GSB is a big success and sells well, and I love it. it’s my fave game, out of all the games I’ve made, but it still has problems, because I made some fundamental screwups, technical and otherwise. here is what I think I did wrong in no particular order

• It doesn’t support netbook resolutions
• There are a fixed number of ship sizes
• The battles are not deterministic, preventing replays
• There are no achievements
• The tutorial is weak, and the learning curve too steep
• The auto-update system is dumb regarding where the game is installed.
• The online integration doesn’t include many features, like friends lists and user profiles, clan tags etc
• It makes poor use of multi-core CPUs.
• The player cannot customise the physical appearance of their units very much
• Mod support is not quite as easy to use as it could be
• The unit design tools (ship editor) used during development was laughably poor
• The UI was not as gratuitous as it could have been, given the subject matter

Have I missed anything? Obviously if I ever did a similar game, I’d be keen to fix all of those issues.

Bookmark to:

I just can’t make my mind up about in-game achievements. The pseudio-intellectual whiny part of me says ‘they are just like pavlovs dog being trained, don’t give in to that manipulative OCD crap’. The rest of me goes ‘Oh YES! I just scored 47 hits with the flamethrower whilst running backwards, that’s the ‘platinum running backwards with flamethrower achievement’ checked off.’ (High-fives all-round).

I completely see why people get into achievements, and I think I’m being a bit of a grumbly old git not having them in my games. The thing is, people always want ‘Steam’ achievements’, and that gives me slight issues because that means people buying the game direct are not going to get them. I am very much against that, as I like it when people buy games direct.

Tbh, it is LONG past the time when I should be working on game IV, and I am now working on game IV (in-between GSB bug fixes etc), so I won’t be re-visitng GSB any time soon to stick in steam achievements. However, with G4, I shall definitely investigate this. There will be achievements, and if I can find a way to toggle it so that they are steam-integrated (if steam accept my next game) for steam buyers, and hosted and run by my own system externally otherwise, then I shall be doing that.

Other stuff I’ll be defintiely aiming to put in mystical top-secret game IV will be online integration in the manner of the GSB campaign game / challenge system, which I think worked extremely well. This time around, there will be more attention spent on the UI for that sort of stuff, so it should be a smoother experience.

I should probably explain what G4 is at some point, but I’m going to wait until I have something to show, which will be a long time, even if it’s just concept art, or placeholder. I also tend to change my mind in design terms a LOT, so I don’t want to say “It’s an FPS set in napoleonic times where you play a kitten that can time travel!” until I’m sure it really is.

Bookmark to:

Before I became ‘the Gratuitous Space Battles guy’. I made other games. They aren’t as good as GSB, I know that, but they aren’t bad*. I did newer versions of two of them (Kudos and Democracy).  Some of them may not run on some newer video cards or O/S versions, but they all have demos.

I mention this because I’m bundling Kudos, Democracy, Starship Tycoon, Planetary Defence and Rock Legend together for $5.99, which is very cheap.

Get it here, and enjoy.

*I have made some bad games, which I don’t even link to on my site. Everyone has to start somewhere I’ll be talking about this more in a few days, when I talk about GAME FOUR, and why that is the games working title.

In other news, there is a mouse loose ‘somewhere’ in the living room. I am in a 1950s sitcom.

Bookmark to:

I wish improving the energy efficiency of your house came with unlockable achievements, I’d be a total achievement-whore. Roughly a year ago, we bought a very old house (roughly 1750), and it was in a sorry state in terms of energy efficiency. To take just a single room (the living room/lounge/whatever), it had thin carpet and crap underlay, huge gaps under the skirting board, a freezing cold cellar underneath with zero insulation between joists, and an open chimney with an open fire. Plus single glazed windows (can’t change them…alas), and normal bog standard curtains.

