Despite what the publish date says for this entry, this was written on the 16th of July. There have been more than a few hiccups moving from Holland back home to the green and pleasant hills of Exmoor.

My bike and TV stayed in holland with a friend, the cost of transport being too great. EasyJet lost one of my bags. Fedex forgot to put a "Do not X-Ray" sticker on my PC, apparantly wiping the BIOS, rendering the machine useless. Upgrading wouldn't have been such a problem if it weren't for those green and pleasant hills putting me 40 minutes away from the closest tech shop - and unfortunately, that's PC World; the AOL of computer retailers.

I should really order online, right? Sadly, those pleasantly green hills have done it again, putting us in a mobile phone and broadband blackspot. We can't currently even sustain a modem connection without a pleasant breeze knocking us offline.

I guess that this is the first lesson of many. I had assumed that it'd be rather easy to sit down and get on with development of the game. For Tommy, it's been pretty much fine, but for myself, everything that could go wrong did go wrong. No computer, no net connection, no shops nearby, and thanks to fuel prices, limited transport.

Since we knew we'd be working remotely (myself in England, Tommy in the US), we made sure that all our tools were net friendly. We have a wiki for our design document, and for sharing information. We have e-mail, skype, and MSN for communication. We have Subversion for our code version control. But all these tools don't mean a thing if you don't have an environment where you can just sit down and work - work without distractions, without hindrance.

That's the take-away from this post. If you're starting a work intensive project, your first priority is to figure out a realistic actionable plan to find and sustain a working environment.

Wow, this is the most obvious shit ever. Less obvious stuff, more often... that's the ticket, bez.