Starting up. :D

Hi all!

This is my first blog post so I guess I had better introduce my self. I'm Antony Blackett, Designer/Programmer and have spent all of my young career at Sidhe, a lovely game development studio based in Wellington, New Zealand. Before that I studied Computer Science at The University of Otago, New Zealand (awesome!).

The highlight of my career so far was being on the core team of the award winning Shatter, originally released on PSN but later ported to Steam and OnLive as well. Shatter was a great little game to be a part of. The team size was small and allowed me to advance my skills in many areas of development other than programming, the main one being design. I have to tell you, if you ever want to get a broad knowledge of the whole game development process get yourself on a small team aiming to develop a small game of high quality.

Next I moved onto iPhone development for Sidhe’s iPhone label PikPok. The best known app I worked on being Flick Kick Rugby. iPhone is a wonderful change to the slow pace of console development. 2 month development cycles, instant customer feedback and then no jumping through hoops to get patches approved to respond to the feedback. If you’re a young developer and you want to learn what customers like and fast, I defiantly suggest you make games on more open platforms such as iPhone and Steam.

That brings us to the present. Finally after 4 and a half years at Sidhe I’ve decided to part ways. Not to a another studio though, instead I’ve decided to have a go at indie development and I mean ‘real’ indie development!

Hopefully by reading this blog you’ll get to see the ups and downs, struggles and triumphs involved in starting up your own business as well as see a more personal side to my game development studio (if you can call it a studio yet)...

So I hope you enjoy reading my future updates and I’ll be sure to post at least once a week and keep everyone informed of my progress.

Also note that I’ll try not to sugar coat anything. If I’m having a bad time of it you’ll know. If I’m rolling in money you’ll also hear about it. Please please can I be rolling in money!

Thanks for reading! My next blog post will be about setting up a company.

Antony.