I got thinking on this topic whilst watching voyager recently. Here is my list.

1. The Borg

The idea: A group of cybernetic beings that have shared thoughts and one collective mind. They have no leaders, no command structure, no need to consult each other or communicate as they act as a cohesive, unified deadly enemy. Turns the idea of a typical sci-fi bad guy around by doing away with the concept of individuality entirely.

The Mistake: The borg queen destroyed the entire concept on which the borg was based. Then came Hugh, Then Seven of nine. Then borg children, then “we’ll always have uni-matrix zero’. It’s easy to forget that the borg were supposed to be a collective at all. And The borg ship design became less cube-obsessed, and more like a kids set of building blocks. Bah.

2. The Ewoks:

The Idea: A group of primitive, tribal aliens who do not use modern technology can, despite this disadvantage, bring a technologically superior foe to it’s knees using ingenuity and determination. A long-cherised idea of George Lucas’s, based on his love of anthropology and his feelings about the Vietnam War. Originally planned as wookies at the end of Star Wars Epiosde IV, later shelved.

The Mistake: Making them look like cuddly toys.

3. The Daleks:

The Idea: race of highly mutated aliens who can only exist within their metallic cases, after a long running nuclear and biological war which left their ‘parent’ race destroyed and their homeworld an irradiated wasteland. Genetically designed to consider pity and compassion as weaknesses, so as to be the ultimate weapon.

The Mistake: They Can’t climb stairs. Universal conquest ends here

4. Star Trek: Enterprise:

The idea: Go back to pre-kirk days to discover the early years of starfleet. Throw away all the conventions of later trek series and put humans and the federation on the back foot. Bridge the gap between the present day and the original series of star trek to tell the story of how it all started.

The Mistake: Basically ditching the idea within minutes. There is little to distinguish Enterprise from TOS or Next Gen. Ships have phasers, artificial gravity, and familiarity with tons of aliens. Did nothing to show a weak, technologically early federation. Suspiciously sexy vulcan strips off in very first episode. Sad….

5. The Matrix:

The Idea: The world as we know it is a simulation. A war rages between machines that mankind created and the last few free humans alive. These human freedom fighters jump between the real and virtual world battling against virtual opponents with awesome powers.

The Mistake: The sequels. Some bullshit about keys. Endless car chases. Inability to realise the mistakes made when doing a sequel to Highlander. (Don’t).

What’s on your list?

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So Apple are looking to tell google where to shove it and sell advertising directly, I read. One of the thinsg that sprung out at me from this article was this quote:

“Every time a user sees a banner ad from Apple, it will charge advertisers a penny. If the user taps the banner and the full ad expands Apple charges $2. Large ad buys would reach $1 million from the taps and views.”

Wha?

So lets re-visit that a bit. For a single mouse-click (less really ebcause it just expands an ad, doesnt go to a site), the advertiser pays TWO DOLLARS. So that’s at least two dollars per click.  I currently pay around $0.10 a click, so this would eb twenty tiems as much money. Now obviously, not everyone sells indie games. I’m sure some megacorps selling high price items have money to burn, (oh and by the way, if you are a small advertiser with an ad budget under a million dollars, apple have told you to f**k off already. Thanks guys).

I do wonder how the discussion goes in the megacorp head office though:

“Dude, there are lots of people with iphones. Maybe we can advertise our high-value product on there?”

“Yes, but dude, they are charging at least five times what anyone else charges for the ads.”

“Sure, but from what I hear, people with iphones are not at all price-sensitive and will happily pay a premium for everything!”

“So why are iphone games considered overpriced at $1.99?”

I don’t think google should be worried at this stage. For them I’m sure it will be business as usual. Business time…

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The new race, for upcoming DLC has taken over my life a bit. I haven’t worked on the campaign for what seems like ages. Nevertheless, the new pack is almost done from an assets and code POV. It’s just a matter of play testing and balancing, plus one more fleet deployment to add, then it’s done.

Here is a teaser:

Sales are not stelalr, plus there aren’t many entries for my banner ad competition. Maybe everyone too busy watching the Greek Economy Collapse, or Gordon brown making mistakes, or Infinity Ward imploding?

