Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Final week of Gratuitous pre-release

cliffski

If you are not already aware, Gratuitous Space Battles 2 will be released on April 16th, this coming Thursday. This is scary stuff. People who are working on their first indie game may suspect that after you have shipped a dozen of them, you become more relaxed and laid back about it, but absolutely not. It always both exciting AND terrifying. The benefit of having some games ‘under your belt’ is that  if the game totally bombs, you can at least know that you *have* made some decent selling games, and thus you don’t feel like a complete failure. However, the downside is, that you have likely scaled up both your production and ambitions, and expectations, so you are setting yourself up for a bigger fall if it flops.

release

Conventional wisdom in media circles is to never admit to a flop, so you don’t get to read about them, but we have all had them. Gratuitous Tank Battles definitely made a profit, but comparatively, it was a flop. Check out it’s steam spy entry compared with the first gratuitous space battles. (Not accurate data, but you get the idea)…

My plan to make GSB2 a success, apart from the obvious and ‘I think we can assume that’ strategy of ‘making the best game possible’ is basically to minimize reasons for people ‘not’ to buy it.

For example, some people might not buy it because its not in their language, but I’ve hopefully reduced that by translating to French, German, Spanish, Swedish and Dutch. (Others *may* follow). Some people may not buy it because they don’t run windows, but again I hope to eliminate that by porting to Mac & Linux (I *hope* these will be ready by Thursday). Another reason people may give is that they don’t think the game will run on their PC, but I’ve gone to great lengths to both optimize the game big-time, and also include a plethora of graphical options to ensure people can streamline the game down to whatever graphics capabilities their PC supports.

languages

And yet another reason is that people have their preferred store, but I am hopefully mitigating that by being on Steam, GoG, Humble store and direct. The others are too small to be worth the accounting hassle tbh.

Of course, thats all well and good, but the reason 99% of people don’t buy your game is because they don’t know it exists. I am *still* running an ongoing facebook campaign promoting democracy 3, and every few days I see a comment on the ad saying ‘whoah this looks interesting’ and I wonder where on earth these people have been hiding! There are a LOT of people out there.

So with that in mind, I have a big scary ad-campaign budget primed for GSB2. Hopefully you will see an ad somewhere, if you are vaguely in the target demographic.  And don’t email saying ‘why not advertise with us’. I’m more aware of ad opportunities than most. If I didn’t email you, I’m not choosing that as an ad option thanks :D

 

13 thoughts on Final week of Gratuitous pre-release

  4. How to interpret those stats? Sometimes the “owners” blue bar drop?

    Playtime total: 06:10 (average) 01:54 (median)

    I’ll assume it’s hours:minutes… The interpretation is that most played couple hours and then few played crazy hours?

  5. I’ve seen few comments in gsb youtube videos that suggest (probably due to lack of demo) some people make assessment of whether the game runs on their crap laptop based on the gfx seen. Not sure how many that is or how to solve that besides some separate benchmark exe they can download for free and always runs through the same action. (this shouldn’t have the possible downside of a demo that people get are happy enough with the demo to not buy the game – that was certainly issue in some big AAA titles of past where they put all the best content in the demo and the full game turned out to be not so polished)

    1. Indeed, this concerns me. Many AAA games are very poorly optimized, so I’m hoping to gather as much evidence from people with good performance and slow rigs as possible after launch.

      1. I wonder whether a well-cut video could help with this? You could show a few seconds of GSB in full-screen glory, and then cut away to shots of computers running the game. E.g.

        1. Standard, full-screen GSB with all the bells & whistles

        2. Video of old laptop running the game just fine (with low graphics options)

        3. Video of old desktop running the game a bit better

        4. Video of clearly high-end laptop running the game really well

        5. Video of beastly, multi-monitor desktop setup

        6. Back to the full-screen show with bells & whistles.

        The advantage of this is not only would you be proving that “clearly weak” hardware could run the game, you’d also be showing off the high-end support like multi-monitor multi-HD support you’ve built in.

        Another option would be to ask users to film their rigs for a few seconds, and then cut together snippets of about 20 of them in rapid succession.

        But maybe more trouble than it’s worth! Or you have better video ideas already

        1. Some ‘old laptop’s could have discrete gpu and others could have some really old Intel integrated. I think the Intel igpu’s have come up in speed a bit too. It may well be that this years igpu is faster than my old laptops discrete ATI.

          And then of course AMD laptops have been ahead of Intel laptops in the GPU stuff for many years.

          I don’t think there’s any other way than benchmark or demo to reliably answer that.

          While you could compile min+avg fps stats and hardware id’s to try and come up with some list or minimum spec, there’s also a lot of various native resolutions the laptops (x768,800,900,1024,1080,1200 and now doubles (hi-dpi) too) while having the same iGPU.

          I think the benchmark app or screensaver is best way to go. Then you can try to flock that to tech press to use in their laptop measurements.

          How would the benchmark/screensaver work? Well you could make it so that the engine generates visible ships and stuff up until FPS drops below 30 or something like that, and then show a count how many was possible to do. And another mode where the bench lasts say 30 seconds and tracks how far it progressed.

  6. Just get some YouTubers to play your games, that seems to be a big thing for indie devs nowadays. It’s basically a ticket to almost instant success. ;D

  7. I follow your blog (obviously) and was a big fan of GSB, buying the game and all DLCs. I may or may not buy GSB2, because:

    – It looks much the same game as GSB1?
    – Some of the graphics improvements seem to make it more cluttered, cartoony and possibly worse
    – You have spoken only a little bit about what makes the game better than GSB1. Designing your own ships (graphically) is a big feature, but only for looks. I am unconvinced that sufficient attention has been paid to making the key decision making any more interesting.
    – I think the system could really shine in a properly constructed Space 4X, which you have indicated you have no real interest in.
    – Not sure if I can still control the ships?

    Not criticising, just providing feedback.

    1. Hi, I like to show screenshots of the game with a lot going on, but its not the case that every battle is as packed with stuff and cluttered as you might think. I’m interested to know why you think it looks worse or cartoony? The bright colors on some ships perhaps?

      1. I guess so, yes. Bright colours, many ships, lots of colour and movement. It has been a long time (maybe forever) when you talked about ‘the game’, which is, to me, looking at tactical nuance and the interaction of weapons and shields, ranges and manoeuvre, etc.

        1. Its tougher to talk about that because graphics have nice screenshots, whereas debating the relative merits of adding radiation warheads to plasma torpedoes is less visual, but I assure you a lot of work has gone into improving the underlying mechanics :D
          The mere fact that fighters expend fuel and need carriers changes the tactics of the big battles considerably. Take down enemy carriers and their mass-swarm attacks are suddenly very short :D

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