When do I add the chilli peppers?

· Take fifteen young, talented programmers, and shut them in comfortable but not too opulent surroundings. Preserve in harmony for two years. · Mix in a bona fide genius. One of these is needed to drive every game to its best and add that little bit of bite to the team. Like the match for the flambé, if you will. · Toss in some money. Enough to allow the purchase of technologies, deodorant and Tab Cola but not enough for long-distance phone calls or beer. The mother of any college student will know what I mean. · Stir in a delicate blend of performance incentives, trade show dates and deadlines and instil the fear of god (or at least the managing director) into them. And take away their pretzels. They must be hungry, and have a will to be the best (yeah, yeah, just like the SAS). But be ready to relax the above if they have a good reason for needing more time. But do not allow feature creep; that always sours the blend. · For the first and middle two months of the process, infuse with one non-programming but extremely creative 'Thought Guy". His job is simply to develop the 'storyline' and atmosphere of the game: this really does make a difference (but is not always essential, I guess: go and read the blurb on any Quake game and you'll see what I mean). · Watching the pot should be one hard-ass "Game Process engineer". His job is to make sure that the pot boils (by bribery, punishment and all round whipping) but also to direct the steam so that it turns the turbine that rotates the coils which generates the power that connects to the knee bone that is next to the hipbone yadda yadda. In short, this guy provides the direction for the horses. Yeah, he is a rein. Good metaphor Dan. (Ed: stop it. Bad staff writer). · Remove all celebrity endorsements, movie tie-in deals and especially god-awful music deals. If we liked DJ Pixie Plaboy or 'the next Goth-metal Punk sensation' then we would have bought their records. We don't want hardcore drum n' bass in our driving games, and we especially do not want games called 'Kiss: Psycho Circus'. Okay? Worst ever in this category has got to be the techno-remix (or is it acid house? WHO CARES?) of the Star Wars theme at the beginning of Force Commander. What the hell were they thinking? The music should blend in with the game, not vice-versa.

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