On the plus side, the total collapse of the UK economy means that the pound gets cheaper against the dollar, meaning I eaern very slightly more. Yay?

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Ok, here we go. It’s your chance to win my 3D model spaceship of a Gratuitous Space Battles centurion cruiser. You can have it if you can design a better banner advert for GSB (animated or static) than I can, which isn’t difficult because mine look like this:

And you KNOW you want the ship because it’s cool and looks like this:

Full details on what is involved are here:

http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/model/model.html

Basically just send me a decent banner ad (within some technical restrictions) in the next two weeks and if yours is the best AND it’s better than the ones I make, then I’ll send you the ship. As they say in USA marketing “THAT’S AN EIGHTY DOLLAR VALUE!!!!!111111oneone.”

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I’ve been away for 2 days, on holiday. Yippee. First time I’ve been away this year, and indeed, since I moved house. It takes me about 24 hours to switch off from work, even once I’m 100% away from a  PC, so that gives me 24 hours of relaxation proper before I’m back in code mode. I still occasionally find myself thinking ahead though.

I actually started thinking post-GSB very briefly. I’m still a little way off from that, but I need to set a date for when I ‘move on’ and pack away the star wars and star trek DVDs and sound-tracks and dig out the <********* spoiler ***> which will get me in the mood for my top secret next game. With a new race expansion pack under way right now, and the campaign add-on in full development, it feels a bit weird to already be planning ahead.

However, I know that it takes me roughly a year to make a new game. That means having to start on the next one at the point where I think I can finish it before you I out of cash. If I plot a graph of Gratuitous Space Income, it tapers down pretty steadily to about now, and bumbles along at a livable rate. In a years time, that will (if it follows my other games) be just below that. Luckily I’m a bit paranoid and always stick some money aside when things go well. My plans stupidly assume that the next game is at least as good selling as Democracy 2 / GSB. If it sells like Rock Legend instead, I’m probably eating from Asda rather than Sainsburys. If it sells like Kudos 2, I’m eating from bins .

So my current business plan (not as exciting as my game design plan) is that the 3rd (likely final) race expansion pack comes out next month, and hopefully the Campaign turns up in June. Those should bump up sales of the main game a bit, and hopefully pay for themselves over the next year. I have a feeling the campaign may slip a bit due to feature creep, but I’ll assess the likely interest in that after the next expansion goes on sale.

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I recently bought a present for a relative, from a fairly obscure website. It was clear that the companies heart was not in the whole website thing, and I suspect it was designed a decade ago. Lets put it this way. It used frames…

It was pretty clear that the nature of what they sell made it a poor mix for modern internet geek. However, they realised they needed a website and this was it. There was an online catalog, of sorts, but many of the links were broken. Worst of all, they had no prices next to items, just price codes. You had to go to a seperate page to lookup the price of an item. Plus (and here it gets laughable) there was no shopping basket. If you wanted to buy stuff, you would have to write down the codes somewhere, and then manually enter them in a form on the order page. And there was no running total, or way to calculate the cost. You had to add up the cost yourself, and submit your credit card details in a (secure) form. Lucky dip as to whether the final cost was as you suspected. No mention of shipping costs or tax, thats a happy surprise on your bank statement too. Did I mention no confirmation email or notice of shipping?

The world has moved on. Websites like amazon exist. If you sell online, you are competing with amazon. I don’t care if you don’t have the budget, the customer likely doesn’t care either.

The same is true in games. I just added the campaign map ability to zoom in. I thought it was needed. But thats not enough. Obviously if you can zoom, you can scroll, but how? using the arrow keys? yup, what about WSAD? yup, how about moving the mouse to do edgescrolling? yup. how about click and drag panning? yup, how about varying  scroll-speed based on zoom level to maintain a smooth feel? Every new triple-A game will add new features and expectations, and they trickle down to everyone. I feel like my games look cheap without smooth multi-threaded animating loading screens. I wish my games showed up in the windows game explorer like the big ones do… there are extra things being added all the time that people expect. Look at the Civ IV map versus Civ I, or the new total wars versus the first one.

