I’ve uploaded a new video blog thign about the influences on GTB, with me rambling about Dr Who and Blackadder. Here it is:

Obviously it’s on youtube. if you have a second, and you thought it was worth watching, please up-vote it on the youtube site. better still, share it on facebook or twitter. That kind of thing is really helpful, and it doesn’t take much effort to do it. I really appreciate it. Also, does anyone have any good ideas for sites to submit/notify about this sort of thing? I’ll post it to the GTB moddb page, and also nervously submit it to reddit, but I’m not sure where else it should live.

It takes a silly amount of time and effort to make a video, in comparison to a normal blog post. i want to get into the habit of promoting GTB through video though, because it looks so much better in motion.

I started early work on the tutorial today. yay!

Edit: here is the reddit submission:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/nwdba/me_nervously_talking_about_the_influences_behind/

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I bought skyrim, partly because I did enjoy oblivion, partly because skyrim got great reviews and any decent game dev should know what people are buying and enjoying.

So far, It’s pretty good, but I’m not bowled over. I don’t see it as any major (or even minor) change or improvement from Oblivion. Maybe I haven’t played it enough yet? There are a number of minor things that make me smile, more than disappoint, such as all of the guards sounding like schwarzenegger, and all the women assuming I want to sleep with them. That’s my normal expression, I swear!

More seriously, the game does not seem to have moved on at all, in the field of interaction with NPC’s, which is a big surprise. It’s 2011 now (nearly 2012), so we still need almost static NPC’s that act pretty much like ‘gossip+quest+lifestory vending machines’.
Coding a much more adaptive and context sensitive system shouldn’t be hard. I find it very unlikely that there is a major problem from either a game design or code POV, in having every NPC store some data abut their attitude to you, plus a list of recent events, plus reaction to your appearance.

Almost all games have NPC’s that are staggeringly stupid. You can sneak up to them at midnight, having never met them, with your sword drawn, wearing a black cloak and holding a two handed sword, and as long as you press ‘E’, they will say something like
“My name is zarg, I’ve been farming here all my life, things aren’t so bad really.”
WTF?
We *can* do better than this. On an indie game, with a tiny budget and one coder, we can do better, so why a game with the budget of skyrim cannot, is beyond me. Unless….

It’s voice acting isn’t it? Lets be honest. We cannot afford to have 500 different lines fo dialog for that character, because the assumption is that all games need to be ‘fully voiced’. This is CRIPPLING to AI. I bet the
AI coders on skyrim grind their teeth like maniacs, knowing that the simplest and cheapest text adventures can have twenty times more immersive character interaction that the trillion dollar AAA hit game skyrim.

Is it *really* so vital to have voice acting for all NPC’s? I find most acting in movies to be tragic, let alone acting in games. I would be much happier if ‘lesser’ NPCs had just text, (maybe some simlish mumbling?) but they actually said something relevant and believable.

Immersion is NOT just graphics and sounds. If it was, who would buy books? Sometimes dialog really matters, and in an epic RPG it is vital. Skyrim has (like most games) prioritised screenshots & trailer clips over actual immersion, at least when it comes to AI.

You probably all thing I’m wrong, the game scored massively highly and sold by the crateload. What do you think? Is it just me that wants to smack the NPC’s and say “I only just met you, you f**king robot!”.

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In all these days of bundles and steam sales and DLC and blah blah, people are happy to shout loudly about what they think about any particular pricing model or experiment, but I don’t come across much discussion about pricing models in theory, from first principles.

So I’m going to ask, in theory, given magical powers to make anything work (like workable DRM, or perfectly rational customers etc), how would we sell and price PC games?

