It might seem weird for me to worry that I’m too risk Averse. After all, I’m the idiot who bought a bunch of shorted Lead Futures on the stock market without really understanding what it was (up 0.83% today!, still down overall…).

But I think one of my failings as a business person is my risk-aversion. I do not invest a huge amount of my savings into making a game. I *do* spend more on art and sounds and so on than a lot of indie devs I know, but am I *really* doing everything it takes to make the game the best ever? have I spent every penny in the Positech Account on artwork and programming? have I re-mortgaged the house to spend that money on a kick-ass advertising campaign?  Did I have to take out a bank loan to pay for the content creation and professional team of QA and testing staff?

No.

I read a lot of books and stories about businesses that became really successful. It’s amazing how many of them really risked everything to get where they are today. The pattern I often see is that someone is very successful, then rather than cashing the check, they invest it *all* (and then some) into the next level of their business and become stratospherically wealthy.  valve took ALL the money from half Life and invested it in an amazing next gen engine for HL2. George Lucas took ALL his money from American Graffitti (he was a millionaire before SW) and invested it in Star Wars. he then took ALL that and invested it in Empire…

The closest I’ve got to ‘success’ was Democracy & Democracy 2. They both sold pretty well by indie game standards. They made enough for me to work comfortably from home. But did I take all that money and invest it in K2?

No

I *have* spent more on k2 in times and money than any game before now. I *do* plan to spend even more on advertising and QA than ever before, and it is the biggest game-related risk I’ve ever taken, but I won’t be re-mortgaging the house or getting into debt. I even just booked a holiday. Maybe I’m doing the *sensible* thing, but when did sensible ever make someone a millionaire?

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Something bloody fast, possibly this (the Eurofighter)  just flew over my house. I heard what sounded like a major thunderclap, and thought it was weird, considering the bright sunshine. Then realised what was going on.

I live near Farnborough, where they hold the air show, and you often hear and see stuff like this at this time of year. I’ve seen the eurofighter before, from a hill nearby. Damned thing flew absolutely dead down towards the ground like a missile before pulling out. Adrenaline rush FTW I guess. Pity its now totally useless outside of the remote chance of a ten minute war with the USSR or China before nukes kill everyone. Ho hum…

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I’m having a design quandary about characters who become overweight in Kudos 2. I need to really nail down the game play effects of letting your character become jabba-sized.

There are some effects already, in that a few acting jobs require you to be below a certain weight. I could probably extend that to the police jobs, but beyond that does it really matter? The obvious negative side to being overweight is the health effects, but to be honest most of the activities that increase weight are reducing health, and health is directly used in calculating illness. What I may do, is have a locally used (not shown to the player) calculation for obesity, and use that as an extra accelerator in determining illness. Then you have the age old problem of conveying this data to the player. kudos 1 did lots of clever stuff the player was never told about, and I need to be more aware of that this time around.

The other possible uses in game terms for ‘weight’ are all a bit ‘dodgy’. Should being overweight reduce confdence? Should I reduce your chances of getting a job in general if you are overweight? I might not mind how big people are, but is there a real world prejudice there? and if there is, is it ok to represent it in game? I currently don’t have black avatars (another worrying, but budget-related situation), but if I did, should I give them less chance of a good job to reflect society’s racism? For that matter, should I reduce your chance of romance if you weigh too much? Is that just reflecting society as it is, or is that encouraging prejudice?

I guess I’m half way between Ben Sisko and Kassidy Yates on the whole ‘We shouldn’t pretend the world is better than is’ (Ben) and ‘Lets just enjoy the way it should be’ (Cassidy). I’m glad I’m not programming a holodeck.

What do you think?

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And why it isn’t all bad. Written by a talented indie developer:

http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2008/07/13/game-phone-home/1

And apparently you can ‘digg’ it here:

http://digg.com/pc_games/Why_you_should_let_games_phone_home

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Sadly everything seems to be going wrong lately. Sales have not been at all good, last night I got a parking tiket from the bastard scumbags at Hammersmith & Fulham council for not understanding their cryptic parking explanations, and this morning I realise some sad little thug has kicked the wingmirror off of my car…

Plus my shares I bought are in freefall…

So it’s all a bit pear-shaped right now. There are a few potential pieces of positive news around the corner, such as finishing Kudos 2, getting a Mac release for Democracy 2, and a possible portal release for Democracy 2, and also for a slimmed down version of the game for the casual portals. (more on that when I know it’s happening).

Hopefully next week will go better.

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I’m working on the code for restaurants yesterday and today, specifically how you get into the hip and trendy or expensive ones. This is code from Kudos 1, but I’ll be improving on it.

Great timing then, that last night ‘L.A Story‘ was on TV, which was the inspiration for the idea of hip restaurants in the first game. The best scene in the film is when Steve Martin is trying to book a table at a hip Hollywood restaurant called L’Idiot (pronounced ‘Lidio’). The evil French waiter (played by patrick stewart) is interrogating him to see whether he is the sort of person he wants in his restaurant. He scoffs at Steve Martins job (TV weatherman) and demands to know his bank records, the value of his house and where he takes his holidays, before eventually conceding he can have a table in eight weeks time as long as he only orders the chicken and not the duck.