Now…

• It has a wood-burning stove, MASSIVELY more energy efficient than an open fire (+400 points)
• Curtains lined with ‘blackout-liner’, to keep the heat in (+50 points)
• Some heat-reflecting nano-paint, ready to repaint the walls (yes really) (+25 points)
• Sheeps-wool insulation stuffed between the joists under the floor (+75 points)
• Super-thick underlay and carpet on order (+40 points)
• A builder is going to fill all the gaps under the skirting board (+125 points).

To add complications, we just discovered that a draught from under the skirting boards is coming from a HUGE gap in one corner. It looks like the floorboard there is missing, and has been replaced with a thin sheet of metal, that is just hanging in one corner. What the hell? I think that may need properly fixing, by actual tradespeople.

Hopefully by the time this is all done, it will massively drop my heating bill, and I won’t need to sell 10,000 copies a day just to keep us warm. Hurrah! The guy who sold us the house must have worn duvets strapped to each limb all winter.

Bookmark to:

This sort of thing happens all the time, but it’s usually less obvious, and less ‘all-at-once’.

People generallhy consider there to be two business growth strategies. I think it was Joel (of joelonsoftware fame) who called them Ben & Jerrys Vs Amazon. Amazon’s strategy was ‘Get Big Fast’. It depended on getting tons of customers, very quickly, and growing, growing, growing. Making a profit was irrelevant, that would come later. Ben & Jerrys was slow sustained growth (like positech!)

It’s also a strategy for building a games portal. If I had the time, and knew the right people, I’d be doing it myself with showmethegames.

Two portals are currently engaged in the mad rush to get customers. One is games for windows live, one is indiedb. Indiedb are doing it cunningly and cleverly with a competition, where you need an account to vote (please vote for GSB!)

Games for windows live are doing it by offering an old game, that they own, for 99% off. People think this is incredible generosity, but it really isn’t. If they could find a way to pay YOU $10 to sign up for an account (assuming you are someone who ever buys games) they would.

This isn’t a bad strategy, or an evil strategy, it’s very good business. It’s also very risky. If you win, in the long term, you become steam / amazon and make hundreds of millions. If you lose, you earn nothing, and you blew $10 million trying to make it work.

I’m too much of a wimp to actually remortgage the house and try it with SMTG. I’ll probably regret that one day At least I’m still biz-savvy enough to only include one hyperlink in this post though

Bookmark to:

An idea as old as stonehenge, is that indie game developers should band together and start up an ‘indie portal’. The idea goes to discussion, then argument, then an obsessive ranting over the topic of what is considered indie, and then devolves into a sort of kibbutz-style hippie-love-in where no decisions ever get made because everyone had to agree on everything, which never happens, because we are, as a tribe, very independent.

So after watching this spectacle about 100 times over the last decade, I decided that what was needed was someone to just bulldoze ahead like an egotistical dictator* and say “this is what we are doing, take it or leave it”. I also thought that a full blown steam-style portal would never happen, so thought it best to start smaller. And this is how ShowMeTheGames got started.

Here is the website in question:

www.showmethegames.com

It was a domain name that was free, and reminds me of Jerry McGuire, which is, after all, a story of a guy quitting his corporate job to go indie…

Now I know what you are thinking, “why haven’t I heard about it then?” isn’t it usual form for me to go on a publicity blitz? When am I going to punch Keith Vaz on live TV? The whole point of SMTG was to prove 2 basic concepts:

• You can get almost 20 indie game developers to co-operate, and actually pay money into a mutual project
• You can make advertising work for indie developers, it we club together. (this is why we tested it as an ad-driven site at first)

I think SMTG proves both, but you’d have to ask each contributor if its working to get an unbiased view. Basically, we have been running google ads that point to that page, on the basis that if you see an ad for defcon, come to SMTG, you might try out defcon, but you might also like GSB, or Smugglers IV or Castle Vox… That way, it’s like having the advertising and catalog clout of a portal, yet we all still independent, all taking 100% of the sale price. The site is php and randomises the order of the games, so nobody has a better slot than anyone else.