Thinking about that makes us consider what the theoretical demands should be of a perfect system. What do we even mean by perfect? I would humbly suggest the following basic principles:

1. The financial success of a game is strongly correlated to the amount of fun and enjoyment that it has provided, as a whole to the gaming population
2. The financial success of a developer is independent of any personal relationships or circumstances. Games should not be hits because the developer plays tennis with the owner of another company etc.
3. Gamers should feel that they are receiving a fair deal for the money they pay
4. There should be a strong system of market signals. Good games should make piles of cash. Poor games should fail, thus encouraging future promotion of good games.
5. There should be a level playing field. It should not be possible to purchase success, through sheer weight of advertising
6. It should be financially viable to produce niche games, not just blockbusters.

Do these principles seem sound? Any I’ve missed? Given that we accept these (for the sake of further typing…) what sort of system would exist, or what changes need making to the current industry to move us closer to it? I feel that the existence of a few major distributors and publishers that have gatekeeper status seriously undermines 2) and to some extent 5). I think that piracy of games seriously undermines 1) and can cause problems for 6).

My main concern is with 1). If 2 games cost $10 and one provides an average of 22 hours of play time per purchaser and the other provides 3 hours, we really should be finding a way to get more money for game 1′s developers. The solution to that could be DLC, where the 22 hour players are happy to pay more because they are still into the game. Does that seem fair? It certainly seems more viable that game setting it’s price at 7 times that of game 2. Of course, it could be said that game 1′s better quality will lead to great word of mouth and 7X the sales, but I’m not sure that works in practice.

More widespread use of demos would help with item 3) surely? or could we make an argument that DLC helps here too, because with DLC as an option, players are spending more closely what they choose to buy? Maybe we should go so far as to say that F2P and microtransactions solve all of these problems? except that kills of 6), because the many players + few whales strategy doesn’t scale down easily to niche.

No wonder game pricing is such a mess.

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On my todo list for ages was fixing damage sprites so they glow in the dark. It always bugged me that my damage sprites were not really good enough, to my mind. We have wood-burning stoves at my house, which I light almost every day right now, and for a lot of the time I worked on GSB I used to sit there staring an a blazing inferno of logs and coal and feel annoyed that the damaged bits of spaceships didn’t look that awesome. I am using a very similar system for GTB, although with less hassle for placing the individual damaged locations, which makes it a bit easier for modders. They still do not pulse and glow the way i want.

One complication though, is I have lighting in GTB (not real 3D lighting, but cunningly faked), which means they needed to glow in the dark like this:

Which they now do, and I’m very happy about it. Unfortunately it took 2 days work, because in investigating it, it turns out I had to totally re-write my lighting system. The game uses multiple render targets for the lighting and composes them right before displaying the end image, which means that anything that actually gives off any light, such as a searchlight, laser beam, particle, or damage sprite, needs to also render to the offscreen lightmap buffer. It also means you have to batch these, and there are all kinds of annoying  unlikely scenarios where it actually breaks down, in some way, although I doubt anyone will ever notice.

At the end of those 2 days, I was very glad I took the effort. Maybe one day I’ll manage to get them pulsing properly, and have particles flitting around ‘inside’ the damaged areas. Maybe!

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So have you all seen this?

Quite a few people probably guessed it was coming due to my tux image tease, but GSB is part of the Humble Indie Bundle. Yes, that means there is a linux port of the base game, for people who prefer to run native linux builds I do NOT have the final linux installer yet, so if you want a linux build and you bought GSB direct from me (so I can verify the sale), then you will be entitled to it for free, once I have it. Don’t email me asking for it yet, because I can’t reply with a link, and it will get complex and bottlenecked. Obviously I’ll blog it when it’s all ready.

A few words about the bundle, and Gratuitous Space Battles being in it (as one of the ‘beat the average’ games).

Some people have expressed surprise about this move, because I rant about devaluing of games, and bundles a lot, so why am I doing this?

Firstly, it’s the beat the average game You can’t pay $0.01 and get GSB, can’t be done, so there is that in there.

Secondly, GSB is actually quite old now. It got updated a LOT, but it’s release was September 2009. It’s been full price everywhere for a long time, so I’m much more flexible regarding stuff like this at this stage in the games sales cycle.

Also, there is a new game coming in the first quarter of 2012, it can’t do any harm to remind people about GSB, and to get people who sat on the fence for those two years to grab a copy at a discounted price. Hopefully when GTB comes out they will be more inclined to buy it at full price rather than wait another two years. I hope!

I often talk very frankly about sales figures and games revenue, but that’s regarding direct sales. Humble Bundle is a proper publisher arrangement with contracts etc, so don’t ask me for financial details about splits etc, because I can’t talk about that.

As I typed this, the total raised has passed a million dollars. That’s good then  .

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This is really hard for a single developer, because we do not have much regular reason to return. I’d wager that if you are a regular visit to one of my sites you are either:

1) A reader of this blog. Hello!

2) A poster on my forums.

The problem is, you are never going to pop back to www.positech.co.uk in case there is a new game released, because it’s a 2 year release cycle these days. Eeek.

Above: Indie website traffic, between releases

Because I am a wimp who prefers semi-regular income to sudden spikes followed by two years of silence punctuated by tumbelweed, I am happier if I get regular income from sales over time. Obviously that means I need a regular flow of new potential customers, and an ongoing healthy conversion of potential to actual customers. What ways exist to get this regular traffic?

1) Regular releases of new games. The problem here is you either have to make easy-to-make, small casual games that you can churn out regularly, or you have to expand big time and fund the creation of multiple big games with intertwined release cycles. I much prefer the latter, but it will be a few months before you are likely to hear me talk about that. And I have no experience of doing this yet.

2) Cross-sell affiliate games from other devs. I used to do this a lot, but in the end launched showmethegames.com instead. The problem is, it makes your website looks just like every other casual affiliate site and it stops reflecting your indieness. This is why I stopped it.

3) Build a community. Either through the game itself (MMO’s are a big win) or somehow through other means. Obviously a blog is a great help here, along with facebook and twitter. Youtube can even be a blogging site in some ways. The problem here is it all takes time away from game development. You can hire a PR guy, but the whole point of being indie is that you are close to your customers, so why hire someone to wreck that relationship? I screwed up a bit here on facebook. I didn’t know if I wanted my facebook page to be businessy or personal. I still don’t know, and I hardly ever bother using it now anyway, and almost feel like closing it. I do tweet a lot though @cliffski. Another win for me was the modding scene for all my games, expressed through the forums. Again, the trouble here is it takes time to support and encourage.

4) Spend advertising money. This is something I tend to default to. The main gain here is that it involves money but not time, and I am atrociously time poor. The downside is that it produces very marginal gains in profit. I feel it necessary to remind you that revenue is for ego, profit is where it’s at. If I quadruple the ad budge for democracy 2, I get an increase in profit of 6%. That’s still worth doing, obviously, but it’s also within the margin for error. There is little point in having huge sales, and admin hassles, and support costs, if you actually don’t end up making any more profit from doing so.

So what should the struggling indie do? Well it’s very very difficult. It depends on your strengths. The time-poor should maybe go with ads. people who like shorter smaller games should go with 1) people who love being online chatting 24/7 should maybe go with 3). I don’t have all the answers, I just know how I’ve muddled though this problem over the years.

The other solution is of course the ‘introversion’ strategy. You release games in sudden awe-inspriing bursts of sales-success that means you can finance effectively disappearing for years at a time. This is, after all the strategy of many AAA developers. I just find it a bit scary

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I regularly read the ‘silicon alley insider’ web site. I have a love hate relationship with it. I do it partly to remind me how inward looking and narrow peoples focus can be. To the writers on SAI, the only big thing happening in the world is the battle between smartphone companies, and the biggest news in the universe is if a silicon valley startup orders new office chairs. It is incredibly inward-looking. As someone who doesn’t even own a ‘smart phone’ (my phone doesn’t even have a camera) and isn’t even sure where his phone is  right now, I feel like I’m watching aliens through a telescope.

