Team Blog

Last night John and I took a trip down to London, along with WikiMonkey. The purpose of our visit was to do an interview with TalkSport Radio's Ultimate Late Night Show with Ian Collins. As you'll see from the picture, Ian was pleased to meet WikiMonkey, particularly as he's a big supporter of Wiki's cousins at the Orangutan Foundation. Ian's show has been known to be a little controversial in the past, so we weren't sure what to expect, but gadgets were definitely on the agenda for this one.

Ian's recently got himself a Treo 750 and has been keen to talk about his new gadget on air, so he invited us along to join in the chat. It was a general talk which covered a range of subjects including Windows Mobile, smartphone games, Treos, Astraware Sudoku, Girl Geeks, John's new HTC Touch, Facebook, Broken Sword, and whether co-host Alan Hyde should replace his Sony Ericsson P990 (we said yes)!

As Ian's show goes out nationally across the UK from 1am to 6am, we didn't stay for the whole show, but we thoroughly enjoyed our visit and have promised to go back in the New Year to talk about some upcoming exciting game releases. If talk radio is your thing, you can also tune into Ian's show via the internet at Talksport.net - those of you in the U.S. won't even have to stay up all night to do it!

Not many people can get to say they work in an industry where the pioneers are still alive and kicking. Over the many years I have been involved in videogames I have had the honour to meet many of those originators; from EA founding father Trip Hawkins to the UK's own Peter Molyneux and of course Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, with many more along the way. A few weeks ago in Seattle I had the good fortune to bump into probably one of the true 'living legends' of the videogame industry - NOLAN BUSHNELL!

For those of you unfamiliar with Nolan, here is a quick rundown...

Nolan K. Bushnell (born February 5, 1943) is an American electrical engineer and entrepreneur who founded both Atari and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza-Time Theaters chain. Bushnell has received a great deal of recognition, including being inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame and the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame, receiving the Nations Restaurant News "Innovator of the Year" award, and being named one of Newsweek's "50 Men That Changed America". Bushnell has started more than twenty companies and is widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of the video game industry... more importantly this is the man who brought the world PONG!

After a few seconds of stunned silence on my part (which anyone in the office will tell you, is a very rare occurance) I spent the next 30 minutes being regaled by Nolan of his viewpoints on the casual games industry ('cool'), the mobile games industry ('lots of promise'), Atari's past, present and future ('don't quote me!') and his new interactive entertainment restaurant called the uWink Media Bistro in Woodland Hills, California, whose concept builds off his original Chuck E. Cheese venture allowing diners to order food and drinks via screens at each table, through which guests may also enjoy games, movie trailers and short videos. After a little more chat about where the mobile side of things could segue into the uWink concept, we got interrupted by Jill (of Cake Mania fame) and a natural photo opportunity presented itself (and yes... that is me on the right grinning like an idiot!).

And Nolan's parting piece of advice, I hear you ask... "There is nothing in life better than good food, a beautiful woman and a great game design"... I am contacting the stonemason right now to make sure, that quote is spelled correctly on my headstone

We're all very excited here at the office as we have a brand new addition to the Astraware family. At 9.29 this morning, David and his wife Neroli, had a bouncing baby boy! John Richard Oakley weighed in at 8lb 15oz, and mother and baby are both very well.

It's been a bit of a wait as John Richard was several days overdue, but we're happy to welcome him now.

As David is our Chief Technical Officer, we'd expect nothing less than the first photo to be taken with his Treo and immediately uploaded to Flickr! We're sure you'll agree John Richard is really gorgeous!

I've recently taken out a new cellphone contract which includes a great unlimited data plan. I have access to 3G and HSDPA (high speed data) which also allows me to use my phone as a modem for my laptop and to do things like streaming audio and video calling. With this new data package, I thought it was time to pick a new phone which supports all of these things. After careful consideration of the features I wanted - Windows Mobile, 3G support, wifi and a qwerty keyboard - and reading a range of reviews, I settled on a Samsung SGH i600.

The i600 is one of a handful of increasingly popular devices that we refer to as landscape smartphones. It runs Windows Mobile 5.0 for Smartphone and has a 320x240 landscape screen. Unlike all the Palm OS and Windows Mobile for Pocket PC devices I've owned previously, this one doesn't have a touch screen, so there's no stylus and everything is controlled by the buttons, 5 way controller and the scroll wheel on the side. After many years of devices with touchscreens, this is probably going to be a bit strange for me, but as many of you are now selecting devices like the Motorola Q, Samsung Blackjack (which is similar to my i600) and the HTC S620 (T-Mobile Dash), I wanted to see what a non-touchscreen cellphone was like.

Not all of our games run on my i600 yet, but Bejeweled, Glyph, and Astraware Solitaire are already installed, and I'm excited to say that there are updates of some old favorites along with some exciting new games in the pipeline. Keep an eye on our Preview Page for news of new releases!

The Astraware mobile website works really well in this version of Pocket IE, and I can even sign in to Club Astraware from there too. Best of all I don't have to remember a special website address, I just go to http://www.astraware.com and it automatically detects that I'm visiting from a mobile browser! More mobile-friendly features are on their way, so keep an eye out for those too. If you've got any suggestions of things you'd like to see, feel free to post a comment!

I just wanted to have a quick word about how happy I am that my first game - Tradewinds 2 - has been released! It's been in development now for a long time, and it's great to see it finally finished. It was really challenging to program as I knew expectation would be high due to the popularity of Tradewinds, so I had to work really hard to ensure that the sequel would be an improvement over the original. Now that the game has been out for a week and the first reviews have started to emerge my nerves have been quashed and I'm confident that Tradewinds 2 is an improvement over the original game... phew!

One major improvement that took a lot of work was the extensive mission system that encompasses over 100 missions! This adds a whole new dimension to the game in addition to the updated combat and trading system. In fact, there were so many missions that I needed to create a special cheat menu in the game to allow the beta testers to access missions quickly, (although we did have to take it back out for the release version!)

Of course it wouldn't have been possible to create the game without lots of hard work from Bryan, the lead artist on Tradewinds 2. I think that everyone agrees that he has done a fantastic job creating the multitude of graphics required. He even managed to create an animation of a dog in 10x10 pixels!

Finally, I just want to thank all the guys here at Astraware for their support throughout the project, with a special mention for Kat's pirate cake, and an extra special thanks to all the beta-testers for their hard work and dedication!

I would love it if you could give my game a try... but beware... its apparently quite addictive...