WITH E3 2012 now firmly behind us, it’s time to reflect on the show. Tune into the chatter of developers, Twitter- obsessed games journalists (guilty as charged) and our friend the consumer, and it’s clear an atmosphere of disappointment prevails in the wake of our industry’s annual cash-burning festival of marketing. There were apparently not enough big game
releases, underwhelming press conferences, and a distinct lack of PlayStation 4s and Xbox 720s. But what is the industry to do? Could we really create enough games to fill not only E3, but the rest of the year with high profile announcements? And if we could, would being stretched so thinly really improve the medium? It seems the need to constantly shower the gaming public in news about new titles is reaching a critical mass. Push it much further and we might pass the same tipping point that saw the dawn of cable television thin the quality of TV production down to near evaporation. If more channels means less choice, maybe more press releases means less quality games. Still, we’ve survived another year, and now the Develop Awards, Develop Conference, GDC Europe and Gamescom are almost upon us; events that celebrate the industry without demanding it wrings itself dry. Team Develop will be at every one of those, and keen to meet up with you, so drop us a line. And, yes, we’ll even accept the odd press release; because games, tools and services of course need exposure. That’s to all our benefit. And yet, when the industry has ‘failed’ because
we can’t bombard the planet with new releases 365 days a year, we are in serious trouble. If you’re lucky enough to make what you like
in your own good time, stick to it. And if a publisher is breathing down your neck, consider a world where games matter more than news.
Since 2010 Jagex co-founder Andrew Gower has been toiling away on a new programming language, engine, and games. Craig Chapple asks the veteran why he left the MMO studio to set up Fen Research
What inspired you to found Fen Research? It was because I had an idea that I really wanted to do, and I was really keen to do something new. So it sort of made sense to start up a new company to pursue that project. I had an idea for trying to solve a problem that I faced. It was quite academic actually; I wanted to
create a new programming language that’s specifically designed from the ground up for creating games. That’s as opposed to other types of languages, like ones that make web applications and ones for making drivers and operating systems. There didn’t seem to be a great deal specifically designed to solve the problems that games have. Games have a very unique set of challenges, particularly when doing online and network titles and that sort of thing. We found ourselves writing the same sort of thing over and over again. So we’ve come up with something quite different to existing programming languages. Existing programming languages tend to
fall into the camp of either the procedural or the object orientated, or they’re functional. Ours is quite radical.
06| JULY 2012
So would you say there are problems with the current programming languages? I wouldn’t say there’s a problem. They’re actually very good as they’ve had a lot of years to mature. Some of them are extremely well refined. But I think that so much stuff is still written in C++ even though it is decades old. I don’t think that’s by coincidence, and I
don’t think it’s just because of the fact that people are sticking to what they know. For the games industry certainly, C++ remains the staple because for games, performance is so important, cross platform is important, and there’s real-time concerns; you can’t have your game stall for several seconds otherwise it goes off to the garbage collection. I think a lot of these newer languages are
very good for what they are designed for; but they are not particularly good for games. It seems to me like an up-to-date language which is suitable for games has been created for some time.
So how are you making your language more suitable for games? For starters, we’re trying to make sure it will port well to the platforms of games that it is