)

When I listen to this record, the orchestral portions bring up images of visits to natural history museums - skulls and labels and display-cases, ammonites in colourful minerals.

I love natural history museums. Not the modern kind with kid-friendly computerised displays and big, colourful, information-scarce panels. The kind that contains nothing than near-endless glass display cases of fossils and preserved animals. The kind where, if you bother to look, you can see the shapes of life and their evolution and get a feeling for the immense flow of time and its forces. You can see the patterns hence formed, their combination of utility and symmetry, mathematical glory. A reminder of the beauty and depth of the world, and an antidote to the mundane tedium of everyday life.

Other people find such museums gruesome or boring, I think. Full of dead staring things and little yellowed type-written notes. Too clinical, too reminiscent of your own status as a creature that will die and leave behind one of those skeletons. They would rather go out and chat with people, or watch TV, or take a walk, and not be in the same room as these dead things.

But I've always found them quite comforting. I'm an atheist, and one who slid into this view quite naturally, with no great struggle of faith. I'm well aware of death and its consequence of near-certain total oblivion. Sharing a space with things that are already dead makes no difference to that. I have no delusions of my own significance in the universe, but in the presence of fossils, I can see myself as part of life, and I can see life's shapes as a mirror of the universe's mathematics.

And the vast expanses of time across which life plays make my own death appear immaterial. Given that the present is a sham invented by my brain to let me reason about the world, when I look at the world sideways in time, I am part of the same organism as my mother, my father, my unborn children and everyone else. Take the dimension of time into account, and the demand to live forever is like the demand to have infinite width: absurd. Things have to be bounded to be real. The present exists exactly as much and as little as the past, so after I die, I will go on existing exactly as much as I always have: as a reflection of the universe.

At the end of "Death is the Road to Awe", in the last fifty seconds, the music explodes for a last time in an almost physically painful burst, containing everything in the song at once. Its afterglow morphs into the piano that leads into the final song. You would then expect to hear a point where the orchestral crescendo again becomes the mundane piano, where the quality of the music shifts to the mundane. But the music is one piece.

A little over a year ago, I founded my own company, Metal Beetle Ltd, as a way to organise my various for-profit projects.

Originally, the company was actually going to be called Grid Five, but I abandoned that when it turned out that gridfive.com was already taken. It took me weeks to find another name, but then I hit on this one. As a result, the company now has a charming robotic logo.

Did you know it's interactive? Click on the beetle logo at the top of the Metal Beetle front page, and it turns itself into a Java applet. Click on its wings, legs, and antennae to interact with it. The logo also contains a painfully hard puzzle, if you like that sort of thing.

So what have I been up to in this past year?

• Released Fractal Fripperies, a website for making T-shirts with beautiful fractals on them.
• Continued work on Space Exploration: Serpens Sector, introducing detailed crew and a combat mode, which I'm currently re-writing for dev 10.
• Contract work implementing custom therapy software for researchers at Imperial College, London.
• Contract work for Etianen.

The next year will bring the release of SE:SS and its first expansion pack, as well as (hopefully) more contracting work. I plan to add a new section to metalbeetle.com soon about what kind of contract work I can do - so if you need some custom software or website of any stripe, get in touch. Even if I can't do it, I will likely know someone who can, and will happily refer you on.

Finally, the beetle has a little present for you: If you enter the word "coleoptera" into the rebate box on Fractal Fripperies (choose a fractal and press "Make T-Shirt" to get there), you get 15% off. This rebate code will remain valid until the end of the month.

While preparing for this post, I noticed that on the shape/size/address page, the preview picture of the fractal on the T-shirt was being rendered off-centre for some reason. I have replaced it with an illustration for simplicity's sake. I assure you that any T-shirt bought from Fractal Fripperies will have exactly the fractal you selected on the main page. Equally, the pricing information was a bit confusing and outdated, so you should see that improved as well.

In short, if you have been thinking of getting a fractal T-shirt, now is the time to do it.

Here are some photographs of the event - most of them taken by me, and some by daisyk.

The second recording is of a tougher fight, where I was rather unlucky. But as you can see, they're still beatable:

The track that accompanies the films is part of the music being made for the game by a talented musician called Rozovian. It's still unfinished, so what you will hear in the game will be at least subtly different. I don't know yet if any music will make it into dev 10 - it depends on timing - but it will be in by the final version.

I will make another recording of an entire game run at some point soon, as I have promised in the forums to put up a record of a very successful game.

• Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Kieron Gillen covered the game, mentioning its crew management and monkey hunting aspects amongst others.
• Nine Over Ten just put up a post on dev 9 and the upcoming plans for dev 10.
• Star Controller, who previously previewed SE:SS, have a new post on the game, talking about some of the new features and significance of names.
• RPG Codex also posted an update about it, adding a RPGCodexese in-joke about Adhara that took me a while to unravel.
• Inside Mac Games covered it in their news section.
• RPG blog "I Waste The Buddha With My Crossbow" had a look at it and liked it a great deal.
• The game also appeared in the news roundup of Norwegian site Gamer.no. I admit to speaking no Norwegian at all, but I think they liked it.
• German site Gaming XP also reported on dev 9.

Furthermore, amazingly, this site is now on the first page of the Google UK search results for "space exploration", crowding out various real-world space probes. I feel almost a bit guilty about this. (And Metal Beetle's site is on the second page for "beetle".) The algorithm seems to have taken a liking to my sites.

Anyway, I've been playing with Firefox search plugins for a bit, which it turns out are very easy to make yourself. Just write a short XML file and plonk it into the appropriate folder.

I've made two plugins I find quite useful:

• Google & Wikipedia uses Yubnub to display a split frame with the Google results on the left and the salient Wikipedia page on the right. For example, searching for "kittens" yields this.
• Google Translate translates any word or phrase entered, taking a guess at the language used. For example, searching for "Katze" yields this.

The other useful thing about search plugins I've discovered is that if you click on the search plugin selector drop-down on the top-right of you screen, there is a "Manage Search Engines..." option. There, you can set keywords for your search engines. These keywords allow you to select a search engine by typing them into the location bar. So if you choose "t" as your keyword for the translate engine, you can enter "t <some words>" into your Firefox location bar and get an instant best-guess translation. Which is fairly neat.

While a lot of people were happy with this idea, a lot also had their reservations. The reason for this, as far as I can tell, is that a number of large game publishers are abusing the idea of "episodic content" to more or less fleece their customers: They release a game, and then pump out dozens of minor add-ons which they hope people will buy.

For example, two people mentioned a case where Bethesda Softworks released a $2.50 add-on consisting of nothing but armour for your horse. Other examples mentioned are Half-Life, where the first episode was "meaty", but the second one was not - and cost the same as the first. Another one is Spore.

They appear be to thinking: "If we do add-ons, we can chop up the gameplay into lots of little bits to sell to the customer at a higher price, and end up with more money for no extra effort. And we'll just keep on cranking out more content until no-one buys it anymore."

This is not what I want to do.

In the rest of this post, I'll explain why I want to use the "expansions" model for selling SE:SS, but first some promises:

1. Even without any expansions, the full game will be entirely playable. There won't be nearly as many encounters, so they'll start to repeat themselves rather quickly, but there will be no game features (as opposed to content) that are only unlocked by buying something.
2. The expansions will be few, and meaty. Each of them will take me several months of work.
3. If I do feel the need to release a minor expansion or add-on, it will be free.

So why the expansions?

I've spent about half a year of development time on Space Exploration so far. I expect to spend another three months or so on the game itself, and then maybe another three doing nothing but writing encounters for the first expansion. I will then release the game and the expansion. If the expansion does well in terms of sales, I will start work on another expansion. If not, I will move on to another project. Assuming people really like the game, and I have enough ideas, I might do three or four expansions, spending maybe a year of my life doing nothing but writing content for the game.

So I could spend that entire year up-front and release all of the content rolled into one release people can buy, and which costs about as much as the three or four expansions put together. (That is, about as much as a normal shareware game.) But if the game proceeds to sell badly, I will literally be unable to buy food, and will have thrown away a year of my life. Which is a rather depressing outcome.

So I want to have a dialogue with my customers that goes something like this:
Me: "I made this game, do you like it? If you do, I'll spend more time making more of it."
Customers: "Yes!"
Me: "OK, I'll go and make more."

or, alternatively:

Me: "I made this game, do you like it? If you do, I'll spend more time making more of it."
Customers: "No!"
Me: "OK, I'll go and make something else you might enjoy more."

For the customer, the end result of a game with expansions is the same as if I'd done a single big release, or a small release followed by free upgrades. Customers get X amount of enjoyable game playing time for Y money. The difference is just that with expansions, it happens in instalments of say ¼ X game play for ¼ Y money.

The biggest change is the way crew is handled. Instead of being just a number, each crew member now has their own name and set of skills. This adds a lot to the game, with your crew's skills and mood affecting the outcome of encounters, and the options you have.