Even better, is the scene later in the film where someone with an upper class English accent (Richard E Grant) books a table no problem with a 2 minute call. I love that

Kudos always had lots of factors that determine if you get to eat at the best places, but I’m really going to town this time. For maximum results, you will need to be a highly cultured french-speaking food critic with bags of cash, a smart suit and designer sunglasses . Hey it’s not normal game-fare, but we have slain enough dragons, we need games where the end-level boss is a pompous waiter now.

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So despite the fact that most economists realise that talk of recessions can easily become self-fulfilling prophecies, it’s hard to avoid the constant discussion of the ‘global economic downturn’ or whatever it’s called this week. Obviously, given my line of business, I’m forced to ask myself “how does this affect games sales?”

Some people would suggest it could be very bad. Games are a leisure activity, and thus are easily cut back. you will stop buying games before you stop buying food, or paying the rent. This would suggest that the wise man would make cheaper games, in order to make the potential buyer think he is getting a bargain, or that the game is so cheap the price isn’t worth worrying about.

I think it might be the opposite. It could be that tough economic times are good for games. Not *all* games, but mine, and here’s why:

1) Games in general are a VERY cost-effective leisure activity. Assume a $22.95 game like Democracy 2. That’s probably a similar cost to buying a DVD which lasts 2 hours, 3 with the extras. Call it 5 if you watch it twice. A decent game will last much longer than that, so in terms of cost-per-hour of leisure, the game pretty much beats the DVD. Compare them to the hourly cost of drinking in a bar, the movies, restaurants, the theater, or pretty much anything but books and TV, and gaming wins out big time.

2) The games I make are simulation/strategy, which tend to have a lot of playtime, and replay value. They aren’t fixed length games with one-shot puzzles, like the hidden object games, or on-rails one-time hollywood style rides such as COD 4. Even if in practice you choose not to keep replaying, the option is there. It’s perceived value that affects sales, and the perceived play time and thus value of my games is high.

3) The credit crunch is terrible for the overpriced PS3, and bad for the XBox, Wii, DS and any blockbuster PC game that requires that you upgrade your hardware. On the flipside, this means there are a lot of gamers who have got used to buying a new console or video card every year who have decided not to do so this time. In other words, there are a lot of people who want low-system-requirement games to play, in order to make full use of existing hardware investments.

Thats ME!

My games are unusual in that they aren’t designed for absolute base level minimum spec. I assume a hardware accelerated video card and 1024 res monitor. I also assume some graphical punch, so I do a lot of overlays and blending, and some particle stuff. In other words, I try to make my games look as good as they can, whilst staying out of the 3D arms race.

Who knows how it will play out? Sales for the last two weeks have been really bad, so maybe I’m just trying to cheer myself up, but I think my logic at leasts makes some sense. What do you think?

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I’ve had database issues on my server which thankfully should now be sorted, and I won’t have to gnaw off my own leg in frenzied frustration every time I try to make a new blog entry now. It was something to do with SQL processing limits or some such. We never used to have these problems with text editors, grumble grumble.

Today, after doing a small bit of classic ‘work’ I did a very long play-through of the game (Kudos 2). The game was originally design to last 10 years, like the original. (With the option possibly to keep playing..maybe..not sure).

The thing is, having done a four year playthrough this afternoon, I’m thinking that’s possibly long enough. One of the things I’m concerned about is the long-term playability and re-playability of the game. The last thing I want is for the game to feel like a chore towards the end. I’ve already made enough changes and design tweaks to it that this is far less of a concern than it was for Kudos 1, but I’m still seriously considering changing it to be five years instead. The thing is, five years sounds weird.  The other option is to do ten years, and double the rate at which time goes by, basically by skipping every other month. Would that seem weird? Or I could change months every 3 days instead of every seven. Decisions…decisions…

BTW I got The Starship Tycoon data off that old disk. i’m going to attempt to tidy up a bit each weekend then release it one day.

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I’m very interested in the idea of making one or more of my games open source. Not the current big sellers, but maybe planetary defense, or Starship Tycoon. I’d be tidying up the source and preparing it this very instant if it were not for one big silly, embarrasing problem…

The hard drive with the source for both games is in a PC that died.

Now yes, theoretically somewhere I have a backup of it all, but how recent? I have no idea. and you would imagine there would be a disk carefully labelled somewhere that has “final retail release source for games” or other cunning description, but I’m just not that organised to be honest.

My motivations for open sourcing a game are 1) to see what people will do with the source and 2) promote my games! I think I might go try and boot the dead beast now. I suspect its a dead PSU and motherboard, and don’t look forward to the nighmare of sticking the old drive as a slave (is that even how it works now) on my vital 100% mission critical vista PC. I may risk it though .

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I bought some new stock sounds for Kudos 2 today to replace some of the sounds that are still in there from the original game. I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I can imagine some people who own Kudos 1 will be annoyed if (for example) they hear the same sneeze sound from the first game. After all, you have paid for a new game right? But on the other hand, does it *really* matter? There is a lot of new content and art and features in the new game, but to be honest, the sound of someone sneezing is the sound of someone sneezing. Does it really matter? Did they change the MP40 gun sound between COD 2 and COD 1? I have no idea, and doubt I would care or notice, but obviously I want my customers to be happy.

Clearly
its cheaper and easier and quicker to leave in old sounds (and text where applicable) rather than pointlessly redoing things for the sake of it. I’d rather spend that time and money adding new stuff like the stand up comedy night, new books, new jobs and new sounds etc. I’m interested to know what people think, especially if you bought Kudos 1. Would recognizing some sounds and text annoy you?

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