Ultimately, you have to keep up, even if that means scaling back your expectations. A small, contained, polished game is better than a big sprawling but amateurish mess. I make this mistake myself. GSB is likely too ambitious a game for positech and I know it. I can barely keep up. The level of polish and features for the initial release of the game was too low. It’s way better now (37 updates later), but there is still room for improvement.

Everyone knows the bar keeps getting higher. But the worse news is, it’s tough luck. You still need to at least be reaching for that bar.

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I haven’t decided the nature of the competition or task required to win this yet… But it arrived today and I wanted to blog some pictures of it immediately.

Behold a proper 3D plastic model (made using l33t 3d printing tech) of The Imperial Centurion Cruiser from Gratuitous Space Battles

If I do give this one away, I’ll need another one for my desk

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I decided that a combination of wanting the option to expand and do big things, plus the fact that it’s about time the non-battle parts of GSB stopped being scared of resolution-independence, meant that the GSB campaign map should be zoomable and scrollable.

This also means I can add more icons and data around a planet that you can zoom into. It therefore makes it easier to represent fleets as icons next to a planet, and makes it theoretically not a big deal to let the player have multiple fleets, at different worlds. That allows you to build up ships steadily at a shipyard in a safe system and send off ships to join the main fleet later on.

It effectively makes the campaign map a proper big Total War style campaign game. Which is a big step from just chaining a few missions together. But hey, who doesn’t like big campaign maps connecting battles together?

I haven’t got anything to really show off today, and it will be a few days before there is anythign visual done. By then I might have more l33t stuff to show you.  To answer someone’s question, the campaign will not be a free patch, it will be some sort of DLC. It’s still better value than a single flipping horse mesh which blizzard want $25 for.

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GSB got patch 1.37 recently. It did some weapon-balancing, plus some bug fixes and new features, like that new post-battle stats stuff I talked about a lot on here. It also increased the variety of ship debris, a side effect of preparations for an eventual new race.

In addition to finally getting that sent out, I’ve been doing campaign stuff. The map now looks like this:

Which is very similar, but those tiny icons are my placeholders to show facilities at each ‘encounter’ (basically each planet). The current types of facility are as follows:

• Repair yards
• Factories
• Shipyards

The factories and shipyards come in 3 flavours. My current thinking is that the factories generate cash each day (real world day) if they are under your control. The repair yards let you fix your ships (rather than letting you do it regardless of where you are) and the shipyards let you build new ships, of a class dependent on the shipyard (Only the best yards can construct new cruisers).

I have all the code done to place these things, and load and save their data. The actual facility code to generate cash and the code that restricts or enables shipbuilding and repairs isn’t done yet. The plan is to have a game thats more in-depth than GSB was in its vanilla form, but nowhere near as detailed as a normal 4X game. There are plenty of 4X games already, I’m trying to do something different, by making the battles the focus, rather than the resource-gathering.

And yes, this expansion has mushroomed into serious feature creep. Typical…

Now I need to go pour some wine so I can enjoy the first ever political leadership debate in UK history. In 30 minutes time…

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I’ve been thinking about that classic situation where you buy a game and think it’s cool, but your friends don’t have it. I’ve experienced this lately with Just Cause 2, Men of War and even Mount N Blade. It’s cooler to know loads of people playing the same game as you.

Some companies do clever discounty stuff where they give people the ability to give away discounts or extra copies. (‘gifting’ is a word that really offends my feeble sense of grammar somehow).

I wonder what people think about this?

If you own Gratuitous Space Battles (for example), do you know someone who hasn’t bought it, who you’d like to pester to buy it? If so, and you were given a money off token for your friend to get the game at a discount would you:

A) Think thats cool, because you get to give away a discount code to a friend, plus they might now get the game too

B) Think you were ripped off by paying full price for the game.

I think A) personally, but I’m biased because I run a business and read a lot about this sort of thing. I don’t like the idea of making anyone who bought a game from me annoyed about their pruchase, so I fear there are many people who think B) but am I wrong?

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