Mind Candy

Mind Candy has been named as one of the top 10 media companies to watch.

With a new player joining Moshi Monsters every second, we are continuing to grow at a phenomenal rate and are on the lookout for creative, talented and ambitious folks to join our growing team.

If you fancy joining a fast paced and growing tech media company that is ’set to make waves in the near future’ then check out our latest vacancies here.

For a while now I’ve wanted to write a blog post about how the game development process works at Mind Candy. We use an Agile development process called Scrum, and it suits our business very well.

Over the course of 3 months we recorded an essential part of the Scrum process at Mind Candy: the movement of tasks over our 10 foot tall scrum boards. We have these boards at the back of the office for everyone to see, and it’s a great way for the whole company to get a feel for what features are currently being developed and how well they’re going.

I had originally envisioned a mammoth post going into great detail about how wonderful scrum is for a creative startup like Mind Candy, the benefits it brings our awesome developers and how, as a management team, knowing that we’re always working on the highest priority work to keep our millions of users growing and actively engaged is a great thing, but the irony is that I spent so long thinking about the post that I never actually wrote anything, and that’s what the heart of scrum is all about: releasing the minimal marketable feature as early as possible.

So here you have the first iteration of my post about scrum, as well as the first of hopefully many time-lapse videos of how our processes work at Mind Candy.

If working in a fast paced environment using a process that empowers everyone on the team to create amazing products interests you, then good news! We’re recruiting and we’d love to hear from you.

So here I am, the last of my 12 weeks as a Flash programming intern at Mind Candy. I’d like to think I’ve brought a lot to the company. I programmed the Underground Disco for Moshi Monsters which went live recently, as well as a few small things that will hopefully pop up in the future, but aside from that I’ve tried my best to take an active role in meetings and discussions, possibly to the frustration of my more experienced (but very patient!) colleages.

My main reason for coming here was to learn, to become more experienced in doing what I do in a working environment and as part of a team. I’m happy to say that I learnt a lot more than I expected to! I’m programming in a much more professional way, in a much more complicated but rewarding development environment (FDT in Eclipse). I’ve previously been quite uncomfortable having other people work with my code but here I was introduced to the joys of using an SVN repository which has been pretty painless and very useful for recovering old work. I’ve taken part in pair-programming too which was surprisingly productive and again something I’ve never been exposed to before.

I’ve been involved in all stages of a product cycle, from the wide-eyed aspiration of the initial design meetings to the gut-wrenching final moments before release. Working with designers, artists, animators, testers, and coders of various disciplines really highlights the importance of communication between disciplines, and that going that extra mile, or even inch, to make things easier for other people helps a lot in bringing a whole product together.

In two weeks I’ll be heading back to do the final year of my degree, where I will immediatly get myself an SVN repository set up and write better code than ever before; and hopefully will keep in touch with some of the great people that I’ve worked with. :)

It’s been a while since we last covered Perplex City, but today we have some exciting news for all of you puzzle fans out there.

We released the first wave of new puzzle cards all the way back in 2007 and ever since then we’ve been hard at work getting Moshi Monsters off the ground.

We always wanted to release wave two of the cards, and we’re ecstatic to let you know that we’re finally able to do it! That’s right, you can look forward to 86 never before seen puzzle cards, spread across the usual range of difficulties.

That’s not all though. To celebrate the release, we’re putting the boxes on sale at a hefty discount. They’ll be exclusively available tomorrow from Firebox at only £20 for a box of 36 packs.

This will also be your last chance to pick up wave 1 cards and you’ll only have a limited time to get the wave 2 boxes. If you want a piece of Perplex City, grab them while you can!

NB. The codes on wave 2 cards won’t work on We Love Puzzles, so you won’t get points for solving them. However, we will be releasing the solutions at some point in the future, so keep your eyes peeled.

As much as we’d love to bring back the Perplex City ARG, there are sadly no plans to do that in the short-term. We simply felt it would be far better to release these puzzle cards to our loyal fans rather than letting them gather dust in our warehouse. We Love Puzzles will be one of the best places to join in the discussions.

Have fun!