The other big change is that the time limit has been removed. Instead, you now receive more limited fuel at the start of the game, and have to periodically report back to base to ask for more fuel. Your performance in the game so far affects how much extra fuel you are granted. This results in more interesting strategic decisions on where to fly when.

Beyond that, I've fixed various bugs, simplified the user interface a bit, and introduced a new tutorial you can access from the main menu, replacing the old in-game help pop-ups.

Combat, too, has had some minor alterations, mostly to clarify things. It will get a major revamp in dev 10, though.

As always, I'm very interested in any feedback you can give me, either by email, or through the handy web form.

Anyway, download the new version and give it a try.

As you've probably noticed if you're reading this, I'm writing a computer game. (Space Exploration: Serpens Sector)

A big part of the development process is figuring out how to make the game easy to use. But since I'm the one making it, I'm actually a very bad judge of its ease of use - everything seems obvious to me, because I programmed it that way!

Hence, the best way of figuring this out is to watch other people play it, and take notes. I've had a lot of internet-based feedback, but nothing beats being able to see a person play it. Which is where you come in - I need experimental subjects!

Basically, I'd like to meet up with you for maybe half an hour, bringing a laptop along. You play the game, I make notes on my pad while going "hmm, yes, very interesting".

I know I'm asking you for a favour and don't want to waste your time. I'll gladly visit you at your home / in some other convenient place/time (within Cambridge and vaguely waking hours). Whatever is easiest for you. I can bring cookies. :)

The biggest new feature is the tactical space combat mode. In addition, there are more encounters, better performance, bug fixes, and an improved help and reminder system.

With this release, the engine of the game is nearing completion, baring minor features and more optimisation. From now on, we'll be concentrating on massively upping the number of encounters, and writing the first expansion.

Download it, discuss it in the forum, or have a look at the press release.

Feedback is as always highly welcome, via the forums, or via the feedback form.

I want to make some of these:

"We seek to ... strengthen the tradition of the diamond engagement ring -- to make it a psychological necessity capable of competing successfully at the retail level with utility goods and services..."

About a year ago, I wrote a rather angry article on diamond wedding rings. I've now found a very good article on the trade and popularisation of diamonds. (Via Vertical Blue, via Sociological Images.)

Since the article was published in 1982, the de Beers cartel has lost some of its hold on the diamond market, but the ideas it imprinted on generations live on. It's a long article, but well worth reading. So, I reiterate: do not buy diamonds. Just don't. Especially not now, with the world economy in the state it's in. There are much better things to spend money on.

Of course, someone will say that we must keep on buying diamonds because some people's jobs depend on it. But if there was a factory that killed babies, someone would say that we must keep on buying tinned baby to support the factory workers. According to that logic, we are not allowed to stop buying any product.

How convenient.

It turns out there is such a thing as the International 3-Day Novel Contest, which is basically NaNoWriMo on speed. You are given three days to write an entire novel.

So assuming a novel is 50 000 words, and you'll be sleeping / doing other things 8 hours out of every day, that leaves you with 48 hours to write the novel - 1042 words per hour, 17.4 words per minute. Of course, I would never try this, since I struggle with RSI and this would be a certain way to permanently damage my hands. But I couldn't resist seeing how much "story" I could write in five minutes. So, to the amusement of my friends, I set myself a timer and started typing. This is what I wrote:

SoapQuest 1024 is now available online, as a Java applet. Go and make soap. Then download the standalone version and fiddle with the game rules. That is all.

(You have to click on the applet to make it notice your keyboard input.)

The aim is to prevent the feeling that you're just "doing one thing after another". Instead, the you and the game should construct a little narrative each time you play. You make meaningful decisions which affect the rest of your game, and you can see causal links between things.

The number of encounters in the current dev versions is pretty small compared to the number there will be in the release version. (And indeed there will be several months at the end of development where the game engine won't really change and I'll be busy writing encounters.) But even now, I try to strive for a well-connected game. Compare these two diagrams.

 

The first one is a diagram of the connections between encounters in dev 6, and the second is the same diagram for dev 7. (With the encounter names obscured, because there are now some plot-related encounters in there I want you to discover for yourself.)

As you can hopefully tell, the second diagram is much more interconnected and confusing than the first one. (And features such lovely terms as "vvivv' tetetehete".) As I add more encounters, this diagram will become more and more interconnected, and less and less readable, until I end up with a giant tangle of connectivity-wool.

That's what I'm aiming for - a giant tangle of connectivity wool.