What I find most awkward about that silcon-valley-mania, is the obsession with venture capital and startups. it seems there is only one possible way to be in business:

1. Start up a new company. Must be NEW! nothing older than a week, or you are yesterdays news!
2. Employ young people. They must be young. The younger the better. Nobody with any experience at all. if they are good looking, much the better!
3. Spend a fortune on flash offices and furniture. Have ‘zany’ stuff such as slides and table football in the office to show just how totally crazy you are! (Also helps scare off older people).
4. Don’t worry about making a profit. profits are for losers. Spend any money that would have been profits on a superbowl ad, especially a hip one that doesn’t even mention your product.
5. Smooth talk venture capitalists into lending you hundreds of millions of dollars, which you will spend on bonuses for the CEO and CTO, despite not earning a cent in profit yet.
6. Sell to google or facebook, and then goto 1).

This is probably a smart move, if all you want from life is money, but there is only so much money can buy. once your strategy earned you $10million, whats the point? what are you doing?I have a strategy for what to do with my life if I ever have $10 million, and it’s not about making more.

Sometimes I feel like a dinosaur schmuck because I run my company this way:

1. Make a game, using savings to finance it.
2. Make profit from sales of the game
3. Stash some aside for a rainy day
4. Make the next game, financed by last games profits.

Schmuck or not… I sleep safely at night knowing positech is 100% privately owned and 100% debt free and influence-free. No bank, no investor, no business partner can turn the lights off tomorrow. In an increasingly debt-laden world, with every possibility of future economic wobbles and debt-financing squeezes, maybe I’m not the dumb schmuck plodding along, but the wiley old tortoise who will still be here after the startup kids are locked out the office because the creditors demand their money back?

Ha! who am I kidding, I bet lots of them sleep on a pile of gold on their own private islands already

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I’m dithering a bit about how some of the ‘support’ units in Gratuitous Tank Battles should work.

Right now, you have dedicated command vehicles and buildings, and repair vehicle and buildings. The command ones give a rate-of-fire bonus to every unit in range, and repair units reduce the damage that units take.

I’m not happy with either of these. The main problem is they just aren’t intuitive enough. What would you expect them to do? I assume you would guess command units give a boost to accuracy (like spotters or radar would) and repair units actively repair damage done over time.

I changed from repairing, to reducing damage because the ambulance module and hospital ones (for infantry) were useless, because the minute infantry got injured, they probably shortly afterwards got killed, so the modules were rubbish.

I guess with infantry, I could apply a damage reduction, and have repair modules (for vehicles and turrets) work differently (actively repairing damage done, at regular intervals). That makes more sense right?

That still leaves command units. Would a hit-chance modifier possibly be overpowered? Maybe… it obviously needs balancing like crazy, but I suspect it makes more sense than a rate of fire unit.

And even as I type this, I wonder if if would make more sense to have a new type of deployment slot on maps, one which can *only* be filled by a support unit. It might make for some more interesting tactics and map design. Ho hum…

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I’v started doing some of the flavor text for GTB. My plan ( to be explained more in a future video blog) is for it to be a bit ‘blackadder goes forth’ in approach. I am assuming you are a british soldier fighting in and endless world war I against the Germans.

Note that the ‘story’ is a very small part of the game, just a few mission briefings and the manual. You can ignore it happily.

My concern is that I might accidentally be offending some people. So my question to you is this. Do you find Blackadder and Allo Allo and other world war 2 comedy style things offensive?

I assume hardly anyone does, but if you are a German strategy gamer who would be put off a game that affectionately mocked the patriotic jingoism of World War I/II Britain, and referred to the enemy as the Hun, ‘Jerry’, The Bosch, etc… Is that offensive?

I assume not, but we live in an age where people take offense at almost anything, so I’m checking. My stats show 5.7% of GSB buyers are German. I’d rather they still bought the game.

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