Team Blog

I'm the proud owner of a shiny new iPhone and I like to use it to listen to music in the background when I'm browsing the web, reading an ebook or whatever.

As we were developing games for iPhone™ and iPod® touch, we realised that people might want to play their own music as they played our games too. There are slightly different methods for iPod touch and for iPhone, but first of all go into the sound settings of the game you want to play and turn off the game sounds and music. In GTS World Racing, for instance, you need to select the 'Disable Audio' setting within 'Options'.

Once you've done that, exit the game and go to 'Music' on your iPod touch or 'iPod' on your iPhone. Choose what you want to play and start the music or podcast. Exit using the Home button and return to the game, and hey presto, your own soundtrack! There are a couple of other ways to do this - for instance you can double press the Home button on an iPod touch to bring up the music controls within the game, but this doesn't work for the iPhone. If you're using the iPhone headset provided with it, you can press the headphone button to start the music, but the best thing is to turn off the in-game music and sounds first.

As GTS World Racing involves cars you'll want to design your own driving soundtrack - I'd recommend 'Song 2' by Blur or 'My Favorite Game' by The Cardigans - but if you have your own favorite driving tracks, why not share them in the Comments?

It's been quite a while since you've heard from me, particularly with a cake recipe. This isn't to say I haven't been baking cookies & cakes, just that they've not been particularly interesting recipes Last week was a bit of a celebration for me though, so I dug out my favourite carrot cake recipe (much to Larry's annoyance because it includes banana!) So for the release of Bubble Babble, my second solo project in my 2 years working for Astraware, I baked this lovely, moist, nutty carrot cake

Cake
175g light muscovado sugar
3 eggs
175ml sunflower oil
225g coarsely grated carrots
3 ripe bananas, mashed
100g chopped walnuts
280g plain flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp baking powder

Preheat your oven to 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4. Grease and line a 9inch cake tin.

Throw all the ingredients into a big bowl and beat the mixture until smooth (well, as smooth as it can be with bits of carrot and walnut! )

Pour the mixture into the tin and bake for 1 hour or until well risen, golden brown, and a skewer or sharp knife inserted into the centre comes out clean. Leave in the tin for 10 minutes and then turn out, remove the lining paper, and transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Frosting
200g cream cheese
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
115g icing sugar

To make the frosting beat all the ingredients together until smooth

At this point, I stole an artist to help decorate my cake. With lots of food colouring, some marzipan, and a pair of chopsticks we created the lovely watery scene. Never before have I seen anyone "paint" with cream cheese icing using a chop stick! Although it did work surprisingly well

If you don't have an artist to hand, then just cover the cake with the icing, and perhaps dot a few pieces of walnut on the top, before slicing into generous pieces and trying to fend off the swarm of hungry people! Or perhaps everyone in my office is just underfed?

Bubble Babble was a really fun project to work on. It all started with an idea from Steve for the basic gameplay and slowly evolved through prototypes and long design meetings into the game that's now available to buy I really love word games so it was great to work on a game which I keep finding myself playing, even now I'm not on a bug hunt! If you enjoy word games then I highly recommend you give it a try, although I might be a little biased

One of the really good outcomes of our acquisition by Handmark earlier this year is the opportunity to get our games into the hands of smartphone owners who haven't so far had access to them, and to give existing Astraware customers a wider choice of phones to run our games. There are two parts to this: the chance to develop for new device operating systems (platforms), and also the ability to get our games sold direct to mobile/cell phone customers on providers such as Sprint and Telus. I'll stick to talking about the first part though...

The first new platform release of 2008 was Symbian (S60 and UIQ) when Astraware Boardgames was released in March. Work on Symbian had actually been going on since the start of 2007, so it was good to see the first game let loose! Hidden Expedition: Titanic and Astraware Solitaire have just followed and Platypus is nearly ready for release. Converting our games to Symbian is now a pretty smooth process, so you can expect to see our other own-brand titles appearing as well as time goes on. Larry has done the vast majority of the work that went into our own-developed games onto Symbian, and I must prod him to write about his experiences...

The first new development platform of 2008 has been BlackBerry. It's a platform that until very recently we'd not ventured into as old BlackBerry smartphones used to be rather unfriendly when it came to games. Software for BlackBerry is written in Java rather than the C++ that we code in for all our other platforms, so we've had to write a new version of our game framework to work in the new (to us) language. But the opportunity has become huge, and once RIM released the pink Pearl, we knew they were gunning for the consumer and that it made sense for us to start work!

An interesting aspect of the BlackBerry is going to be the fact that they are generally sold with a data plan, which isn't something we've been able to count on with other smartphones. One of the things I hope we'll gain from being part of Handmark is that they have been much more used to using data and networking, so it will push us to innovate there. I'll write another time on our thinking around mobile "gamer card" ideas and other such things.

To make sure that we understand what it is to be BlackBerry users, Howard, Alison and I have recently started using BlackBerry Curve smartphones. It's very early days on that, so we're still learning how things work.

Back in 2002 (January 2nd, to be precise!) when the 6 full time members of Astraware moved into our office - a massive 1200 square feet room - at Keele University Science Park, we felt like it was so large we'd never fill it! As we grew the team, however, and added things like a server rack and a device desk to hold our growing collection of (mostly) Palms, it felt a little less spacious... In 2006 we were at over 20 people, and by that point it felt quite cramped! Now, an office where everyone is together is great for knowing what's going on, but a little harder for concentrating in, and we knew it was time to look for more space!

We decided to go with an option of having our own office built - that meant we'd not be sharing with other companies (who always gave us strange looks, especially on September 19th...), and also had the benefit of us being able to have it designed to work well for us!

It has been a pretty long process - I've had to learn a whole new language and understand more about the building, design, and legal trades than I was expecting, but we're now there! Earlier this week we took posession of the empty building, designed and built to our specification, and we're getting ready to pack up and get everything moved! We're not going far - only a couple of miles down the road (making it within walking and cycling distance of more of the staff!)

We'll share lots of pictures later as we move in, but here were some of the (often conflicting!) design goals we had in mind:

• Open space, to help communication and for everyone to feel connected...
• ...but not-too-open spaces, so that individuals and groups aren't constantly disturbed by everyone else
• More space for each of the teams, business, support, testing, and development.
• Good natural light...
• ... but without direct glare from sunlight
• Lots of whiteboard space (for the big plans and grand designs!)
• Lots of desk space, with plenty of power and network sockets
• A dedicated room with *masses* of sockets available for us to keep devices available and charged
• Comfortably warm in winter, pleasantly cool in summer, and as energy efficient as possible!
• A good bicycle rack, and a shower (somewhere!) to make it reasonable for staff to cycle in to work.
• Reasonable kitchen facilities
• A "conference room" bigger than a telephone box!
• Space to grow from 20 being cramped to 40+ with good working space.

We've actually managed all of these! Given the UK weather for the past couple of weeks has been distinctly summery, the prospect of moving into a nice air-conditioned office (that doesn't suffer from the constant baking glare of the sun through biiiig south-facing windows,) is one welcomed by the whole Astraware team!

We did have to cut from the original design:

• Portholes instead of conventional windows. (Not too good for natural light, unfortunately)
• a flagpole for running up the jolly roger. (Required extra planning permission)
• A fireman's pole to get between floors - doubling as a dancing pole, perhaps. (Too many staff wear skirts/kilts)
• Cannon ports (too drafty)
• A moat filled with piranhas and crocodiles (planning permission, again. Killjoys.)
• A deep pit underneath the conference room, with controls to drop individual chairs (and occupants) down to the awaiting spikes/sharks etc. (Health and Safety implications, bah!)
• Miniature railway for delivering tea/coffee to all staff. (Will retrofit later)
• Giant searchlight for projecting Astraware logo onto night sky. (May attract too many moths and/or superheroes)

A bit of a shame about these, but then we don't have them at the Keele office either, so at least it won't feel like a loss.

Designing the internal layout of the building has been an iterative process - with considerable use of Visio to help with plans. One of the coolest things we did was to use a projector and put up an outline of the building from a PC onto our whiteboard, showing the Visio plans and a 1m x 1m grid. From here we could just sketch onto the board ideas for layouts using dry-wipe pens, rub out bits that didn't seem to work, and when we settled on an idea that worked we could add it to the plan on the PC. The result of this was that we were able to minimise wasted space (corridors in particular) and get a layout that seemed quite optimal. The ability to drop in desks, doors, windows, walls and more, made it a quick process to come up with something that was easy to visualise and discuss.

Whether the design turns out as good in practise as it looks on the plans will remain to be seen - we certainly hope it works out well.

Wish us luck - and for the nice weather to hold - for the move!

Astraware are looking for beta testers, again! As you may have seen us mention, we are moving towards supporting the BlackBerry platform, and the time has now come for us to get together a group of BlackBerry testers for our Beta team. For the moment the only devices we will be supporting are those which include a Trackball.

Compatible BlackBerry devices:

• 8800 Series
• Curve (8300) Series
• Pearl (8100) Series

Apart from being one of the first people to play our BlackBerry games, one of the biggest advantages of being an Astraware beta tester is that if you help with the beta of a new game, once it's released we send the testers involved a free registration code for it - the more new games you help test, the more you'll end up getting for free!

One very important point is that all of our beta testers must sign a non-disclosure agreement, and therefore must be 18 years old or over.

All of our beta tests are conducted through our forums, so the first step is to sign up. Once you've done that, visit the beta testing information page to look over the details, as well as instructions on how to get hold of the NDA and what to do with it!

If you have any questions you'd like to ask before signing up, feel free to contact any of us in the QA team!