I think there is some future in SMTG. We might start running competitions to win games, or have discount bundles of our stuff, or post up interviews and previews of new games. I just don’t know yet. So far, it’s just an experiment. One decent outcome from it so far is this:

If you are trying to explain to someone what an indie game is, you no longer have to point them at a single example or wave your arms saying “Stuff like World of Goo”. Just point them to showmethegames.com, it has a whole bunch of the best indie games I could find. If you can find it in your heart to tweet a link to the site, hashtag #smtg, that would be awesome.

*can you guess who that was?

Bookmark to:

I have a slight problem with the balancing of the GSB campaign. The problem is that swarms of fighters are just *too good*. The main game prevents this because each battle has pilot limits. The campaign battles do not. It’s not a total game killer, because spatial anomalies act as ‘chokepoints’ preventing fighters roaming everywhere. It’s annoying though.

One solution is to increase the maintenance costs of fighters. The downside to this would be that it’s hard to explain to the player, doesn’t make *that* much sense and may not be effective enough.

Another is to make them more difficult to build, maybe using twice the resources per CR in a shipyard, thus making shipyards more efficient when building cruisers etc. This maybe just delays the inevitable, and is also hard to justify.

Another is to introduce the idea of needing carriers. This is tons of work and testing, plus it breaks the link with the main game, where they are not needed, and means the player will fight AI fleets designed by players operating under different rules.

Another is to introduce flight schools, and pilots as a new resource. This is adding even more complexity, although to be fair, I could make academies churn out pilots too, so its just a resource, not a new facility too…

Another is to add more anomalies that block fighters, or set hard limits of the number of fighters in a particular fleet or battle. That involves real chaos, as I’d have to handle it when merging fleets yada yada.

I can see whatever I do will involve lots of work won’t it

Bookmark to:

I was looking at the conversion rate for the GSB demo (The percentage of demo downloaders who buy) and thinking I could find a way to improve it. One of the pieces of common feedback about the game was that people had no idea whether they had made good choices or bad in terms of ships and weapons.

Obviously there are all the ship and module stats and the post-battle stats, but I was thinking that it’s a bit much on the first playthrough, and that maybe something more simple was needed to give instant feedback. So I’ve coded a popup dialog on the stats screen that basically gives you four stats, based on the amount of hull damage that ships and modules do:

Thoughts? I know there are some people here who tried the demo but didn’t buy. Would this have helped ease you into things a bit?

This was a weekend diversion, I’m back on campaign bugs now…

Bookmark to:

Bah. I had all sorts of interesting plans for what work to do today, and they are all up in smoke.

My domain name registrar has gone tits up. I have about 10 domains there, including cliffski.com, so well done if you managed to still get here. Luckily the actual site hosting is with hostgator, and positech.co.uk is not affiliated at all with the useless incompetent muppets at my old domain name registrar. Also, thankfully my forums and the actual game server are thus unaffected.

It’s not *too* bad because hardly anyone types in the domain names, but I bet I’m losing some traffic now. I’m also possibly losing some email. bah.

I’ve been quoted $15 per domain to move them from my dodgy crappy cheap old registrar to the same company that hosts the site. That’s non trivial, but I guess it might be worth doing to avoid this mess. My real fear is that monday morning, the part time idiots that claim to run an inetrnet registrar won’t be fixing it, and I may be stuck in domain name limbo. This sucks

I wish I really understood more about DNS and the way it’s set up in WHM and stuff like that. Right now my sites are all a bit hacky, thats why going to gratuitousspacebattles.com just redirects you to positech. Ho hum. I guess it’s the games that matter, not this crap

Bookmark to:

I don’t have time to annotate and explain them now, but I thought at least I could put up the raw slides from my presentation at the Indie World Of Love conference. If I get time tonight or tomorrow, I’ll expand this blog post with details, but for now here they are. For anyone actually AT the conference, this is what my slides were meant to look like, without my silly attempt to use the ‘open document format’.

Bookmark to: