Team Blog

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!

Working at Astraware has given me a great opportunity to feed my addiction over the last few years with Palm OS and Windows Mobile devices galore. Now with our newest platforms S60 and UIQ, I have an even greater selection of phones to choose from. I'm already the proud owner of a copper Palm Treo 680 and the Samsung SGH-i600 running Windows Mobile, but with the release of our first titles for Symbian, I wanted to get a device to bring my knowledge up to date. I chose the Nokia N82.

In the past I've used organisers from Psion, which ran EPOC, on which Symbian is based and a couple of earlier S60 devices - the Nokia 6600 and Siemens SX1, so I'm not completely new to the platform, but it's been great fun learning what an S60 3rd Edition phone can do.

The device I chose, the Nokia N82, is full of great features - a nice fast processor, bright clear screen which automatically rotates from portrait to landscape, and excellent audio quality, all of which show off games like Astraware Boardgames and Hidden Expedition Titanic really well.

In addition, the phone includes wi-fi, assisted GPS (which enables it to get a position fix very quickly), and a 5MP camera with Xenon flash and lens cover which also shoots video. I took the phone with me on vacation recently and it's a real little powerhouse - with games to entertain me on the flight (in flight mode, obviously), the GPS proved invaluable for finding our way around Alabama in the hire car, and the camera came in very handy when the battery ran out on my camera during a day's sightseeing.

I'm looking forward to more of our games being available for my shiny new phone - look out for Astraware Solitaire for S60 and UIQ in the not too distant future, and lots more titles in the coming months.

Recently I bought a new laptop for email, surfing and general usage but this time I decided to go with something a little different. Ever since Asus announced the Eee PC I've been fascinated by the idea of a small, cheap laptop with long battery life and good connectivity so when I finally got the chance I went for the 4GB model.

In desktop terms it's not very powerful, with a 900MHz processor, 512MB RAM and 4GB storage, but it copes quite well with day to day use and rarely seems underpowered. With the addition of an 8GB SD card I've got plenty of storage for documents and the built-in WiFi makes it easy to get online at home or round the office. After a few weeks I can't imagine not having it around to fill in the gap between my smartphone and my desktop PC.

Of course being a developer and working at Astraware I couldn't just leave it at using the Eee PC for serious and useful jobs, I had to play too

After a bit of tweaking and following the guides from the excellent eeeuser.com I added the developement tools and was able to build software. Once I'd got that working I couldn't resist, so I tried building a couple of our games and after some tweaking I was able to get Astraware Solitaire and Astraware Sudoku up and running as tech demos. Obviously, they aren't ready for release and not everything works properly but it was a great feeling to see two of my favourite games running on a new device.

Once I'd got the games running I was curious to see if they would run on an unaltered Eee PC so after some quick negotiations with Paul S and promises of death if I broke his 2GB Eee PC I copied the files over. Since he was still using the default interface which discourages this kind of thing, it required a little creative thinking, but I was also able to get the game running on his unmodified laptop.

At the moment that's where the story ends, but who knows, the Eee PC is a very popular device. If people start buying software and games for their new laptops then one day you could see your favourite Astraware games coming to a tiny laptop near you.

Astraware recently became part of the Handmark family and is now known as 'The Handmark Games Studio'. In becoming a Handmark studio, we also have a new Studio Head, Cassidy Lackey, and now Cassidy is happily welcoming a new baby girl to his family. Reese Landon Lackey was born yesterday at 11.18am (Central DST) and weighed a perfect 7lb 7oz!

We're sure you'll agree that Reese is a beautiful baby and join us in welcoming her into the extended Astraware family!