When in doubt, break it down
When in doubt go Retro
I can point to countless notebooks some of which date back to some of my first programming experiments in my pre-teen years. One problem which I've never felt happy about are TILES.
Now I've always had a bit of a love affair with tiles but also an obsession with clean logic. Sadly tiles require some dirty link ups when working in an animated 2d or 3d world not built out of tiles but instead pixels or some floating point algebra.
Not to mention the issue of WALLS!!! Does tile A or B own the wall, or does it exist in wall space. Do you split the wall down the middle? In the case of wall space does the tile extend underneath it?
These all have quick and dirty answers but I don't like working like that. Sadly I've never been called on professionally to look at the tile problem. If I ever had I'm sure the sanity of deadlines and my team would have made the problem almost trivial filled with arbitrary choices.
So yeah the game I've been working on was stuck in limbo for a month while I fought with data formats, and variety of ways of representing the data. Not to mention a bunch of stupid graphic glitches.
Solution
Bless Sophie and her balance of manic development with apathy. After a coffee and my ranting about the tiles I realised how stupid it was and in one day rewrote it from scratch. In a horrible hacky memory inefficient way. Though my stubborn self and experience found the hacky method worked and then was easily smoothed out. I honestly couldn't tell you if it is the best solution but it is a solution!
For those curious I went with the concept of wall space which overlaps with tiles and belongs to no tile. So it has additionally memory overlap but no convoluted calculations involving bitmasks, or bit shifting.
So hopefully I can move on from here and just place objects in the world and then get some guys running around the room X-Com style.
The Value of the Middlemen
Cut out the middle man!
How many times have you heard that said as a positive call to action? Well there is a darker side to this glorious plan. It stems simply from this question, "What does the Middle Man do?". If your answer is take our money and invent work then shame on you.
I haz all your moneyz
What they most often provide is some perspective, and a range of people and business skills.
Publishers provide market research, business analysis and a range skills that are often overlooked. Agents do networking and chasing up so you don't have to. Billing Service handles a whole range of messy interconnected laws between countries, insurance and other items.
Mostly they provide perspective a third party to look in and stop the madness of creative train. I've been on board more than one of those and sometime they have been slowed down and saved. Yet I think more than one creative train has gained too much speed and derailed though it's own madness.
So I say to you the third party, the partners, the community, the network, all these people they are Sanity!
Nano, Leads and Projects
Level Up - Scott Pilgrim style
On reflection of this month my NanoWriMo project which I was really keen on is just not going to fit into my spare time at the moment.
In better news I'm now Lead Designer at GameLabs Jagex. Wooooot! All quite amazing to be honest. Some amazing and exciting stuff is on the go there now. Wish I could say more, and a bunch just happened.
So it means my time is getting sucked up. Hence no NanoWriMo and my October project falling by the wayside. I do want to carry on tinker but they will be things I can finish in a day or maybe a night or two.
So until I have some tinker bits to show 
P.S. Those blog posts I was sitting on are not going to be published. Not comfortable with them at this stage. Needless to say there is a lot I want to say and some of it may anger people.