The last month has been a strange one for us. For the last 18 months we've been working in isolation, and very few people outside of the company knew what we were working on. We recently broke our silence and demonstrated our first game, Republic: The Revolution to the press. The response has been extraordinary. We've encountered some pretty extreme reactions over the last month. Never answer your critics and never make the mistake of getting drawn into a slagging match. Let your game do the talking.

I'm driving the team forward towards Christmas, but everyone's knackered. The temptation is to slow down in the run-up to the New Year, but we can't afford to do this as time is short. E3 is a big target for us and we have much to do before then. Our priority is to have our first living city running. This will be a city of 10,000 people wandering around, in full 3D, living their daily lives. The going has been tough. Every morning emaciated programmers shamble into the office on their way to another shift.

We've added another couple of people to the team, taking us up to 20 in total. I reckon that Republic: The Revolution's AI is about a thousand times more complex than Theme Park's and so we've added a fourth AI programmer in Martin Smith. Had I written a CV to fit the job, I would've been hard pressed to have come up with one as colourful or as impressive as his. He left school at 18 and went to work for Avalon Hill where he playtested the original Civilisation board game among other things. He owns and has played every one of Avalon hill's games (about 200 of them). He then went off to the States and became a professional poker player for three years. Having been thrown out by US emigrations he came back and did a degree, then a PHD in Artificial Intelligence. He's also a good footballer, which is useful, as the Elixir football team has been defunct some time, on account of being crap.

We have a new non executive director in David Norwood, a banker. But he's no ordinary Merchant Banker. He managed to get himself into the Sun whilst captaining the England Chess team at the World Championships in Kalmykia a couple of years ago. The team hadn't performed very well and David was invited to a gala dinner where he drank vodka with his Kalmykian hosts. Lots of it. And passed out. One of the Scottish team took a picture of him lying inert, beneath a mountain of empty vodka bottles and gave it to the Sun who published it under the headline "Why our Chess team lost." The Sunday Telegraph wrote: "Feeling ashamed by the side's poor performance and vowing never to captain England again, Norwood said: "I think we all got worn down a bit by the vodka on offer," though he did admit that his team drank less in Kalmykia than they did when they won the European championship last year."" David has one of the sharpest business minds I know of, and he advises on multimillion pound flotations in the City. Just because you do something that other people perceive to be nerdy or high-brow doesn't mean you have to conform to the stereotype; you can be both scholar and lager lout if you want to be.

In terms of the game, we've made a lot of ground in terms of with some of the key design issues. We've spent the last month hammering out the simulation intelligence, which is about as hard as it gets, in terms of pure design. Four of us have been locked in a room for the last three weeks trying to decide how to program, enumerate and describe the feelings of every person in the game. This means inventing a set of relationships describing people's values, across issues such as nationalism, ethnicity and religon. To make matters worse, the players will never see most of this work, because we intend to present it in a simple way. Do they need to inderstand the causal relationship between poverty and crime? No. But we do. They may not give a toss about an individual's socio-economic affiliations, but it's our job to ensure that the game works and that people behave in a coherent way. The game lives and dies on how well we achieve this.

We've also spent some time scripting out the key Characters in the game. I see these as being similar to Trump cards (anyone who's ever played Horror Top Trumps will know what I mean). Each character should be instantly recognisable to the player, with a history carried from game to game. We've tried to create characters that are memorable, interesting and colourful. For example, we discover that Ludmilla Mironova, a Town Councillor, is "a walking advertisement for Soviet era cosmetics, the living embodiment of the David Hockney school of makeup. Middle-aged, extremely fat and cunning." Eduard Satarov, a journalist has "a huge beer gut, florid complexion with thining hair barely concealed by a fantastic scrape-over." Stupid details breathe life into otherwise two dimensional characters. Republic: The Revolution will have, I hope, around 1500 of these key Characters. I want each one to be unique and fascinating.

I hope that 2000 will be as good to us as 1999 has been. We've had a great year, and I feel we've been very fortunate, but we've also worked very hard indeed. But you're never far from disaster in a transient and competitive industry. All you can do is put the hours in, close your eyes and hope that luck smiles kindly on you.

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