Make Sure You Own What You Do

So, first lesson this and it's important. It's not technical, it's legal.

For many people this isn't going to be a problem, but if your day job involves developing games (or possibly any software) it could well be.

Developing games and coming up with designs is what I get paid for, and what I produce belongs not to me, but to my employer. Although you can't copyright ideas, you can claim copyright on many areas of game development, not least source code. Work I do out of work hours is in something of a grey area, as I have quite resonably agreed not to do anything that will create a conflict with my day job. So, before doing any development work I have to get a letter from my employers stating that this will not conflict, and they will not make any claim on the work.

Which I don't have, yet.

So I haven't written anything at all, until that's settled.

Why do I need this clarification? Well, obviously I don't want to conflict with my contract, and start anything that I might have to give up later on.

What will I do if I don't get clarification? Well, nothing. Literally. There'd be no point in carrying on, but at least I wouldn't have started. I'll probably be grumpy for a while, though.

What do I do until I get clarification? Well, nothing that could possibly conflict with my work, so no development at all. However, there are tools to be gathered, compilers, source control and bug databases to be set up, infrastructure to be put in place.

I can do a lot of useful work by doing no work at all, for example an evening spent finding an exisiting tool or library that does something I'd otherwise have to write myself is in one sense not doing anything, but also gets the game closer to existing. These are all useful things that can be done before a single line of code or item of design are set down, don't involve any contractual issues, and apply to every development project, so I'm going to outline them for the benefit of future generations...